AddieStan

You'll recall, dear reader, yesterday's madness about the meltdown at SoapBlox , a Web host for a number of progressive blogs, which was hacked by no-one-knows-who. There was much drama, as Paul Preston, SoapBlox's founder and keeper, prematurely declared his enterprise dead -- only to have a raft of contributors cry "Say it ain't so!" and contribute, via blog comments and other electronic means of communications, ways to salvage his servers. All that may make this seem like less of a story than we originally thought (panicked visions of site files lost forever seemed to be coming true), but today's more sober assessment by Preston strikes your cybertrix as even more troubling than the original fear: Starting on Tuesday, some of the SoapBlox servers were infiltrated by a currently unknown source for unknown reasons. SSH access was acquired by the hackers, where they were able to install port scanning scripts on to the machines. SoapBlox servers were the...

UPDATE #2: SoapBlox seems to be backing off its announcement of its own demise , though the site's communicator, who posts under the handle "pacified", still doesn't seem to know quite what to do in the face of the Big Hack. He's apparently scrubbed this earlier post from his homepage: SoapBlox is dead.All these hackers messing with our stuff, and we here at SoapBlox have no clue what to do. We don't have enough knowledge, time, money, or care to fix it. So I hope the Hackers are happy. If you want the data from your blog, we will get it. But we are not going to try and restore anything. Consider this the "We're Out of Business" post. UPDATE #1: Pam's House Blend is back up; no further word on the fate of SoapBlox. Blue Jersey still down, as is Swing State Project . Just received word that SoapBlox , a Web-hosting service that caters to progressive sites, has been hacked so severely that it is reported to be dead, leaving a number of si...