This week’s issue of The New Yorker features a Talk of the Town article by Jeffrey Toobin (The Nine) about hackers infiltrating SoapBlox, a Denver company that administers the Web sites of over a hundred progressive blogs, including the compelling and prolific LGBT site, Pam’s House Blend, edited and published by Durham’s own Pam Spaulding. (Read her 2006 Indy article about the “queer blogosphere,” her reasons for joining the fray, and a Pam’s House Blend campaign that crashed the servers of the anti-gay group Alliance Defense Fund, legally.)
Toobin starts his story in Durham:
Late last Tuesday night, Pam Spaulding tried to post an entry on her blog, Pam’s House Blend, from her home in Durham, North Carolina. There was a technical glitch, and she couldn’t publish her post.
It turns out the problem originated from hackers who had infiltrated servers in Denver, replacing the site’s slogan with “destroying online communities.” After the crash, Soapblox received an outpouring of financial and technical support, and its sites are now back up and running, Toobin reports. In addition to a new technical staff, they are upgrading to new servers, company president Paul Preston notes on the Soapblox Web site this week.
