It's a BLOG, not a Sanctuary!

Tags: bloggers, China, East Asia, Weblog, Disaster, Internet & Telecoms, hacked blogs

Could you just walk away from your blog --- shut down the PC and never go back again? What if a hacker totally destroyed every inch of your blog?

For some bloggers, "big" bloggers, "A-List" bloggers, like Wendy Cheng or Michelle Malkin, losing the blog would be a great big deal. Like losing a leg. It's part of their livelihood. Wendy actually did once lose her Xiaxue blog to a hijacker. Several of her thousands of readers pitched in, helped her recover all of her lost posts. Michelle has been targeted by DOS attacks in the past, but her blog has always stayed the course.

According to Nielsen-Buzzmetrics a handful of popular bloggers continue to be the driving force in the blogosphere.

For smaller bloggers, it's just a bunch of stuff we wrote. Sorry to minimize it, but most blogs, including your beloved Albany Eye, fall into this category. Having said that, a lot of people pour hearts and souls into their blogs, so to lose anything to interlopers or hackers would be akin to someone breaking into your home or apartment and throwing mud all over the place and all over your things. So be careful if you're using a blog to save your family photos or recipes or something like that. Suggestion: if it gets to the point where you find yourself "fussy and protective," it's time to either back up your blog or take a vacation.

Over the last few weeks there have been a series of attacks to popular Spanish language weblogs. Trouble began at the popular Chilean tech blog FayerWayer [ES], which not only was hacked, but also got all of its posts and comments deleted, and all that was left was a pretty sour manifesto against Leo Prieto [ES], the site’s creator. The blog had been backed up a few weeks prior, so it was mostly the comments which got lost. The posts, in some cases, were manually recovered. Next was Mariano Amartino’s Denken Uber [ES]. In this case - despite having all his posts deleted - nothing big happened, except for a few hours offline status, since his hosting provider automatically saves copies of the database and it only needed to restablish a copy. Finally, the most serious case was that of Cronicas Moviles [ES], a site mainly dedicated to publishing video interviews. In this case - because it was hosted in Blogger - there was no backup at all, and all of its published contents were lost. [Spanish version here: Algunas enseñanzas sobre los ataques a blogs]

Despite the similarities of these acts - accessing the blog’s administration interface in an unauthorized way and deleting all of its posts - there’s no clue that indicates they were done by the same person. But it’s surprising to see the extreme cruelty of these people trying to ruin many years of work. At the same time, it displays a clear fact: keeping a blog is not an easy task, and it forces us to follow certain basic routines. Among them, to modify our password frequently, change the name of some folders of access to the administration interface, and particularly, make back ups of the database or posts we’ve published, in case we’re using some free blog publication site. All of these things, of course, take time. And the worst thing is we have to use more of our (little) time to maintain our blogs than to write on them.

A suspected security flaw in Firefox or Gmail has caused a small number of Gmail users to lose all their contacts and e-mails. Google is currently performing a full investigation into the matter. Thankfully the number of “hacked” accounts is fairly low, so the vast majority of Gmail users shouldn’t worry too much. Please note, this only affected users who use the web interface. If you use Gmail through a mail program you are safe unless your actual computer gets attacked.

90 percent of Indonesia’s internet connection is disfunctional or very slow, due to the strong earthquake off Taiwan’s coast December 26th that damaged underwater cables and severely disrupted telecom links in the East, Southeast and South Asia. They say it could take a month or more to restore service. Certainly one month, if it’s true, is way too much for an internet addicts like Enda Nasution who wonders whether this is what end of days feels like.

Uploaded to Sina.com’s blog page is a series of video clips shot across the street from and around Guangzhou’s (China)central train station, where most of the criminal motorbike drivers tend to hang out. Footage seems to have been shot by police themselves, was uploaded by a user calling herself Feever, and shows several drive-by robberies in action, a mid-freeway chase halfway through, renegade motorbikers resisting arrest and how municipal police work to catch them: [Note to viewers outside China: the video may be unviewable (without a proxy server) until those underwater cables are back up.]

FaryadNameh says blogging has become popular in Iran due to the lack of free media, but internet,in general, has not been really developed in country.The blogger says it is rare that we find an institution in country with an active website[Fa]. The blogger adds even very popular sport clubs don’t pay attention to their sites.

Africa 2.0 shares (Fr) two new links: Makossa TV, a self-described media center for African artists and Ouestaf, a West African news site

Contributors to this article include Jorge Gobbi , Amika Orloff, A. Fatih Syuhud and John Kennedy .