This morning it seems that sites who manage their blogrolls using blogrolling.com’s service had their links hijacked, every link being replaced by one to “Laura’s Blog” which predictably redirects to a porn site. As painful and unfortunate as this is, I think it illustrates an important point that as a weblogging community we should be heading away from centralization as a rule, not flocking to every free or low-cost centralized service that pops up.
To me one of the greatest things about weblogs is that they shift power and control away from monolithic organizations and into the hands of users, where it is ultimately more secure. I have a friend who lost three years of her writing when a free online journal service decided to fold and delete everyone’s entries. I know people who hardly use email because their hotmail or yahoo addresses are flooded with so much spam as to make them useless. People who don’t host their own comments have their discussion at the mercy of some third party provider of varying reliability. Many of you reading this had your blogrolls hijacked this morning. In the weblog world blogroll links represent a web of trust — you freely giving a piece of your credibility to another site as a gift to that site and your audience. Today that trust was betrayed for many people.
This isn’t meant to criticize the fine people behind blogrolling.com at all. Realistically, anyone can be hacked and most people have been at some point. However the principle of the matter is that this shouldn’t have been a problem in the first place; it shouldn’t have rocked the weblog world like it did. How to change? Host your blogroll yourself. This is why WordPress’ links feature offers weblogs.com XML support, an unlimited number of blogrolls and links, OPML import (so you don’t have to re-enter all your links), and a handy bookmarklet — all for free. Even if you don’t use WordPress, please at least consider moving to a decentralized method of managing your blogroll.
On Blogrolling Hack
I think the importance of this issue cannot be understated. My thoughts from the WordPress Dev blog: Blogrolling Hack Illustrates Need for Decentralization.
It seems that sometime people who manage their blogrolls using blogrolling.com’s service …
Trackback from Photo Matt on November 17, 2003
Blogrolling.com Hacked by Spammers
Blorolling.com is a centralized system for bloggers to manage their lists of links. It’s quite popular, because many blogging systems don’t provide an easy way to manage these lists, forcing bloggers to modify their HTML directly.
This mo…
Trackback from The War on Spam on November 17, 2003
Many good points, Matt. Would it be hard to release the link-handling parts of WordPress as a separate stand-alone “blogroll” package which people can use instead of a centralized hosted service like Blogrolling?
Comment from Chris Burkhardt on November 17, 2003
Matt, a short aside, Laura’s Blog is a personal blog run by herself and her husband. There are however, numerous “blogs” that spoof links as javascript redirects to porn sites. Those, on the other hand, are plain old terrible.
Comment from OF Jay on November 17, 2003
Host your own roll
At wordpress.org’s devblog, this entry by Wordpress’s primary developer, Matt Mullenweg:
This isn’t meant to criticize the fine people behind blogrolling.com at all. Realistically, anyone can be hacked and most people have been at some p…
Trackback from One Fine Jay on November 17, 2003
Yeah, someone commented to me today that my links weren’t working and that there was one link all the way down. Now I know why. Lol.
Comment from Zach on November 18, 2003
Decentralized Blogrolling Script
Well, I’m sure most bloggers heard about the little incident with Blogrolling not too long ago. If you haven’t, that site has a bit of a timeline of what happened, but the gist of it was that a small(?) error…
Trackback from The Queer Dot Net on December 29, 2003
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Comment from Rose, Birthday Flowers Admin on September 9, 2004
[...] rezolvat. Dar nu au pomenit nimic despre asta pe site, nici măcar la Breaking News. Se pare că s-a mai întîmplat asta în 2003 şi a mai fost semnalată o breşă de securitate în 2004, dar ambele probleme au fost rezolvate [...]
Pingback from Strangers on the Net » Blogrolling.com “defaced” on October 9, 2008