I like the independence and illusion of freedom that comes from publishing an individual blog on an independent host. To a point I even like tinkering with my Movable Type blog software. (No, I don't need to hear from WordPress users how declasse this makes me.) I enjoy the idea that if somehow something I said offended the powers that be who provide me an Internet platform, I could just pick up my data and move on, without being locked into a Facebook, Google, Wordpress.com, Blogger, whatever.
But the illusion of freedom and the appearance of independence come at a price. On Friday, I learned that my little blog had been ingeniously hacked, thanks to a tip from John Grillot of White Fir Design, which runs an anti-hacking operation. When one visited the site, it was to all appearances working perfectly normally. However, unbeknownst to me, it was spewing volumes of c1alis ads and other unsavory spam into Google's search engine, presumably in an effort to attract attention to the spammers' sites. I would have been collateral damage when Google decided to shutdown and blacklist my site as a spam factory, were it not for Mr. Grillot's timely tip.
At this point, having rebuilt the site and changed the passwords, I am still not sure how I invited these cockroaches of the Internet in, but I suppose any site, particularly one that is small and under amateur management, may have a thousand vulnerabilities despite reasonable diligence. I find the experience suggests several implications for how I think about the Internet. On the one hand, I am sure that big providers who manage thousands of blogs are better defended against this kind of attack than I am. On the other hand, although the attack was an inconvenience for me, attacking little sites like mine cannot offer much in the way of economies of scale to the spammers. Moreover, a little differentiation might generate further inefficiencies for the spambots, despite their fiendish ingenuity.
In the end, I remain in favor of more decentralization of the Internet and more individual independence, but paradoxically this can only work through better collaboration and communication to hold the malign influences of the Internet at bay.