Thursday, December 14, 2006

Back after being hacked

The Downtown Eastside Enquirer appears to have became the victim of a hacker over the past week.

At first the hacker deleted the description of the blog, altered some of the settings, and deleted a couple of postings, including one entitled McFailure. The hacker also published a copy of a posting that had been stored under Draft.

The Enquirer responded by restoring the deleted material.

Then the hacker struck again. This time deleting the entire blog!

This hacking came after a Carnegie Board member twice verbally attacked a homeless Carnegie member whom he suspected was behind the blog. The Board member also verbally attacked a friend of the suspected blogger. The suspected blogger was again verbally attacked, twice, by a leftie activist who sometimes comes to the Downtown Eastside. Then Carnegie staff persons, one a CUPE member and the other a BCTF member, who had been criticized on the blog for repeatedly locking doors to publicly funded services, arranged to have the suspected blogger barred for a day from the Carnegie Learning Centre. (They would later upgrade the barring to a permanent one.)

Although Carnegie has for several months been blocking community access to the Downtown Eastside Enquirer on their computers, censorship has been stepped up over the past few days. Blogging capability -- access to blogger.com -- has been completely blocked on several Carnegie computers. As a final effort to deter publication of the Downtown Eastside Enquirer, the suspected blogger was barred for life from the Carnegie Learning Centre by Ethel Whitty, the Director of Carnegie appointed by the City of Vancouver, and Lucy Alderson, a teacher and BCTF member. Alderson told him that he was barred for allegedly contributing to the Downtown Eastside Enquirer.

But despite setbacks, the Downtown Eastside Enquirer has, as Arnold would say, "cum bock".

Canada is not yet China.

[Most of the original postings will be restored over the next couple of days.]