This kind of online griefing continues because people applaud it as clever and cool. This is an artless act of vandalism, like spray painting penises on Doctorow's house in real life. Please HN, don't give vandals credibility.
What I find funny was that TechCrunch cited a random twitter user Machika Kuro (xXstandstillXx) as their informant of how it was most likely compromised.
If you read the tweet they were citing, "@TechCrunch @alexia mostlikly a mysql injunction attack" you get a sense that he's not the most reliable expert on security.
I stopped reading boingboing after I realised that the signal to noise ratio is lower than an unfiltered reddit. There's nothing in there that can't be found by tuning your RSS reader, except with an RSS reader you can filter out all the garbage.
It's a case study in how not to use your time. For every boingboing post out there, there's an interesting paper on arxiv, an insightful post on HN or pictures of cats that look like Hitler on Reddit.
