What is soupwhale?
Okay so imagine that your mom is rich and she wants to buy a server for her business. She doesn't know anything about computers so she asks her son to do it for her. He buys the biggest dedicated server plan he can find, and decides that putting only his mom's work stuff on it would be a waste of space, so he starts posting on 4chan/g/ saying "LOL ANYONE WANT A FREE SHELL ON MY SERVER?"

That is soupwhale.

History
Soupwhale was an IRC network and Shell service operated by Treefire. The name was coined by Taylor in 2009 and became the home of Treefire's server in 2010 while Rachel and Devnill were visiting during the Wetfish Road Trip.

Soupwhale has been hacked numerous times:

01:51 < soupwhale> fuckin
01:51 < soupwhale> breadwhale AND soupwhale are both down
01:51 < soupwhale> and for some fucking reason won't come back up
01:51 < Frob_> god
01:51 < Frob_> daMNN
01:51 < itsrachelfish> you said someone was on breadwhale?
01:52 < soupwhale> yeah
01:52 < itsrachelfish> right before irc crashed you said 'who just logged into breadwhale' ?
01:52 < soupwhale> yeah breadwhale was definitely
01:52 < soupwhale> someone got on, used a priv escalation exploit, got root
01:52 < soupwhale> deleted the boot sector and shut down the computer
01:52 < Frob_> why are we always the victim of cyburterrorism
01:52 < itsrachelfish> how did they log in? @__@
01:53 < soupwhale> dunno
01:53 < soupwhale> i gave the arabs a shell there but
01:54 < soupwhale> they weren't logged in when it happened
01:54 < Frob_> why
01:54 < Frob_> why would you do that
01:54 < BeetRoot> ^
01:54 < Frob_> why would you give the faggotrons who have been wrecking our shit for weeks
01:54 < Frob_> ANYTHING