This is just another of many examples of 25 year-olds who think HTML and JAVA are programming languages.
Anything tougher than that passes their knowledge level.
BUT, they’re cooool…..

Sorry, but Java IS a programming language. But, you're cooool....

Tano:

Why would a huge spike in requests to a server cause the server to crash? Where I am going with this is - why do servers not have some function which would allow them to simply turn away requests that are in excess of their capacity to handle, thus staying online and handling what they can? Why does the whole thing come crashing down?

This is exactly what a Denial of Service (DoS) attack does. The attacking connections use up all available resources, and any legitimate traffic gets turned away. Their "Service" is "Denied". Now DoS attacks come in 3 flavors:

1.) A standard DoS attack, and the original incarnation, is one host against another, sending out as many packets as possible. Whoever has the most bandwidth wins.

2.) A Distributed DoS (DDoS) uses multiple attacking computer against a single host. The attacking computers can range into the thousands, and usually belong to innocent people who have had their computer hijacked by a trojan or virus.

3.) The latest and hardest to stop is a Reverse DDoS. In this form, a single attacking computer will send a flood of bad packets to multiple innocent hosts, while faking (spoofing) the attacker's source IP address. Then the innocent hosts will reject the packet, and send the rejection back to the fake IP address, causing a DDoS against that IP.

By the time the polls closed, Lamont's top staff blogger, Tim Tagris... reported that the Lieberman camp had messed up in how it set up its site. The site couldn't handle the increased election day traffic.

"They use a sharerd server with 72 other sites. They pay their server $15 a month for 10 gigabytes. We've gone through more than 10 gigabytes in the last 24 hours," Tagris reported. The Lamont campaign pays $1,500 a month for web service.

Sounds plausible to me.

I don't know which is worse, the lies from the Lieberman campaign or the incompetent, dishonest reporters who lap it up.

The simple answer is that a web hosting site is not one system, but a whole complex of systems network switches, network cards, web servers, database servers, name servers, disk arrays etc. all of which have different choke points. And you cannot just throw traffic away, because most clients will retransmit, which actually INCREASES the load. The traffic needs to be throttled down, which is not easy at all the levels and systems. Even to get to the point where you want to print a simple page saying "Site too busy" could lead to enough load on other systems (network cards and buffers) that it could strain your server.

Now its possible to design around all of these issues, and huge sites like Google and much smaller sites do just that, but it takes money, hardware and the like. A very small webhosting service just will not (or cannot) do that sort of design for you.

Why would a huge spike in requests to a server cause the server to crash? Where I am going with this is - why do servers not have some function which would allow them to simply turn away requests that are in excess of their capacity to handle, thus staying online and handling what they can? Why does the whole thing come crashing down?

Surely some enterprising young soul could contact them directly and ask this question... unless it's actually easier to just go on Faux news and cry DoS!

I'm not expecting the Lieberman camp to apologize although they have offically admitted that they have no evidence of a Lamont hacker. That's about as much integrity as one can reasonably expect from them, I guess..

Also, a supposed Internet manager saying this :

"He did not have any information as to the source of the attack or any idea about the identity of the hacker. “We’re just fighting to get something live,” he said, “we’re not security experts.”"

Anyone who claims to be an interenet consultant and says this should be fired on the spot. And getting the source of the attack is truly trivial for most DoS attacks. Unless there are a huge DDos attack, but if so we would have seen plenty of other Internet signs.

Finally, anyone who knows something about Denial of Service attacks (which essentially just means fake requests for a web page that overwhelm the servers) will find the idea that the the 'site has been “fatally compromised” by an unknown hacker.' risible.

My guess ? There probably was a DoS attack. However, the web hosting service has to be totally incompetent to not block it. Instead, it probably crashed their servers. Again, either they were totally incompetent, so they had no backup or couldn't get anything up. They may be trying to blow up a relatively minor attack to cover their incompetence.

I'm telling ya... everything's a conspiracy these days!

I just do not understand why y'all have so much difficulty believing that the Bush administration blew up the World Trade Center. You sure have no problem believing everything else thrown your way.

Kos has what really happened to Joe's site, by the way... just in case you're interested. (I am fully aware that you are not inclined to believe anything that Kos has to say, but I think he has the goods on this one.)

If it wins him the primary, what do they care?