Electoral-vote.com Under Heavy Load; Attack?

An anonymous reader writes "Electoral-vote.com (and mirrors electoral-vote2.com through electoral-vote8.com) seem to be very slow at the moment. Votemaster ( A. Tanenbaum) just posted 'All the servers appear to be under attack now, also DNS. I added another large multiprocessor but it doesn't seem to help much. I don't this is going to work. Sorry.' Massive attack or just a large flash crowd? Anybody up for some mirroring so votemaster can concentrate on the polls?" Reader fishwack writes with word that as of 3:46GMT (10:46 PM Eastern time in the U.S.) "the Federal Electoral Commission's Web site is down."

Comments

The Oldest Slashdotting..

[Renraku]

Political zerg.

Re:The Oldest Slashdotting..

[websaber]

" Electoral-vote.com Under Heavy Load; Attack?". Great let's slashdot it. That will make their day!

Re:The Oldest Slashdotting..

[sk8king]

Since you mention this topic, I remember seeing this in someone's signature months ago.

http://www.couplescompany.com/Features/Politics/St ructure3.htm

A quote in the article:
An interesting note to end this article:
As of January 2004, the United States fulfills all fourteen points of fascism and all seven warning signs are present. But we're not alone. Israel also fulfills all fourteen points and all seven warning signs as well. Welcome to the new republic, redefined, revised and spun. It is not too late to reverse this in either country, but it will be soon. The first step is realizing it. The second step is getting involved. As the propaganda slogan disguising our current war goes, "Freedom isn't free." But our war for freedom isn't abroad, it's here at home.

Web site maybe being ddos'd

[StudyOfEfficiency]

Let's post it to Slashdot with a link.

Re:Web site maybe being ddos'd

[pyrote]

Let's post it to Slashdot with a link.

Or even Double it or Triple it!

Re:Web site maybe being ddos'd

[davidescott]

Actually in this case its a good thing since he wants the data on massive usage to figure out ways to work around it. Those crazy academics. Makes me think this whole ``election'' thing may have been a ruse to get us to all go to his website.


So why am I a happy camper? We survived an unprecedented triple flash crowd and logged it all. As it turns out, two of the faculty members in my Dept., Maarten van Steen and Guillaume Pierre, are doing research on coping with flash crowds. The research issues include how many replicas to set up, where to place them, how fast to deploy them, and how to do it automatically, in real time, and at minimum cost. To simulate proposed algorithms, you need data about real flash crowds and real attacks, preferably at the same time. And boy oh boy do we have data now. Students interested in this and other areas of computer systems might want to check out the English-language Masters program I am running at the Vrije Universiteit.

Seems fine to me

[DJ Wipeout]

I got to the FEC with no problem. electoral-vote.com seemed fine too.

Re:Seems fine to me

[konekoniku]

To be fair, when I tried it earlier in the day (around 6-7pm pst) the primary and mirrors 2-4 were down.

Yeah

[Tyndmyr]

It must be under attack, probably by terrorists, who seek to quash our freedom and replace it with...evilness! Because, you know, it doesnt make sense that a site could go down because of insane numbers of people using it. Us slashdotters cant imagine such a thing happening. Besides, who would be going there now, anyhow?

Re:Yeah

[Xepo]

He specifically put up the mirrors because his servers were getting attacked before. It's not just from mass visitation.

There's an election today

[Peter Cooper]

I think these sites might be slow because the US is voting in a Presidential Election today, so people are checking out those sites for the results so far, etc.

Re:There's an election today

[RealProgrammer]

Presidential election?

Who's running?

Re:There's an election today

[ktakki]

Who's running?

Darl McBride is running against Richard Stallman, with Theo DeRaadt as a third party candidate.

k.

Re:There's an election today

[teamhasnoi]

What!? Have you been living under a rock?

It's Giant Douche v.s. Turd Sandwitch.

It looks like Turd Sandwitch may take it right now, but it's really going to be up to the Washington Racist Football Team.

Under attack by Slashdot editors?

[stoborrobots]

What's this? like the fourth direct link to the site today?

MicroKernel

[diablobsb]

quick!
switch to a microkernel based OS and webserver we all know would stand up to this attack nicely...
jk :)

who cares!

[seanadams.com]

right now they're calling florida as "weak kerry" which is nowhere near the case if you look at the figures in so far. Why is this site important?

Re:who cares!

[DataPath]

He updates the site maybe once a day, and based upon a wide number of polls. He's not doing hourly updates as the results come back from different precincts.

help help!

[Fiz Ocelot]

This site seems to under a very huge load! Quick, post it on Slashdot!

heh but on a serious note, there's something over 120 million voters? With such a close election? Doubt it's a hostile attack.

Electoral-Vote3.com - Electoral-Vote8.com

[marktaw.com]

http://www.electoral-vote3.com/

through

http://www.electoral-vote8.com/

If one doesn't come up, use another.

Re:LOL BUSH IS WINNING YOU COMMIES!

[camooT]

Don't count your chickens. Assuming you know how to count.

Internet load today

[aacool]

netcraft reported this already earlier today http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2004/11/02/mirro rs_help_electoralvotecom_blunt_ddos_attacks.html

Mirroring helped

Aljazeera was also down, per Netcraft

I've blogged live about Internet Load all day on my blog today

Gad you gave us a link to slashdot

[aardwolf204]

Its good that you provide us apache-crash-happy slashdotters with a link to Electoral-vote.com, come on troops get in there and get that server smoking!

More seriously, can anyone tell my why at this moment the reports are so uneven among the major networks:

NBC: 207 / 199
Yahoo: 237 / 199
Fox: 210 / 144
CBS: 246 / 207

Answer that, then continue to F5, F5, F5...

And do it in firefox, maybe the major news sites will notice in their logs.

Re:Gad you gave us a link to slashdot

[Peyna]

CBS is giving Bush Ohio; which is BS when Cuyahoga and Hamilton counties (Cleveland and Cincinnati) have only reported 30-50% of their precincts. Cuyahoga currently shows a significant margin for Kerry, if that trend continues, that's another 100,000 or so Kerry votes in Ohio when it hits 100%. We're going to see the same thing we saw 4 years ago where one network will call a particular state and then find out 4 hours later that a certain place heavy to one side wasn't in yet and it changed the results. At least this time they waited until every poll but Alaska was closed.

Re:Gad you gave us a link to slashdot

[Peyna]

Okay, so now it's down to Ohio and New Mexico. If Bush takes Ohio, Kerry takes New Mexico (and NH, the rest of the states follow the trend from 4 years ago), there will be a tie.

Which means we would probably end up with President George Bush and Vice-President John Edwards. That'd be a hoot.

Re:Gad you gave us a link to slashdot

[TopShelf]

Go here and you can see the states getting called by each of the networks as it happens. It's been my favorite site to follow tonight...

Re:Gad you gave us a link to slashdot

[Peyna]

In the case of a electoral tie, the currently sitting House of Representatives picks the President, the Senate picks the Vice President; yuor talk about the Supreme Court doesn't come into play.

Re:Gad you gave us a link to slashdot

[demachina]

Its interesting exit polls have historically been pretty accurate which is why networks have relied on them for so long, until the Republicans started winning elections and especially as electronic voting came on the scene. As you recall in 2000 VNS exit polling predicted Gore won and he didn't. In 2002 the VNS exit polls mysteriously failed in a massive way and the Republicans had a big win. It was disbanded and an all new AP system was used today.

Today apparently the exit polls were massively swinging to Kerry and it now appears he is losing the election. Curious that exit polls have gone completely south in just the last 4 years.

It leads to two possibilities.

1. The exit polls are really innacurate or maybe Democrat leaners were rigging them, of course rigging exit polls is kind of stupid since they don't count for anything other than maybe putting a little psychic pressure on late voters. Maybe they are just consistently bad but they are a pretty big sampling and its odd they would be as far off as they were apparently today. This is the message Fox and the Republicans were pounding on all night. The exit polls were all wrong and you need to fix them or get rid of them. Unfortunately at this point the exit poll are the only checks and balances we have on the truthfullness of the polls and especially electronic polling.

2. The exit polls were accurate and someone was rigging the vote. Needless to say with widespread use of electronic voting machines, without paper trail, if someone rigged them to skew the vote to the Republicans you would see what we've seen today and it would be hard to prove thats what happened. The exit polls say Kerry wins and the voting machines say Bush wins. Unfortunately with no paper trail we may never know.

If exit polls are wrong it should be setting off alarm bells that either they are wrong or the vote counts are wrong. You should not leap to the conclusion that it must be the exit polls as the media and Republican were tonight and probably will be from now on.

One interesting thing to do would be to lock up a all the electronic voting machines in precincts in Ohio and Florida (Broward and Miami-Dade in particular where there is huge Democratic vote to suppress). Look in particular for precincts where exit polls said one thing and the machines said something else. Be sure to set the date back to the day of the election, set them exactly like they were on election day, and start entering votes on them in a semi random way at about the same rate voters would on all or most of the machines, and see if after a full day of voting they report an accurate vote.

Another interesting exercise would be to correlate the map of precincts with electronic voting with precincts with bogus exit polls and see if there is a correlation.

I think much of the data on them can be found on electionline.org.

In Other News

[Jakhel]

Check out the exit polls. Scroll down to what people believe are the most important qualities in a president. Only 7% said intelligence!!!!! HOLY FUCK!!! JESUS CHRIST, is this the country that I'm living in?!?!?!?

Re:In Other News

[FooAtWFU]

I for one don't care whether my President can solve Fermat's Last Theorem, score a 1600 on the SAT or anything like that. They don't need to. The Presidency is not rocket science. It's not a matter of intelligence, it's a matter of wisdom. This applies to both candidates.

Re:In Other News

[kfg]

There are very, very many 'intelligent' people with little to no wisdom.

However, there are very, very few stupid people who do.

KFG

Re:In Other News

[Rhys]

The scary thing is that more people are concerned about the president's religious preferences/beliefs than his intelligence.

That should scare you.

Alright smartass...

[Art Tatum]

Where's all that "a 20% performance hit is not a big deal" crap now, bigmouth? :-)

*sigh*

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand why Slashbots assume that people who support Bush are dumb. I don't support Bush; I voted for Kerry. But I don't think that people who voted for Bush are dumb. They just have different priorities, values, and opinions than I do. I just don't get it: I understand Bush bashing (he's a public figure after all), but why bash people who voted for him? Attacking someone who holds a different opinion than you does not help your cause...

Re:*sigh*

[mcrbids]

I don't understand why Slashbots assume that people who support Bush are dumb.

Choosing to drive a VW bug is not stupid, unless you're going to haul cement by the ton.

In much the same way, choosing to go with George Bush is not stupid, unless you're trying to run a country.

Now, assume that you're sitting at a construction site, with contractors everywhere. Somebody shows up in a VW full of concrete bags, promsing to make a run to get more.

VW != stupid.

Concrete != stupid.

VW + concrete == stupid.

Simple math, no?

Re:*sigh*

[mrchaotica]

Actually, I've pointed exactly this out to the people who want to get rid of the Electoral College, with a slight modification. It is my interpretation that they wanted intelligent, informed, and moral people to be making decisions -- I agree with you on this. However, I believe the criteria of "white, Christian, land-owning, upper-class" was merely the most convenient way to find such people. Since then, circumstances have changed, and it is now accepted that anyone could be intelligent, informed, and moral regardless of race, religion, or class (Amendments 15, 1, and 24 respectively). So, it seems reasonable to me to dismiss the the actions of the Founding Fathers that were appropriate to the time, but no longer relevant. Instead, we should focus on their words and ideals, which have stood the test of time much more successfully.

I assert that Republicanism (the system of government, not the political party) wasn't designed to protect the "haves" from the "have-nots;" it was designed to protect the "cares and knows" from the "care-nots and know-nots." Unfortunately, it seems to have failed today, since so many people have succumbed to Bush's fearmongering (fears of terrorism, fears of religious and moral diversity). They have forgotten that freedom is the basic principle of our country, and are instead are trying to inflict their morals on the rest of us (who, I should point out, are no less moral -- we might just have slightly different ones).

This is not Republicanism! It is Democracy, it is the "rabble," and it is mob rule.

Re:*sigh*

[PMuse]

That's the reason America is the way it is today.

Right. Because if the US had direct popular presidential elections, that would have fixed this mess. [Bush 51%, Kerry 48%]

Face it, Americans have voted to deny their shame. Bush told them that the US had done right. Kerry told them it had done wrong. They drank the koolaid. It's going to take another full Vietnam-sytle awfulness for Americans to change course; they're incapable of seeing disaster until after it's happened.

Re:*sigh*

[BenEnglishAtHome]

...the Founding Fathers expected and wanted...a white, Christian, land-owning, upper-class in control... The first president of the US was an avid slave owner...

The first president of the US wasn't a Christian. He, like some other FFs, was a Deist. He thought there was a higher power. He went to church because that was the accepted way of expressing one's spirituality in those days. But he left before Communion, always, because that would have been a symbolic acceptance of the whole set of Christian beliefs, something he simply didn't accept.

Can you imagine a Presidential candidate today getting up and leaving church before communion and being quoted in the press as saying "Well, I believe in a higher power and all, but this whole 'body of Christ' thing is more than I can swallow.* I think those Christians are nice people and I'll share their meetings, but I'm not really one of them"? He'd be pilloried. He couldn't get elected dog catcher.

(*) - That's humor, for those of you who didn't recognize it.

Do you really mean to imply that Shrub is a spiritual descendant of Washington? That both of them share similar goals and visions for this country? Washington had the strength of his convictions and enough humanity to admit that he didn't know all the answers and, certainly, enough good sense not to intimate that his actions were the result of God whispering in his ear.

I find your assertion that Bush is "fulfilling the original American dream" offensive on a dozen levels. He wouldn't know "the original American dream" if it bit him in the ass.

Re:Thunderdome!!!!!

[Kenshin]

I hope they play that "dramatic battle" music from when Kirk fought Spock on Star Trek...

Obligatory Futurama Reference...

[supermonkeyball]

On the TV, candidate Jack Johnson is debating candidate John Jackson.

Johnson: It's time someone had the courage to stand up and say: I'm against those things that everybody hates!
Jackson: Now, I respect my opponent. I think he's a good man. But, quite frankly, I agree with everything he just said!
Fry: These are the candidates? They sound like clones. [Squints] Wait a minute. They are clones!
Leela: Don't let their identical DNA fool you. They differ on some key issues.
Johnson: I say your three cent titanium tax goes too far!
Jackson: And I say your three cent titanium tax doesn't go too far enough!

Script found Here

In case you think this is over tonight

[Peyna]

just some of the problems that went down today.

It won't be over at least a week if not longer. So long as it's decided by inauguration day, we'll be okay.

Re:it looks like Bush will win

[mrchaotica]

Suck it up! When we stop being divided, we open the door to single-party totalitarianism.

When we stop being divided, we stop being free.

stupid wise people

[wotevah]

Intelligence has not much to do with the above, though it can definitely help there. Can you imagine a wise person lacking intelligence though ?

One more option

[Shihar]

Last election I watched an exit poller. He had no method of randomly selecting people to poll as far as I could tell. The only pattern I could see is that he seemed to be more inclined to ask pretty young woman.

Conspiracy theories aside, I think it is just bad polling. Democrats are generally younger. Younger people are generally prettier and look more approachable. It might be a small effect, but do it a few thousand times and it adds up. I am not saying that it isn't worth looking into, but my gut guess would be that it is simply poor random selection.

Re:The webmaster was the guy who made MINUX!?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean MINIX?

Re:Bush is going to win -- now what?

[Thomas Miconi]

Simple.

We're doomed.

Thomas-