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4chan May Have Brought Down Pro-Clinton Phone Lines Before Election Day (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Yesterday, as groups across the country hit the final stretch of their get-out-the-vote campaigns, workers at NextGen Climate noticed some problems with their automated dialer program. As the team started its morning hours, the program used to initiate and monitor voter calls was suddenly clunky, and cut out entirely for crucial hours in the afternoon. The downtime wasn't a coincidence. Just after midnight on Sunday night, a post on 4chan's /pol/ board announced an impending denial-of-service attack on any tools used by the Clinton campaign, employing the same Mirai botnet code that blocked access to Twitter and Spotify last month. One of those targets was TCN, the Utah-based call center company that runs NextGen's dialer. According to the post's author, the company was also providing phone services to Hillary Clinton's offices in Nevada. "List targets here that if taken out could harm Clinton's chances of winning and I will pounce on them like a wild animal," the post reads. "Not sleeping until after this election is over." TCN confirmed the outage in a statement, describing the attack as "fairly sophisticated in nature." According to the statement, "the primary impacts were a slow site and a few brief periods of unavailability." The statement also makes it clear that NextGen Climate was far from the only group slowed down by the outage. TCN manages calling services for 2000 different clients, with a particularly brisk business during campaign season handling "everything from inbound information IVRs, outbound surveys to volunteer outreach."
Agreed. I would feel much better about this if they had targeted all of the campaign autodialer firms, and not just Hillary's. An election free from hounding pollsters, cold calls, and attack ads would be like waking up from a bad dream.
Too bad the autodialers diversify and innocent services get impacted by the denial of service.
1) It's not a simple "fair or not fair situation". Your reply is pointless.
2) The electoral college distorts the popular vote very little, moreover it reflects the fact that we are the United States of America, not just a big federal government. True to the structure of our government from the beginning, the people of various states vote within themselves, and the states via the electoral finalize the election by representing the votes of the states.
3) If you want to talk about fairness and our government, just look at the Senate. It's completely undemocratic and much more blatant affront to representational democracy, but also a result of the very structure of our country as United States.