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August 9, 2006

Exit poll results; Video: Lamont, Lieberman won/lost speeches; Traffic, not 'hacking,' probably took down Lieberman site, say conservative geeks

5:21 p.m.
CBS News/N.Y. Times exit poll results (.pdf) of voters yesterday in Connecticut's Democratic primary.

10:48 a.m.
Connecticut Senatorial primary night videos at YouTube:
Lamont Victory Speech - Aug. 8,2006

Lieberman Concession Speech - Aug. 8, 2006 (Part2)

Lieberman Campaign Manager, Sean Smith, on Website Attack

In Joe Lieberman's "I lost the first half" speech last night, the strangest moment to me was when he said, "Come to my website...'when it is unhacked.' "

Hacked? When you get more traffic than your server can handle, your site becomes unavailable. This used to be called "Slashdotting," since a link from the programmers' favorite website delivered so much traffic to little sites that they could exceed their bandwidth limits, or the capacity of their hosting servers, that the favored site would crash.

It happened last night to popular liberal blogs (such as Firedog Lake and MyDD) and to the official results site of the Connecticut Secretary of State as people tried to get election results as they came in.

At 9:58 last night, with 83 percent of the results in, famous lefty blogger Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos noted in this post,

Right now, (this) site is getting hit at the rate of 2,000 users per minute.
I have a 14 or 15 servers on the Daily Kos rack. It looks like I'll have to beef up even more for November....

Kudos to the (Hartford) Courant for keeping their results page live and healthy.

Lieberman's site, joe2006.com, was hosted at MyHostCamp.com, which could handle a modest volume of traffic, but near election day any candidate's site needs to beef up its bandwidth.

Several conservative sites now have explanations by technical people wanting to correct the embarrassingly clueless leap to the conclusion the site had been hacked.

At National Review Online, which earlier propagated the hacking story, there's Lieberman Site "Hack":

...While it’s possible that someone actually hacked joe2006.com, from what I’ve seen, this seems to be the least likely option. More likely, this whole episode started last night with a simple over-usage of bandwidth. In the rush to get the server back up, a temporary site using minimal bandwidth was likely uploaded — “Vote for Who You Know, Vote Joe.” I looked at the source code on this particular page, and it didn’t appear to be coded by a hacker — the code was much too fancy. (Who ever heard of a W3C-compliant hacker?) Probably, the page was put together in DreamWeaver or FrontPage. My instinct tells me FrontPage since cPanel can be setup with FrontPage Extensions. (Nevermind that a hacker would be more likely to say something obnoxious about or denigrating of Lieberman.)
Because joe2006.com appeared to have been hacked (a sensible guess when the site went down on election eve), bandwidth problems were complicated by the ensuing deluge of hits, finally bringing down the entire server this morning. Drudge links and heavy traffic tend to do this when there isn't a backup plan in place. The site has been up and down ever since.

As for a staged operation, that seems unlikely given all of the above. This looks to be simply the work of an inexperienced technical consultant, but that’s just my guess.

The Post-Chronicle published a detailed email chiding the site's handlers for letting it stay down so long (Joe Lieberman Website May Not Have Been Hacked - Report):

here is what you do when that happens: a. You grab your local backup (you do have a local backup of your files (both scripts and database snapshots, right?). b. You find a host that specialized in high bandwidth hosting and you get an account going ASAP. There are plenty of ISPs that would take your money to expedite this. c. You move your files up, test that everything is working d. You redirect your DNS so that Joe2006.com points to you new server; this change doesn't take very long to propagate because you make sure that the DNS update uses a very low TTL (time to live). e. If needed, you separate your mailserver mail.joe2006.com from your webserver joe2006.com/www.joe2006.com so as to keep your mail up and going. Steps a-e can be accomplished, especially with the kind of site Joe had up and running before this incident (nothing particularly complex), in less than an hour or so by a competent sysadmin."

At BBS News in N.C.. Lieberman Site Probably Not Hacked -- Website Nameservers Could Have Been Pointed to an Alternate and have been Back Up Immediately:

in reality every blogger and most fifteen year-olds could have put that Joe Lieberman's Web site back up on GoDaddy or any number of other Web hosts and have it 'resolving' or showing up in your Web browser in minutes....
joe2006.com is indeed up and its vital signs are quite healthy but the doctor, the Web master, is apparently golfing like it's already Wednesday afternoon.

This Web site should have been right back up, within about an hour. This is simply a standard in an enterprise situation and it should have been standard in this Lieberman campaign that for a while claimed they had been hacked. By now, surely they know better.

At this writing, http://joe2006.com/ is still down, and still blaming Ned Lamont.

This was obviously not a campaign for the 21st century. A Senator who'd keep his site down and blame the outage on his opponent rather than find someone technically competent enough to bring the site back up probably shouldn't be making Internet policy anyway.

Prediction: Joe Lieberman will drop out of the race in September.

Bonus links: Connecticut Bob -- blogger and Lamont poll worker -- did some fine "citizen reporting" yesterday from the right places at the right time.

Crooks and Liars -- which has more videos -- reported at 9:38 last night that,

A check from Hillary Clinton’s HILLPAC is being cut to Ned Lamont for five thousand dollars. She’s the first one to be counted on and make good on her promise to support the winner of the Connecticut primary.

Posted by Sheila Lennon at 10:48 AM | Permalink

Comments

Dear Joe –

We all know what happened. Ned won. You lost. There’s not much else to the story. It’s how democratic elections work. We all know that you’re going to run as an “Independent Democrat” this fall, too. Speaking on behalf of Democrats and Americans everywhere, I ask you not to run in November. The citizens of Connecticut – and, to be honest, America – don’t want you. I can’t say it’s nothing personal, but you shouldn’t take it too hard; it’s politics, the game you have been playing for decades. For the greater good, I implore you to be a man and step down. Admit defeat. Do what you can in the Senate this term, and then, when the votes are counted in the big election, hand over power with dignity. This is American democracy, and it’s bigger than any individual pride/ambition/vanity issues you may have personally. You are a public servant, and you’re supposed to put on a good face for America and for the world. Instead, you are making us look like children. Be an adult, and an American citizen – not a selfish, power-hungry politician, looking only for personal power and ignoring the greater good. You must also aware of the tensions splitting the Democratic party right now; the Republicans are drooling over the fact that we can’t get along and how that’s going to give them Congress again this year. By running, you’re not helping the Democrats – you’re showing the Republicans and the world that Democratic politicians are petty and small. You’re showing the Americans that we have sore losers in our party, people unwilling to play by the rules, and that’s exactly what we don’t need right now. You’re what we don’t need right now.

In the 2000 election, you and Al lost, too. What did you do? You made friends with the winner. Why not make friends with Lamont, too? You’ve made a big deal of his amateur qualities. If he wins, help him get adjusted to Washington. Show him around. Get him a copy of Robert’s Rules, or loan him yours. Tell him where to find good coffee. Give him tips on which politicians are only out for themselves and who don’t care about America, and point out the few public servants who really do care for this country’s welfare so he can work with them. We all know you’ve been in the Senate for 18 years; you know Washington, so help him out a little.

But be a man, Joe – not a child. Admit defeat with dignity and courage, and look to the next phase of your private life. It’s what is best for us all.

Sincerely,
AS
An American Citizen

Posted by: as on August 9, 2006 6:33 PM