So in the computer-related election story of the day, it appears that the Bush-Cheney site has cut itself off from the world outside the U.S. (via Frankenstein). Chris, a sensible fellow who generally admits his lack of computer knowledge, blurts out "this is ridiculous", even though he links to this story.

I'm really hoping that Chris meant for his "this" to have an antecedent of "the distributed denial of service attack," and that his statement is merely misphrased, because otherwise I'm unclear on why the campaign site shouldn't respond as it did. Cutting off out-of-country web traffic may be inconvenient, but in the seven-day run up before an election, one would expect that reliably serving your target audience (voters mainly resident in America) will be more important than not providing service to non-target audiences.

Of course, one of Frank's commentors leaves the charitable: "A-------, but what else is new?" The dialogue on Chris's site again focuses on how horrible this is, and how Bush just doesn't like foreigners. But if we assume that most of the DDOS traffic was originating overseas (reasonable, especially since the block seems to have worked), and that the deciding factor was provision of continued service to the site's target audience, I'm wondering what Chris or the geniuses commenting actually suggest was to be done on the server side? It's worth noting that this decision seems to have been implemented by Akamai, a professional outfit. (I know I'd pay them for hosting before I would Chris.)

Now, I'd have given significant props to anyone--Kos, Chris, whomever--who had made the appropriate noise here without being prompted: that the real shame is the DDOS attack. After all, it's not like the Bush campaign made this decision in a vaccuum. And I'll tell you: if Kerry went on TV tomorrow, addressed the issue, and said to his followers, "I don't care who you are or what you think you're doing, stop it! My opponent has the right to be heard!" he'd probably get my vote. (I'm in New York, so who cares, right?)

I'll be the first to say that this election hasn't been the cleanest in memory, and that partisans on both sides have behaved atrociously: accusations of voter fraud, for instance, are becoming bipartisan sport. But DDOS attacks on the sites of either candidate should be out and out disgusting at this stage of the race. And unless Chris has a better--and by this I mean faster and just as effective--solution to Bush's problem... well, he might at least have said something pejorative about the attackers.

I guess that's just too much to ask for these days.