(08-13-2024, 07:54 AM)Jaguarmeister Wrote: If there was a ddos attack, those viewer/listener numbers could be inflated by that, no?    I find it difficult to believe 76 million Americans tuned in.  Perhaps there were others around the world interested enough to tune in to get it to that number or a chunk of it was the ddos attack.  I tuned in for a bit, but couldn't get in for a while.  That said, he already has my vote so it wasn't needed to sway me.

The contrast between the 2 candidates is stunningly stark though.  One is hiding from the media or when she does interact with them it's with those media members that are actually Democratic operatives and in her pocket and the whole thing is scripted theater.  The other will sit down for hours long conversations or even go into that same Democratic operative media tirelessly to be able to get the opportunity to talk directly to the American people and verbally bodyslam hostile "journalists".  I'm sure the founders did not envision a scenario where a candidate and party would virtually not have to campaign and would instead rely their operatives in the media to carry them over the finish line as they also did in 2020.  I have a feeling they would feel that to be a threat to democracy.

Envision yourself the head of a large national corporation and you're hiring a project manager for a multi-year project that's set to start in a few months and can't be delayed.  You've been presented with 2 candidates that have met the initial criteria.  If you unfortunately don't like either, your timeline prevents you from starting the process over from scratch, so you must pick one of them.  You sit down to interview Harris and Trump.  There's absolutely no way in hell that Kamala gets the nod in this scenario and this isn't some corporate multi-year project, this is an interview to be the leader of the free world and to be the head of many multi-year projects.

I don't buy the current polls for a second.  There is no real enthusiasm for Harris.  There is manufactured enthusiasm to the point that even her official social media campaign account is pushing out AI altered crowd images.  She can't fill an arena herself, so she has to appear on stage at a hip hop concert and then make it look like a campaign rally.  Keep in mind that even Democratic candidates that have lost the presidential election have generally historically led in the polls leading up to the election.  You have to wonder if there is intention behind that or if it's just that left leaning individuals are more likely to respond to polls.  The only polls that matter, though, are the election itself and exit polling to make sure the result lines up with what you're finding after the fact.  In a fair election with a true and fair media, Trump cleans her clock on election day.  Let's hope that ends up being the case because I don't want to see another highly suspicious election result because I have a feeling if she actually wins there will be some unexplainable anomalies again.  The Democrats have openly weaponized all facets of government.  Why wouldn't they weaponize whatever was necessary to stay in power?

After thinking about it for a while, the answer is no, the DDOS attack could not inflate the "views" numbers, only the numbers of people/computers connected to the server.  In order to count as a "view" a legitimate login has to occur or a legitimate connection to the specific page hosting the interview.

Without getting too terribly technical, I'll try to explain in simple terms how a DDOS attack might work.  A basic knowledge of how TCP works is helpful.  All one needs to do is have a group of computers do what is called a SYN scan over and over.

When your computer connects to a web server, the first thing it sends is a "packet" with the SYN flag set.  The server will respond with a SYN-ACK flag set signalling that it's ready to establish communication.  It also sets aside a "slot" for your communications.  If your computer doesn't respond the server will sit there and wait meanwhile taking up that "slot".  It will wait a certain amount of time before it finally closes the connection by sending a RST packet.  Meanwhile your computer does the same sequence again taking up more "slots".  This happens on an open port on the server (typically port 80).

Depending on how the firewall on the server is set up, the same procedure can take place on all ports.  Ports that are "blocked" or "filtered" by a firewall will respond with a SYN-RST flag and close the connection, however the the open port is still waiting for the next step to establish communication (which never happens).  Doing the SYN-RST transmission also takes time (milliseconds) away from the server.

Now imagine a group of computers doing the same thing over-and-over several times a second.  Pretty soon the server runs out of "slots" to open up for communication which will slow it down and make it inaccessible for legitimate connections.

In that scenario none of the computers have actually established communication on the particular page that is hosting the interview.  They simply flooded the server causing it to "run out of slots" and possibly slowed it down.

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