Not only is this wrong, it’s likely illegal

April 5th, 2007 | Posted by PostmanE

Not to get all serious on a Thursday night here or anything (Thursdays are for lovers), but this warrants a mention. See, Colin Cowherd - he of the internet plagiarism and heavily caps-locked e-mails - decided to flood The Big Lead today, sending the site’s bandwidth, which probably has similar capacity to ours, into an untenable situation. The Big Lead is still down as of 8:09 p.m., and if you ask me, that’s totally fucked up. (BDD at KSK agrees.)

EDSBS picked up Cowherd’s transcript today, which makes Cowherd sound every bit as evil as he sounds:

“You and I are straining the system, that what I heard…We occasionally, once a week…we’ll mention a website, our listeners will flee to it, and we’ll shut it down. We feel bad about this, we don’t mean to do it. It usually forces that young guy or young gal to buy more bandwidth and can be expensive. I don’t know that…but wouldn’t it be great if every day we gave out a new, young website and blew it up? If I told my audience every day–just one that’s annoying–and we could give it to them, and our audience would blow it up?

I want everyone to go to it as fast as you possibly can. When I say go, go….it’s three words. THE BIG LEAD dot com. THE. BIG. LEAD. DOT. COM. Go now.”

That is so unbelievably dick it’s not funny. For all I know, TBL has never even mentioned Cowherd, or at the very least has not called him out more than any other site for him being a huge fucking tooldouche. (And Colin: you are in fact a tooldouche.) Still, even if TBL had written awful, terrible, slightly pejorative things about Cowherd, this would still be totally unwarranted.

NOT ONLY THAT, but according to my very brief and limited influx into Internet Law, this is actually borderline illegal. What Cowherd did seems to fit the bill of a DoS Attack. From Wikipedia (emphasis mine, links not):

In computer security, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. Typically the targets are high-profile web servers, and the attack attempts to make the hosted web pages unavailable on the Internet. It is a computer crime that violates the Internet proper use policy as indicated by the Internet Architecture Board (IAB).

DoS attacks have two general forms:

• Force the victim computer(s) to reset or consume its resources such that it can no longer provide its intended service.
• Obstruct the communication media between the intended users and the victim so that they can no longer communicate adequately.

….

A “denial-of-service” attack is characterized by an explicit attempt by attackers to prevent legitimate users of a service from using that service. Examples include:

• flooding a network, thereby preventing legitimate network traffic;
• disrupting a server by sending more requests than it can possibly handle, thereby preventing access to a service;
• preventing a particular individual from accessing a service;
• disrupting service to a specific system or person.

Sound familiar, Colin? I’m not a legal expert (though I did stay at a Holiday Inn last night), but it’s looking like our friends at TBL might have a legitimate legal beef here. At the very least, an actionable lawsuit.

Here’s hoping Cowherd learns his lesson - if not in court, then at least in the court of “hey that was really dick” public opinion. I’m not holding my breath.

Oh, and one more thing. To all you lemmings in “The Herd,” those of you that got some slight feeling of satisfaction in your drab, depressing, cubicle-contained life: wow. Hope you enjoyed yourselves. Because you’re every bit as dumb as your listening preferences suggest.