With a tip of my hat to The Times’s Sam Coates, may I present exhibit A), this latest posting by that tedious caricature of right-wing Toryness, Donal Blaney, chief executive of the Young Britons’ Foundation:
Guido links to Derek Draper’s appearance on Channel 4 News last night, debating with Tim Montgomerie, on the launch of LabourList. When Channel 4 tried to link to LabourList, the site crashed. For once Chris Paul’s paranoia was correct. What Guido didn’t reveal is that that was down to a coordinated effort of Conservative Future activists!
Oh! the hilarity.
Complete the following sentence: while Conservative Future is an oxymoron, Donal Blaney is just a …
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Did it occur to anyone else that the **** who dressed up as Madeline McCann for a ‘bad taste party’ had gone to an unnecessary effort?
Surely if you’re a young Tory. bad taste is a given and so no need to dress up.
Sorry, is Donal “I’m a lawyer you know” Blaney claiming that the Labourlist site was brought down by coordinated excess use by Tory activists?
Blaney’s claiming that Tories deliberately brought down a website by excessive use?
He’s claiming that they effectively ran a DDOS attack?
Isn’t that, um, illegal? Criminal offense I seem to recall, but not my field.
Isn’t there a law somewhere against that kind of thing?
There is – and it’s only very recently come into force in England.
http://www.out-law.com/page-9592
The question would be if this was unauthorised access. Visting a website might seem authorised but the Court of Appeal seems to have held (with regard to email but I think the principle holds for websites) that consent was implied and not without limits.
I’ve only had a quick look at things – I wouldn’t advise doing it on the basis of what I’ve read.
Will probably all depend on precisely what they did and what and why they were encouraging people to do.
I’m assuming that this was a case of individuals visiting frequently to cause it to crash. Assuming LabourList was reasonably robustly set up wouldn’t you need a lot of people to do that – ie could you do it without using bots or something similar? That would IMO be a whole other board game.
In any case – haven’t people got better things to do with their time?
For strict accuracy it was the Appeal Court but the High Court
Why is it that the Tory blogosphere seems obsessed by elections and political gossip but never actual policies to help the poorest in our society? This isn’t what politics should be about?
Maybe because Tories have little interest in helping the very poorest in society (if they have even conceded that there is such a thing as society)
A bunch of young Tories engaged in some mischevious silliness which harmed nobody?
The horror! The horror!
Really, come on, surely there are more important things than this rattling your cage?
I asked Donal if he would co-operate with any police or party inquiries into this matter. His reply was:
“I will cooperate with a policy enquiry when Lord Mandelson does likewise in respect of the allegations of mortgage fraud and breaches of City rules that he has to answer :)”
I’ve tried to post on his blog pressing him about whether he would coooperate with a party inquiry – a point he hadn’t answered – but such comments don’t seem to make it through moderation (it’s been nearly 24 hours).
Ironic that he has a go a LabourList for censoring comments….