flood

adj : incoming; "flood tide"; "high tide" [syn: {flood(a)}, {high}]

[ant: {ebb(a)}]

n 1: the rising of a body of water and its overflowing onto

normally dry land [syn: {inundation}, {deluge}]

2: an overwhelming number or amount; "a flood of requests"; "a

torrent of abuse" [syn: {deluge}, {torrent}]

3: a source of artificial illumination having a broad beam;

used in photography [syn: {floodlight}, {flood lamp}, {photoflood}]

4: a large flow [syn: {overflow}, {outpouring}]

5: the act of flooding; filling to overflowing

6: the inward flow of the tide; "a tide in the affairs of men

which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune"

-Shakespeare

v 1: fill quickly beyond capacity; as with a liquid; "the

basement was inundated after the storm"; "The images

flooded his mind" [syn: {deluge}, {inundate}, {swamp}]

2: cover with liquid, usually water; "The swollen river flooded

the village"; "The broken vein had flooded blood in her

eyes"

3: fill beyond capacity; "The water flooded the fields" [syn: {deluge},

{inundate}]

4: supply with an excess of; "flood the market with tennis

shoes" [syn: {oversupply}]

5: become filled to overflowing; "Our basement flooded during

the heavy rains"

flood

On a real-time network (whether at the level of

{TCP/IP}, or at the level of, say, {IRC}), to send a huge

amount of data to another user (or a group of users, in a

channel) in an attempt to annoy him, lock his terminal, or to

overflow his network buffer and thus lose his network

connection.

The basic principles of flooding are that you should have

better network {bandwidth} than the person you're trying to

flood, and that what you do to flood them (e.g., generate ping

requests) should be ▫less▫ resource-expensive for your machine

to produce than for the victim's machine to deal with. There

is also the corrolary that you should avoid being caught.

Failure to follow these principles regularly produces

hilarious results, e.g., an IRC user flooding himself off the

network while his intended victim is unharmed, the attacker's

flood attempt being detected, and him being banned from the

network in semi-perpetuity.

See also {pingflood}, {clonebot} and {botwar}.

[{Jargon File}]

(1997-04-07)