floor

n 1: the inside lower horizontal surface (as of a room or

hallway); "they needed rugs to cover the bare floors"

[syn: {flooring}]

2: a room or set of rooms comprising a single level of a

multi-level building; "what level is the office on?" [syn:

{level}, {storey}, {story}]

3: a lower limit: "the government established a wage floor"

[syn: {base}]

4: the ground on which people and animals move about; "the fire

spared the forest floor"

5: the bottom surface of any a cave or lake etc.

6: the occupants of a floor; "the whole floor complained about

the lack of heat"

7: the parliamentary right to address an assembly; "the

chairman granted him the floor"

8: the legislative hall where members debate and vote and

conduct other business; "there was a motion from the

floor"

9: a large room in a stock exchange where the trading is done;

"he is a floor trader"

v 1: surprise greatly; knock someone's socks off [syn: {shock}, {stun},

{ball over}, {blow out of the water}, {take aback}]

2: knock down with force; "He decked his opponent" [syn: {deck},

{coldcock}, {dump}, {knock down}]

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)