An obvious dirty trick, said the Swanson campaign, demanding that the Johnson campaign immediately "block" those sites. The Johnson campaign immediately responded that since they don't own or have any control over those website names, that would be impossible.

Ah, but that would be child's play, countered numerous tech-savvy observers, including the proprietor of this blog, who said, "I don't know why they couldn't contact their ISP, Hosting Matters, and have them block all HTTP requests coming from the loriswanson sites."

But it turns out it's not that simple. When you are on site A and click on a link to site B, you don't zoom through a tunnel from site A to site B... your computer disconnects from site A, and then your computer connects to site B.

If you follow a link, though, there IS one thing in your connection to site B that marks it as being "from" site A... a field in the request called HTTP_REFERER. However, in the case of a server redirect, which is the method being used to redirect the traffic for this little trick, this field does not appear. There is NOTHING in the request to distinguish it from a normal visit to the webserver by someone who legitimately wanted to visit the Johnson website.

I, too, thought it would be the work of a moment to block traffic from the bogus Lori Swanson sites, and confidently coded up a PHP script to do it, thinking to give it to the tech people at the Johnson campaign. Then I went to test it. After an hour of cursing and various experiments, I concluded it was impossible.

What is there in the request that would do the trick? REMOTE_ADDR? No, that's the IP number of the computer coming to the Johnson website, either because they went to the correct website or one of the bogus ones.

If the prankster had simply pointed the DNS name to the Johnson website, you could filter on the HTTP_HOST field in the HTTP request. Alas, they didn't do it that way... they actually bought web hosting, pointed the names there, and put up a page that does a redirect to the target website.

I have to remind myself that "Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice" (my own conflation of Hanlon's Razor and Clarke's Law), but it does seem interesting that someone spent extra money to implement this trick in a way that would be impossible to block.

It's also interesting that the blog referenced above alleges that one of the bogus Lori Swanson sites earlier linked to a DFL website instead of the Johnson campaign, as it does now. No, it doesn't prove anything one way or the other, but it is intriguing.

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