There's a seemingly automated attack on the slashdot moderation sytem. The attack technique is quite simple: flood the comments with pointless crap. Each of the attack posts is titled Mod Parent (Up|Down|Sideways), a reference to slashdots moderation system, and each post is accompanied by the single word Crapflood, linked to the non-existant URL slashdotbot.com. (You can see the signature of the attack in today's Dot Com Era Fads story.) The attack is interesting because although the form of the attack is a Denial of Service (DOS), it is aimed at slashdot's social infrastructure, not their technological one. slashdot is an example of political systems arising out of social dynamic. The "How did the moderation system develop?" section of the Slashdot FAQ reads like Federalist Papers #10 with the role of james Madison played by a Jolt-addicted perl programmer. The effect of the attack is relatively simple: if moderators mod the crapflood down, they will use up their mod points (each moderator can affect no more than five comments.) If the moderator points are used up in moderating the crap down, they can never flag the good stuff. And if they can't flag the good stuff, the slashdot comments system dies, because it is an unreadable mess without the moderation system to help. The answer, of course, is not to moderate the Crapflood down, but that requires moderators to override their natural instincts, and to leave obvious grafitti intact, whcih will create other signal to noise problems down the line. Will be interesting to see how persistent the attackers are, and how the infected body politic responds.