[fluhd] 
| 1. | a great flowing or overflowing of water, esp. over land not usually submerged. |
| 2. | any great outpouring or stream: a flood of tears. |
| 3. | the Flood, the universal deluge recorded as having occurred in the days of Noah. Gen. 7. |
| 4. | the rise or flowing in of the tide (opposed to ebb ). |
| 5. | a floodlight. |
| 6. | Archaic. a large body of water. |
| 7. | to overflow in or cover with a flood; fill to overflowing: Don't flood the bathtub. |
| 8. | to cover or fill, as if with a flood: The road was flooded with cars. |
| 9. | to overwhelm with an abundance of something: to be flooded with mail. |
| 10. | Automotive. to supply too much fuel to (the carburetor), so that the engine fails to start. |
| 11. | to floodlight. |
| 12. | to flow or pour in or as if in a flood. |
| 13. | to rise in a flood; overflow. |
| 14. | Pathology.
|
| flood (flŭd) n.
v. tr.
[Middle English flod, from Old English flōd; see pleu- in Indo-European roots.] |
flood chat
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.
[The Jargon File]
(1997-04-07)
Flood
an event recorded in Gen. 7 and 8. (See DELUGE.) In Josh. 24:2, 3, 14, 15, the word "flood" (R.V., "river") means the river Euphrates. In Ps. 66:6, this word refers to the river Jordan.