More fun and games in the Conservative "e-campaign". Yesterday it was Pooping Puffins.

Harper had to apologize; backroom staffers tried to blame it on a single web designer and had the gall to suggest that a mouse pointer covered up the offending imagery when the piece was being approved. Do something wrong and then lie about it - now that inspires confidence!

The pooping puffin animation was pulled rapidly but the Dion image remained and the site otherwise remained up yesterday.

Today a subsection on the anti-Dion site, http://notaleader.ca/dionbook/ shows the following:

This is not likely. As noted on Warren Kinsella's blog, if bandwidth was an issue, the entire notaleader.ca web site would be inaccessible.

Digging deeper the site appears to be hosted by Netfirms on a server farm in the United States. The bandwidth is supplied by Cogent, which are known in the industry for cheap high volume bandwidth.

Netfirms hosting plan rate sheet shows a simple business account costing $16.95 having 3,000 GB of transfer. That's three terabytes of data transfer. To put that in context, three terabytes would be equivalent to the contents of almost a million books. The Dion parody is contained in a Macromedia Flash file main.swf which is essentially 1 megabyte in size. Three terrabytes of data transfer would allow for 27,940,817 million downloads of the main.swf file (1,073,698 bytes). Basically one for every person in the country.

Of course they never expect all their customers to use three terabytes of data transfer, monthly, as the industry commonly oversells bandwidth and deals with pesky high volume sites with restrictive terms of use (TOU).

Its marginally possible this particular Conservative site was in breach of a TOU restriction and that is why its currently down. No doubt they got a lot of traffic yesterday from the curious wanting to see their bad taste. However that doesn't excuse them for being down; given their bankroll they could make things right with the hosting provider with a mere phone call.

More likely it was down because the powers that be wanted to have a meeting about the site, thanks to yesterday's gaffe.

Incidentally the Dion image has reacquired the Puffin, sans poop.

Update: I wonder why the CPC media geniuses decided to include this rifle-toting image (links to a video of Michael Ignatieff) on their site:

What with all the gushing over gun-toting Sara Palin in the United States, you'd think they wouldn't want to suggest Iggy and the Liberals are really macho men in disguise.