Foreigners blocked from georgewbush.com

[bloodyjack]

LONDON -- President Bush's official campaign website has blocked access to foreign surfers since Monday, an internet monitoring company said Wednesday.

Netcraft, based in Bath in western England, said the site "appears to be rejecting visitors from most points outside the United States, while allowing access from U.S. locations."

Netcraft did not report any reason for the blockage. "We can't say precisely, except that it seems to be a decision by the maintainers of the website," said Rich Miller, an analyst at Netcraft.

Miller said the company detected a six-hour blackout last week which affected the Bush website and the site of the Republican National Committee. The latter site was accessible Wednesday from Britain.

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,65508,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_5

[gmoney]

1. preventing Denial of Service attacks

...word is you can order a "denial of service" attack to shut down virtually any website for as long as you want -- just send money to some offshore, outsourced tech guys who will flood the server with requests, effectively shutting down the website. (Similar to what happens when a small site is mentioned on TV or something -- or what Rush ordered his minions to do to Votergasm.org a week or so back.)

Perhaps this indicates they're planning an assault on johnkerry.com, etc. as the election draws near?

Another thing it might be is just cheapness... don't want to pay for bandwidth to be used serving pages to people outside the US who won't vote. Except for those expats and soldiers sending absentee ballots... but who counts them?

For what it's worth, I think the Showtime cable channel website has the same policy because they don't see the point in serving content to countries that can't buy their service.

What's more alarming is the "disappearing" of content from the whitehouse.gov site, a PUBLICLY owned site that is supposed to keep a record of * press conferences, etc. Apparently, some of the more embarrassing ones have vanished in recent weeks.

[charlie]

2. It's pretty much always been that way

from where I am in Japan. I could connect to the server, but it would time out before coughing anything up. So, nothing's changed for me except that I immediately get an Access Denied page, instead of getting shunted to the bottom of the queue.

[TahitiNut]

3. Including Americans abroad? Smart. Uh-huh. Smart.

:eyes:

Meanwhile, "foreigners" in the US have no problem? Smart. :dunce:

Anyone wanting to access it can do so using an anonymous proxy server.

As far as DOS/DDOS is concerned, any hacker worth the name can slice through that crapola without breaking a sweat.

[Jean Louise Finch]

4. just tried it

sitting in my office in Bangkok, and indeed, I got the HTTP 403 (Forbidden) message

Weird.

Not that there's anything on there that I would particularly like to see, but it's pretty weird that I'm banned from it.