Bush website: Americans only

[Rspaight]

This is just too funny. They overreact to a security threat, respond in an wildly over-the-top way, piss off the rest of the world in the process, and do it in such a way as to have no real effect on the actual problem.

Sound familiar?

Ryan

Bush website adopts isolationist stance
By John Leyden

Published Wednesday 27th October 2004 10:30 GMT

International access to the official re-election website of Us President George W. Bush (www.georgewbush.com) has been blocked. Surfers from outside the US trying to reach the site receive an "access denied" message.

Netcraft reports that the site, hosted at SmarTech Corporation, began using the Akamai content distribution network to manage traffic on 21 October. The move followed a six hour outage on 19 October, which also the official site of the Republican National Committee. Neither organisation gave reasons for the temporary blackout.

Since Monday morning (25 October) GeorgeWBush.com began rejecting web requests from outside the United States, Netcraft reports. Those outside America can only reach the site through US based proxies (such as proxify.com) but not through European proxies, Reg readers report.

As a security measure this doesn't make an awful lot of sense but the move does mean soldiers and other Americans abroad can't reach the re-election website. A number of reports (such as this by news agency AFP) suggest the site was inaccessible yesterday because of an attack by hackers but this would seem to be a misinterpretation of the site's newly-instigated isolationist policy. GeorgeWBush.com is built on IIS 6, the latest version of Microsoft's web server platform. ®

Technical Update
Although overseas visitors to www.georgewbush.com are blocked https://georgewbush.com or http://65.172.163.222 still work. http://65.172.163.222 resolves as GeorgeWBush.com which illustrates how cack-handed the blocking is.

[Gee Oh Are Tea]

Well, I'm not overseas technically (more likely over the river) (in Canada) but I can access the www.georgewbush.com link.

Of course, why anyone outside of the US would want to visit that site is another issue ..... unless it has details of planned invasions / occupations for the next four years following re-election (one needs to plan for these things, y'know). We do have a few things Dubya might want - flu vaccine, common sense, international friends.

Cliff

[Rspaight]

Yes, I read somewhere that they were still letting Canadians in. Lucky you.

Ryan