Oct 27

Foreigners Blocked From Bush Campaign Site

According to a Register article, President George W. Bush’s campaign website is blocking access from Internet users outside the US (but apparently Canadians can still reach it.)

The Register theorizes that it could be “fears about future attacks by hackers, concerns about keeping bandwidth costs to a minimum or an aggressive response to pinko UK broadsheet The Guardian’s recent shameful pro-Kerry political lobbying efforts in Ohio” that have prompted the blockade.

Whatever the reason, I just think it’s odd… Odd that someone who can’t vote in this election would have much interest in what is on Bush’s promotional site, and even more odd that the Bush team would take steps like this to keep them from seeing it.

Hmmm.

by Dave   October 27, 2004 9:25 PM   |

Comments

by Joe,   October 28, 2004 9:25 AM  

Netcraft originally broke this (being the sort of folks who monitor such things). Their theory, and I think it's a good one, is that the web site was receiving distributed DoS attacks that largely originated outside the US. Since the rest of the world can't vote on the election anyway, they probably didn't figure it to be a huge loss.

Even more interesting is the use of the site's robots.txt file. The site's maintainers have taken great pains to remove files that could potentially contradict the campaign's talking points, but people would still use the Wayback machine or the Internet Archive to find them. Now they add those files to robots.txt to prevent them from being archived.

by Baloo,   October 30, 2004 12:25 PM  

"Since the rest of the world can't vote on the election anyway"... How many american citizens are there outside the US (I'm one)? Why can't I access this site???

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