The Clipboard: Bush site bars overseas visitors

From an article¹:

Surfers outside the US have been unable to visit the official re-election site of President George W Bush.

The blocking of browsers sited outside the US began in the early hours of Monday morning.

Since then people living outside the US trying to look at the site simply got a message saying "access denied".

The blocking does not appear to be due to an attack by vandals or malicious hackers, but as a result of a policy decision by the Bush camp...

...Mike Prettejohn, president of Netcraft, speculated that the blocking decision was taken to cut costs, and traffic, in the run-up to the election on 2 November.

He said the site may see no reason to distribute content to people who will not be voting next week.

Managing traffic could also be a good way to ensure that the site stays working in the closing days of the election campaign.

However, simply blocking non-US visitors also means that Americans overseas are barred too. (link)

Cute. Screw the overseas voters, eh?

Update 10/28: The Bush camp now says that this was done because of a hack attack. This doesn't explain why all overseas voters are being blocked, however. So I'll leave my comments in place for the moment.

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Complete text of the article, Bush site bars overseas visitors, by the BBC

Surfers outside the US have been unable to visit the official re-election site of President George W Bush.

The blocking of browsers sited outside the US began in the early hours of Monday morning.

Since then people living outside the US trying to look at the site simply got a message saying "access denied".

The blocking does not appear to be due to an attack by vandals or malicious hackers, but as a result of a policy decision by the Bush camp.

Traffic control

The international exclusion zone around georgewbush.com was spotted by net monitoring firm Netcraft which keeps an eye on traffic patterns across many different sites.

Netcraft said that since the early hours of 25 October attempts to view the site through its monitoring stations in London, Amsterdam and Sydney failed.

By contrast Netcraft's four monitoring stations in the US managed to view the site with no problems.

The site can still be seen using anonymous proxy services that are based in the US.

The pattern of traffic to the website suggests that the blocking was not due to an attack by vandals or politically motivated hackers.

Geographic blocking works because the numerical addresses that the net uses to organise itself are handed out on a regional basis.

On 21 October, the George W Bush website began using the services of a company called Akamai to ensure that the pages, videos and other content on its site reaches visitors.

Mike Prettejohn, president of Netcraft, speculated that the blocking decision was taken to cut costs, and traffic, in the run-up to the election on 2 November.

He said the site may see no reason to distribute content to people who will not be voting next week.

Managing traffic could also be a good way to ensure that the site stays working in the closing days of the election campaign.

However, simply blocking non-US visitors also means that Americans overseas are barred too.

Akamai declined to comment on the blocking policy saying it could not talk about customer websites.

reference=http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3958665.stm