| Bush’s website
blocked outside US
By Sun News
Friday, October 29, 2004
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 outside the US trying
to browse the site get a message saying they are not authorised
to view it.
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.
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. Some web users in Canada also report
that they can browse the site. Readers of the Boingboing weblog
also found that viewers could get at the site by using alternative
forms of the George W Bush domain name. 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
might have been 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, saying it could
not talk about customer websites.
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