Bush Campaign Web Site Rejects Non-US Visitors
by Volker Weber
The official campaign web site for U.S. President George W. Bush appears to be rejecting web requests from outside the United States, limiting access to the site to Americans.
Comments
Yup. I see that from here. Was reading this piece over at J-Walk when I encountered it:
http://j-walkblog.com/blog/index/P17265/
Clicking the link to the georgewbush.com site yields this:
Access Denied
You don't have permission to access "http://www.georgewbush.com/" on this server.
The georgewbush.org link works though.
I wonder what Dubya's got to hide.
Actually, it's just another proof of how stupid politicians and their advisors can be when it comes to the internet. First of all, they're not only blocking access for "unwanted visitors" but also for american citicens who happen to be abroad. Second, by using a somewhat decent proxy server located in the US, it won't be a problem to access the site. Just tell the proxy to remove any "Forwarded-For" headers ...
Interesting. Looking at the whole article though, it seems like a reasonable response to me.
If they're getting DDoS'd (which is what the Netcraft article suggests), switching to Akamai is a reasonable response. And if the DDoS is coming from overseas, and the primary audience is American anyway, I also think it's reasonable (and easier) to just block up for non-US addresses if it decreases the chances of the site being taken down. It's down to the last week in a major campaign, and I'm sure that any downtime between now and 2 Nov is considered unacceptable.
They do that all the time where I work on a smaller scale...we get activity from someplace, they block the c-class subnet.
It seems silly to suggest that the site was restricted to US addresses is because there's something on it that BC04 wants to hide. The whole site's pure marketing material for the BC04 campaign. Anyone looking for information to convict the Bush administration isn't going to find it on georgewbush.com. There are plenty of other sources for that.
Quod erat demonstrandum ;-)
http://webwarper.net/ww/~GZ/www.georgewbush.com/?*
Well if it is an anti DDoS precaution it is not well thought out. Plenty of zombies over there in the good ol' US of A that could be used by anyone (whether inside the US or not) wanting to take it down.
It would be far better to implement good anti-DDoS precautions at the network boundary and not worry about those darned communists reading what is in all probability a rather dull site anyway.
@Chris: Would it be the first time that Dubya (or his team) pulls up a counteraction against something which doesn't help the goal but rather has a whole lot of "collateral damage"? I think not...
No argument from me there, Chris, that it isn't an ideal solutiuon from a technical point of view. I just think it's not an unreasonable course of action to take.
It's only been a bit over 48 hours too. It might just be a stopgap too. Maybe it'll come back before 2 Nov. Maybe not. BC04 and Akamai aren't talking (not that they have any reason to) so all that's left is speculation.
I'm definately going to keep an eye on it though, even if we'll never know what's really happening with it.
This link:
http://www.anonymization.net/1/1/000001A/http://www.georgewbush.com
enables you to visit this guys website anyway. unfortunatly this link is quite slow at present due to heavy incoming traffic from all continents ... ;)
well, in six days all this will be history and out of date.
"collateral damage"? sigh. Why do I even bother?
These links are working too...
https://georgewbush.com/
http://65.172.163.222/
Well as of this morning, they appear to be also blocking webwarper!
Wow, blocking even from Saudi Arabia? How will he raise money?
Because I'm the uptight guy, Netcraft has updated...
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2004/10/28/campaign_cites_security_reasons_for_blocking_access_to_bush_site.html
The site is blocking overseas web users for "security reasons".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3961557.stm
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