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Bush website adopts isolationist stance

Non-US-based surfers locked out

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.

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