Topic awaiting preservation: Bush website blocked outside US

The BBC reports that Bush website is blocked outside US

I don't know the price rates of Akamai for the amount of traffic generated by his website for an ~2 weeks period, but I'm sure it costs less than the broadcast of few TV ads. So I don't understand why it's blocked. There's some Americans overseas and even non Americans are interrested in hearing/reading some infos directly from GWB ( read without the eventual bias of local medias ).



(Edited by poi on 10-28-2004 18:20)

http://www.georgewbush.com/

I can get there and I'm in Canada though the article does state some Canadians can get through. I suppose the reasoning suggested by the Netcraft guy does make sense - they want to keep the site accessible and clear for US visitors in the days leading to the election. Or perhaps too many people were making fun of their TV ads.

You're not missing much, poi

Amerasu |

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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.

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Without further information it would seem this is the most probable reason.

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i seriously doubt that as the most probably reason, bugs.

the benefits of increasing the international profile would outweigh the costs, surely. And since when would things like that be a concern? Government hosted sites usually have a pretty much unlimited supply of bandwidth, from my experience. And it's not like any other part of any politician's campaigns are structured around cost cutting.

I sense either a political or security reason. I could understand the security reason - stop international hackers from putting their mark on such a sensitive site - but the political reason i'm not so sure on.

The shallow excuse is that it's for the US election, and as such is not the concern of anyone outside North America; but we all know that the ramifications of who gets in are definitely wider reaching than that.
It's also a bit of a slap in the face for the nature of the 'world wide' web if you ask me. But you didn't.

I just hope that no one decides that this is a trend worth following, otherwise we could see the borders that the web destroyed in the online world slowly taking shape.

reitsma

(Edited by reitsma on 10-29-2004 01:52)

Hmmm what could be behind the Access Denied page... you don't think there are any plots for world domination do you!!!

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reitsma said:

The shallow excuse is that it's for the US election, and as such is not the concern of anyone outside North America;

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Has someone actually given that as an excuse? I'm just as curious as to why this happened as you are. If this is a political move, I'm at a loss for how it would help Bush.

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As reported at The Register, you can still access the site by IP, http://65.172.163.222/ See the Technical Update at the end of Bush website adopts isolationist stance

Perhaps more intersting, however, is the 1975-line robots excusion list on the White House web site. See: White House site has oddities, like Bush site--Bender points to possible whitewash at The Inquirer.

One wouldn't want Google's cache to interfere with revisionist history.

Doh! the WhiteHouse robots.txt is impressive. It's rather disturbing to see that they systematically disallow access to folders related to /iraq. What on earth would legitimately motivate anybody to do that ?

Btw I didn't managed to access GWB's website via the IP.

poi: Try this link instead
http://proxy.guardster.com/cgi-bin/nph-proxy.cgi/010100A/687474702f7777772e67656f72676577627573682e636f6d2f

Wierdest damned thing I've ever seen. Just demonstrates to me how off his rocker Mr. Bush is.