Dubya shuts out the world

[giantlaser]

BoingBoing recently reported that www.georgewbush.com is now blocking visitors outside the United States.  This post is an edited version of a letter I wrote to the author of that article

Comments

[mckenzee]

I assume that since you got this from Boingboing, you saw that https://georgewbush.com/ is accessible.

They not only blocked access, they did a half-assed job at it.

[antinomic]

No way to use a redirector site in the US?

[sheilagh]

The BoingBoing article indicates a few clever ways to get around it, most of which will not be known to the average net surfer.

[stickyboy]

How about an anonymizing proxy? There are a ton of them ... Oh, and I would hesitate to assume that Bush's campaign webmasters have his tacit approval for every access control decision they make. Shutting out foreign-based traffic is actually a very common-sense security measure when you're expecting defacement and DDoS attacks.

[grumpy_sysadmin]

Regardless of what gwb.com does or doesn't do, many ISPs (or, say, my current employer) that block on that side block anonymizers right off the bat. (Other genius moves: block anything with a ~ in it as "personal". Which is kind of a pain if you're researching a Unix systems problem via Google.)

Small World?

[anonymous]

Stumbled upon your blog a while back through MetaFilter if I remember correctly. According to most news sources it was a decision of "Bush Camp" policy unrelated to malicious attacks. I happen to run some servers in the same building as the Bush site servers and know that they certainly have been attacked recently (DDoS). I can't think of any other reason they'd start blocking the world.

[pinkfu]

I see this story all over the place and I was trying to think of the motivation of doing it (it doesn't look good so why do it) and the on thing I can come up with is that Bush's itinerary for the next week is on the site and they think it will improve security?

Whatever the reason, it was a bad PR move and they had to know it would be.