George Bush’s official campaign website is currently off limits to anyone outside of the US and Canada. Go on, try clicking the link: georgewbush.com – it’s “403 forbidden”. Isn’t that weird? John Kerry‘s site’s still talking to us.
It might be a response to a DoS attack that might be the cause of six hours of downtime on October 19. If the attack (if there was an attack – the Republicans won’t comment the blocking) was from outside of the US, it would make sense, I suppose, for their server to simply refuse to communicate with any computer outside of the US. Though surely avid hackers could get round that anyway by just attacking through a US computer?
It’s an apt metaphor for the way Bush generally handles world opinion though. Say no to the Kyoto global warming treating, though the US is responsible for 36.1% of the world’s greenhouse transmissions. Invade Iraq, though the UN says no. Refuse to sign an global treaty allowing war criminals from any nation to be tried in an international court. See no world, hear no world, speak not with the world. (via Grandtextauto)
[Update: Boing Boing has lots of reader info though no official story on this, and one of Joi Ito’s readers has this example of a polite way of banning the world.
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Blog Vrij van Nut » Kiekeboe
[…] ut
27 oktober 2004
Kiekeboe
Collegablogger Jill meldt vanuit Noorwegen dat de website van George Bush onbereikbaar is van buiten de VS en Canada […]
jill/txt » reality television
[…] . Of course I’ll go. I’ll bring beer, talk politics and bemoan the situation. Our futures depend on this too. Lost innocence, we can no longer pretend otherwise. In Denmark anti-A […]
Jorunn
Well, if you go by way of, say, http://rinkworks.com/dialect/ you still get to the official Bush site, presented in the dialect of your choice 🙂
H?•kon Styri
If georgewbush.com doesn’t make sense (or doesn’t work), you could try http://www.georgewbush.org/ 😉
(The parody site is probably less scary than the real site translated to redneck. However, there are many free proxy servers that may give you access to georgewbush.com without adding some weird translation.)
fivecats
On another note, would you be willing to give a translation to a new Norwegian site for those of us who are Norwegian-impaired?
http://killhim.nu/
tak!
fivecats
The BBC is reporting this story now as well at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3958665.stm
…
Jill
Oh dear. Killhim.nu claims to be collecting donations towards a bounty for whoever assassins Bush. They claim to be against violence but believe he’s doing too much evil. I assume it’s ironic, there’s no way of actually donating since there’s no links or further info.
It’s a really stupid way of making a point, and a awful idea.
The BBC article’s interesting, it suggests they’re simply saving bandwidth with increasing traffic: