#7764: Ben — 10/27  at  11:39 PM
Hey, they're right. Well I'll be jiggered. Then again, what am I missing out on?

#7765: DarkSyde — 10/27  at  11:41 PM
It doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense. It ain't tough for those of us here to copy stuff and publish it or e-mail it out

#7769: Ben — 10/28  at  12:53 AM
I'm sure it's something innocuous like a bandwidth-saving technique. You don't need to risk any annoying down-time in the week leading up to the election, and those accessing from the 50 states are the only ones you need to try and impress.

#7773: — 10/28  at  04:24 AM
Not necessarily. There are American expatriates who can vote, but apparently that's one segment of the population that Bush doesn't think he's going to win.

#7774: — 10/28  at  04:31 AM
This has swung my vote. Kerry developed no plan to deal with laser beam-equipped animals even after the first Austin Powers movie!

(I wonder if I could get that picked up in earnest as the latest conservative talking point by pushing it at Free Republic?)

#7775: — 10/28  at  04:33 AM
Oops. Please delete the above message and this one. It was supposed to go in the arthropods thread.

#7776: Abiola Lapite — 10/28  at  05:15 AM

I’m sure it’s something innocuous like a bandwidth-saving technique. You don’t need to risk any annoying down-time in the week leading up to the election, and those accessing from the 50 states are the only ones you need to try and impress.

There are two problems with this explanation of things:

1 - The Kerry campaign hasn't had to resort to any sort measures, despite having raised less funding. That the Bush camp should need to do something so kack-handed doesn't speak well of their budget-management skills, does it?

2 - That can't be the real reason in any case: as Joi Ito notes, the Bush campaign website has been blocking viewers from the Asia-Pacific region (including Japan, Australia and New Zealand) at least since August. There can be no doubt that this has nothing to do with some temporary traffic management.

No, this reeks of dishonesty, of people having something shameful to hide.

#7777: PZ Myers — 10/28  at  06:26 AM
The one thing that gives the "they're trying to save bandwidth" explanation a little credibility is that it doesn't work, which makes it fit in perfectly with the general theme of overall incompetence and insanity on the Bush ticket.

#7786: — 10/28  at  08:54 AM
Michael Froomkin thinks it has something to do with this.

#7787: Abiola Lapite — 10/28  at  09:15 AM
Froomkin is wrong: if it were a DDOS attack being halted, it would have failed, as the servers are still serving up traffic when they return a "403: Forbidden"; that's a regular web-page like any other, not some feature of your browser. In addition, a report on the BBC's website has a Netcraft spokesman saying no unusual traffic was recorded hitting the site over the last week.

Data gathered by Netcraft on the pattern of traffic to the site shows that the blocking is not the result of another denial of service attack.

Finally, this "DDOS attack" excuse doesn't explain why visitors from the Asia-Pacific region (including Guam, a US territory) have been blocked since August.

I'd say that this is one occasion on which it would be wrong to err on the side of generosity.

#7796: — 10/28  at  11:14 AM
It could simply be a pre-emptive strike, so to speak. They're assuming that they might get hit hard, either by DOS on purpose or simply genuine curiosity. Reducing the outside world to a single error page will reduce traffic, increasing the likelihood of the website staying alive in high interest.

#7803: — 10/28  at  02:07 PM
Two clicks and I'm looking at it from Norway. Proxify.com. Not sure what it is I am not supposed to see.

#7823: — 10/28  at  05:16 PM
Now that doesn't make much sense to me...hide your lies from everybody that can't vote for you, but openly expose your lies to everybody that can't vote for you? Someone help me with this one...

#7824: — 10/28  at  05:16 PM
Oops, that was supposed to be exposing your lies to everybody that can vote for you

#7927: Badtux — 10/29  at  10:42 PM
It's simple: This is more of the Bushie paranoia. They know that the Bush Administration is hated world-wide, so they restrict access to the site to IP addresses under the FBI's jurisdiction so that they can use the FBI to arrest anybody who tries to hack their site. Now, they did it completely and utterly lamely -- what they SHOULD have done was a packet filter in the upstream, so even DOS attacks from overseas would end up disappearing into the ether -- but just as Bush won't allow anybody who hasn't taken a loyalty oath see him, Bush is also scared of people who the FBI can't arrest. Of course, given his success in arresting Osama bin Laden, who can blame him for being paranoid about dusky furriners?