Tuesday, November 30, 2004

Xenophobia takes many forms

According to Netcraft, an Internet services company based in Bath, England,
[t]he Republican Party appears to again be blocking Internet users from outside the United States from visiting its official web sites, with www.gop.com, www.rnc.org and www.GeorgeWBush.com all dropping traffic that originates outside North America. The timing and implementation of the blocking ... suggests an ongoing interest in traffic filtering unrelated to the recent election.
In the week prior to the election, the Bush campaign site instituted such blocking, claiming unspecified "security concerns." The restrictions were eventually lifted on November 7, five days after the election. But on November 24, the site switched networks
and began having its domain name server (DNS) requests handled by the RNC's server, and redirecting traffic to the RNC's main site, gop.com. ... Since Nov. 26, the rnc.org, gop.com and GeorgeWBush.com domains all show an identical pattern of failed requests from stations in London, Amsterdam and Sydney, while Netcraft's four U.S. monitoring stations show no performance problems.
Supposedly the campaign site was hit with a Denial of Service attack on October 19, sparking the security concern. I guess for an administration that responded to 9/11 by treating all Arab and Muslim males as suspected terrorists, responding to such an attack by blocking the entire rest of the world from your website seemed entirely reasonable.

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