Net surfers outside the US interested in US President George Bush's re-election strategy aren't currently able to learn about it from his campaign website. Visitors from a number of international locations, including New Zealand, reported hitting "access denied" errors as they tried to reach the site this week.
Web surfers in the UK, France, Norway, Austria and Taipei encountered a "403 Forbidden" access-denied error page when they tried to contact Bush's website, GeorgeWBush.com. Surfers in the US reported no problems.
New Zealand Computerworld staff who tried to access the site were also denied access.
GeorgeWBush.com is the official website of Bush–Cheney '04, Bush's re-election organisation. The site features campaign material such as advertisements along with Bush's position statements and policy plans. The site also includes a link to an outside site processing campaign donations; surfers both outside and inside the US said they were able to reach the donation website.
A Bush–Cheney campaign spokeswoman referred questions to Michael Turk, the organisation's internet campaign director. Turk did not return several calls seeking comment.
UK analysis firm Netcraft says the Bush site appears to be using network management technology from Akamai Technologies to restrict access. Netcraft monitors website response times from several locations, four in the US and three outside. Since Monday morning, requests to GeorgeWBush.com have failed from Netcraft's London, Amsterdam and Sydney stations, the company says.
GeorgeWBush.com began using Akamai to manage site traffic on October 21, following a six-hour site outage early last week, according to Netcraft. An Akamai spokeswoman declined to comment on the operations of GeorgeWBush.com.
Web performance monitoring firm Keynote Systems also confirmed access restrictions on the website. Senior internet analyst Roopak Patel attempted to reach GeorgeWBush.com using several of Keynote Systems' computers around the world. He found that the website is available from the US and Canada, but not from many other locations, including Oslo, Brussels, London, Amsterdam and Lisbon in Europe; Tokyo, Taipei, and Sydney in the Asia–Pacific region; and Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro in the Americas.
Patel said the 403 message is a fairly specific error description. "It is more definitive than the 404 type of error where you can't tell what is going on at the server side," he says. "The server understands the request, but refuses to fulfill it. It is deliberately acknowledging the fact that it is refusing the connection."
Keynote also noticed on Tuesday a drop in the performance of the Bush campaign website when accessing it from the US. Around noon eastern time the site's availability dropped to from its usual 100% level to 92%, meaning eight in 100 connections was unsuccessful, Patel says. Performance had not improved by the end of the workday on the US east coast.
International web surfers had no problems accessing JohnKerry.com, the official campaign website of Bush's challenger.
The US presidential election will be held on November 2.
UPDATE: A reader points out some 'anonimiser' services will let non-US surfers access the Bush website. The reader suggests using Anonymization.net. Other suggestions include using an IP address to access the site rather than the GeorgeWBush.com hostname, or connecting on a secure port, but neither method worked when Computerworld attempted it.