http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3958665.stm

Surfers outside the US have been unable to visit the official re-election site of President George W Bush.
The blocking of browsers sited outside the US began in the early hours of Monday morning.

Since then people outside the US trying to browse the site get a message saying they are not authorised to view it.

The blocking does not appear to be due to an attack by vandals or malicious hackers, but as a result of a policy decision by the Bush camp.

The international exclusion zone around georgewbush.com was spotted by net monitoring firm Netcraft which keeps an eye on traffic patterns across many different sites.

Netcraft said that since the early hours of 25 October attempts to view the site through its monitoring stations in London, Amsterdam and Sydney failed.

Traffic was turned off earlier this week
By contrast Netcraft's four monitoring stations in the US managed to view the site with no problems.

Mike Prettejohn, president of Netcraft, speculated that the blocking decision might have been taken to cut costs, and traffic, in the run-up to the election on 2 November.

He said the site may see no reason to distribute content to people who will not be voting next week.

However, simply blocking non-US visitors also means that Americans overseas are barred too.





(Message edited by xenono on October 27, 2004)