Yes, it’s extremely weak since American living abroad can still vote with an absentee ballot as I’m doing in Canada.
(FedExed my ballot on Monday.)
Both johnkerry.com and votenader.org works fine, as a side note I just tried to access georgewbush.com from another network provider (and a different IP class A network) and still got a 403 Forbidden error.
As for the cost savings, I can’t say how it works with the hosting solution they use, but I do know that it is pretty common in Denmark, to have free national traffic and pay for international traffic.
Still, with the ammount of money, that I have the impression is spend on an American presidential campain, I agree that I wouldn’t think it could be beneficial to save on something like this.
Blocking international access might be an attempt to prevent (or recover from) a denial-of-service attack on the website.
Yeah, I just tried johnkerry.com and votenader.org too, and didn’t have any problems accessing them.
Would some stateside Doper kindly go to georgewbush.com and find their “Please Contact Us” email address, or some email address of a point person for the Bush reelection campaign, and post it here or email it to me? I want to write them a (very polite) letter asking them why they have apparently chosen to block their site from overseas viewers, including American voters overseas. I’ll let you know if I get any answer.
RA: Blocking international access might be an attempt to prevent (or recover from) a denial-of-service attack on the website.
That’s what I’d been thinking of as a possible explanation, but if so, why not say so? And I have to say: even though the Republicans appear to be at least as willing as the Democrats to use dirty tricks in this election, Kerry and Nader have both got balls enough to keep their websites accessible (although their campaigns have a lot less money than Bush’s and presumably would be even more vulnerable to sabotage attempts).
www.georgewbush.com is accessible from Vancouver. Do we share a NAP with Seattle or some such technical thing, or are they just counting on there being lots of American citizens this close to the border?
GO 'NOLES!!!
Damn, I am SO glad I got out of that state…
Could be, but if they where suffering from or anticipating denial-of-service attacks, I’d expect them to block the requests upstream on a lower level than the application.
The way it’s done now the webserver still needs to serve the request and the data will still pass through their link.
Thanks TYM! Here’s what I just sent them:
I cc’d it to info@johnkerry.com and a couple other places too. Let’s see if they have anything to say for themselves in reply.
The Washington Post has an article that says:
I see their web security plan is simply their national security plan writ small.
Lump everyone together and treat them all as criminals.
Sabotaging websites is certainly despicable, but I stand by my earlier comment: everybody else is running the risk of website sabotage too, and the President’s campaign oughta have either the brains to minimize the risk or the balls to accept it, or both.
Especially since they raised more money than the other three campaigns combined, I don’t think “cost saving” to guard against sabotage is enough of a justification for cutting off access to everyone outside North America. (It’s not as though there aren’t saboteurs in North America too, anyway.)
I can get it in Toronto too. I was wondering about Mexico. Or overseas army bases. Do U.S. military bases have foreign IP addresses?
Zoff - Ah, interesting. That explains why, but is still kinda dumb. A proficient hacker who has Dem leanings could still do some malicious stuff domestically. That doesn’t seem like a good way of dealing with the IT security issue.
But anyway, back to Florida from the hijack (my apologies to the OP).
Floridians who are far enough away may end up screwed if the problem was with the ballots leaving the mailhouse. If the ballots are just arriving within the U.S. then Florida voters who are further away (say you’re in Japan on business or in Australia) may be screwed 'cause they’ll take longer to arrive and go out again.
Here’s the relevant points from the Yahoo! link:
So you’ve got the elections office saying they took the ballots to the post office, and saying that the post office did in fact send them on.
But:
We’ve also got the USPS’ law-enforcement saying it’s unclear that they ever made it to the USPS in the first place.
As for the background, Broward County is the one immediately north of Miami-Dade. In the last election, Broward was easily carried by Gore-Lieberman (67% - 31%); in fact, Democrats carried more or less the whole county.
Adding this all up, and it is a more than a little suspicious that almost 60,000 mailpieces – all of which were absentee ballots – went “missing”, while mail delivery was otherwise unaffected. In fact, it’s so suspicious, I’m willing to go out on a limb and say that someone intentionally disappeared these ballots. The question is – was it at the level of the department of elections, or was it the USPS?