And in related news...

[blufive]

The Bush Campaign seems to have decided that those of us outside the USA are unworthy of access to their official website.

Access Denied

You don't have permission to access "http://www.georgewbush.com/" on this server.

Words fail. I mean, what is the point? The BBC Story mentions saving bandwidth - but the vast majority of hits (and hence bandwidth) are likely to come from the US anyhow, so locking the rest of us out isn't going to help much.

I suppose they could theoretically be trying to pre-emptively block DDOS attacks or hack attempts, but my (admittedly not great) internet security instincts tell me that this ain't a great way to do that, either.

Besides, how will the loyal citizens of Airstrip One be able to fact-check the Liberal Media without this fine upstanding web resource?

[via frandowdsofa]

[edit: more on BoingBoing, which reveals that us dirty foreigners can get in using the cunning ruse of swapping to https and dropping the www. Genius.]

Comments

You made my Firefox crash!!!

[devilgate.livejournal.com]

I tried the BoingBoing hack, and the site was so slow to load (so maybe they are having bandwidth problems) that I stopped it, hit back a couple of times, and Ol' Foxy crashed. Clearly a site not to be seen with certain browsers, too.

Maybe one of the developers will get a laugh from my Quality Feedback Agent report, at least.

Re: You made my Firefox crash!!!

[blufive.livejournal.com]

Are you prepared to drop me the talkback ID? I'll go poking around in Bugzilla and see what I can find out...

Re: You made my Firefox crash!!!

[devilgate.livejournal.com]

Sorry, been away for the weekend, so I didn't get back to you. I'll happily do so, if it's possible to get hold of such a thing after the event: do you know how to? Not that I really think it's your fault, BTW.

Re: You made my Firefox crash!!!

[blufive.livejournal.com]

(The following assumes a windows OS, but they might be good for a giggle elsewhere, too)

In your [mozilla firefox]/components directory, you should find "talkback.exe" Run that, and it should give you a list of all the talkback incidents generated since you installed Firefox.

With the Incident ID, I should be able to dig out the (de-personalised) details of the log. With those, I can have a poke around in bugzilla and see if I can figure out (a) whether they know about the problem, and (b) what they're doing about it. (or (c) you're a weirdo who came up with a crash no-one else has ever seen, but that's really rather rare...)