out of interest i tried the states main site https://kentucky.gov/Pages/home.aspx
works just fine from Canada?
Doesn’t surprise me that the portal isn’t geofenced because it is likely to be well maintained, monitored, and funded for business reasons.
Stare Archeology websites don’t have the same incentives for IT attention…I mean the one here isn’t even very “Web2.0”.
Particularly because mostly forgotten webpages like this one are an attractive nuisance for black hats, banning foreign IP’s was probably a best-practice argument.
There’s also the possibility that a sudden uptick in activity (HN slashsot effect) triggered an internal mechanism.
And politically, I suspect there wouldn’t be a lot of pushback to any of it.
But I could be wrong.