The Old Dog Barks

Via cmblake6 comes this toothsome bit from Forger!

I love it!

I am being stopped from accessing parts of the Internet. It started about midnight last night. I was getting ready to shut down and I went to visit a site to check for comment replies. A place I had been to an hour before. No joy, what happened was the connection timed out. I tried again with the same result.

The site, Transterestrial.com is on our sidebar at NSF and one I visit at least once a day. Ok you say; the place may be down for maintenance or having some problems of its own. Good thought, but it gets a little more complicated. Three days ago I was attempting to use Transterrestrial and my browser hung, just locked up, in that window only, it did the same the following day. I caught the name b.scorecardresearch.com on the lower window bar showing me where I was hanging at. I did a search on the term and found it was some kind of tracking site seemingly aligned with Google. I also found a report showing the Fire Fox add-on “NoScript” might solve the problem.

Good enough, I downloaded and installed NoScript. For the next day, and until last night things were working fine. Rand Simberg had posted by this time a message saying that a number of people had reported to him via e-mail that they were having the same problem I seem to have fixed. I made a comment to that post mentioning NoScript. A few hours later another person commented to thank me for the info because NoScript had worked for him as well. And not only that, it boosted his speed noticeably. There are many options in NoScript and I was learning how it worked, turning things on and off, and kicking the tires so to speak. Thus when I could not get to Transterrestrial again I thought something I had changed in NoScript might be the problem.

I turned off the add-on and I still timed out. Tried a few other sites and no problem. Then I tried the FutureVerse, my own site, Opps — Time Out! Well time for bed and I will worry about it in the morning; it will probably fix itself while I sleep. I get up this morning to find — No Such Luck!

Could it be a browser issue? I try Explorer and have the same problem with the same sites. I check a few more sites and some I can get into and some I can’t. One of the ones I cannot reach is the mailbox provided by my internet service. The mail I actually use, the one on the sidebar, works just fine. Time to call my provider.

I did that about 10 AM EDT my time. The person I talked to said she had received one other complaint about someone unable to read their mail but no other complaints about being able to go to some sites and not others. She was very friendly and I think helpful, giving me a work order ticket number and saying someone would call back. After I was through talking with her I fired up the Linux machine and found it had the exact same problem. It has now been two hours and the problem persists.

I just ran a virus scan with no reported problems. The solution should be interesting and I will absolutely post about it when I find out what it was. For now I am signing off again in case someone tries to call me. Oh — and I asked again about when high speed service gets to my area, it turns out that that is another great unknown.

Five hours after the post above and my Internet is working again. I reversed the two posts order so the story would make more sense.   No call from support as to what the problem was but I can deal with that. I am going to keep using NoScript and post a report about how it works for me in a week or so.

Before I added NoScript I was using Flashblock, still am as a matter of fact. They seem to block some of the same things but NoScript blocks flash and other scripts as well. So what I will do is turn off Flashblock, which had been a very good addition to Fire Fox, and see what kind of job NoScript does alone.

Note —  10 minutes later: Nope turned Flashblock back on, the two add-on thingies seem to compliment each other. Possible I could change settings in NoScript but life is too short to bother.