[Tfug] maybe OT: web site oddity

[Matthew Patenaude]

On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 1:49 PM, Angus Scott-Fleming <angussf at geoapps.com>wrote:

> On 28 Jan 2010 at 12:56, Matthew Patenaude  wrote:
>
> > Guys!
> >
> > I have a strange situation with a sight I like to keep tabs on, namely,
> > distrowatch.com.
> >
> > I have lately been running Chrome in Ubuntu, and it is quite fast.
> > However, when I try to go my bookmark for the main home page for
> > distrowatch, what I get instead is the following:
> > http://114search.118114.cn/search_web.html?id=592&kw=distrowatch.com&nid
> > =WS0rahFg%2B2ZNP/xL6p4lyg%3D%3D&st=web&param1=web&param2=
> > [It does the same no matter how I try to get to http://distrowatch.com]
>
> >From Tucson this is what I see:
>
>    DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD.
>     http://distrowatch.com/
>
> > I live and work right now in China, Shanghai, and so it is no surprise
> > that something like this would pop up from time to time. It really is
> > just a search engine page, that includes a lot of links in it, the first
> > of which is distrowatch.com itself, however, if I click on that link, it
> > merely refreshes that aggravating page. 114search is sort of like a
> > phone operator for asking information.
>
> What happens when you go to DistroWatch.com through TOR or an anonymizing
> proxy?
>
> --
> Angus Scott-Fleming
> GeoApps, Tucson, Arizona
> 1-520-290-5038
> +-----------------------------------+
>
>
>
TOR is agonizingly slow, and unsuitable for most things due to that fact.
However, that's not the point. If I enter "http://distrowatch.com" into my
address bar, in Firefox, I get there quite successfully. But if I do the
exact same thing in Chrome, I get an entirely different result.

Therefore, Distrowatch.com is not blocked here in China. That is not the
problem. No reason to use TOR or a vpn service or any other such thing.

Anything further down the directory of distrowatch also opens fine in BOTH
Firefox and Chrome. For example,
http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20100125 , or
http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major  , or
http://distrowatch.com/search.php ... and so on.

Chrome opens *anything but* plain old http://distrowatch.com/ whereas
Firefox will open that no problem.

No settings are different: no proxy settings, no privacy settings, and so
on. I tried changing settings to avail.

Any idea where to look, because I have gotten into this horrible habit of
using Chrome, and I'd rather open Distrowatch.com in a separate tab, rather
than open Firefox just for that one site.

One more thing: when I first started using Chrome, the site opened just
fine. This behavior only started last week.

Thanks,
Matthew
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