Download Squad is closing

http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2011/04/12/farewell-internet/#comments

 

Between my numbskull government and corporate buyouts/dumps, I'm losing more and more places to go.

 

Sad news, they have a lot of good content.

 

downloadsquad was a site id visit daily, its sad to see it go

 

Same, here.

 

Looks like some of the staff have started a new browser centric blog here

http://www.browserscene.com/

 

Thank you

 

Woot! *does happy dance* Thanks!

 

When I visit the new site, browserscene.com, my browser wants to connect to inst ant fun das . co m. When I look at the source code of the browserscene.com home page, I can't see any reference to this other site. Can anyone verify and explain why this happens (if it does for you as well)?

 

This is what I'm seeing but not every time:

 

I deliberately went there. It looks like yet another tech blog. I'll block it. End of story.

 

I can block it two ways (and I'm sure there are more). One by Privoxy, the other using the firewall. If I block it using the firewall, the actual browserscene page doesn't load.

"Information
Your request to visit website ww w.i nstantf undas .c om has been blocked. The website has been denied because the Firewall application rules are set to block this application: Privoxy. "

As I said, I don't get this every time. Guess I should e-mail one of the authors @ brow sers cene to satisfy my curiosity.

 

Both of them and more than 1000 others resolve to same IP, your firewall reversed that IP and randomly picked one those sites.

 

Thanks for taking the trouble to respond

But it's a bit confusing for me .

I've started keeping a log in Privoxy and let's see what it throws up.

 

I think that all these sites are "owned" by Google and Google has found a way to increase hits to these sites even if the user has no need to visit the site. I see similar things when connecting to GMail as well.

(I do have link-prefetching turned off:
user_pref("network.prefetch-next", false)

 

Those sites are all blogs hosted by Blogger which is a Google service. Also see this thread: https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=265634

 

I saw the reference to the hosts file. That may be impractical given the vast number of blogger.com variants.

Anyway, it's not a big deal security-wise. I was just interested to know how Google manages to "push" its affiliated or owned sites. Also, it makes one wonder about whether this is just a way to show more hits although they are involuntary.

 

No, Google isn't "pushing" anything, it's your Firewall that is confused, that thread is about the same issue, you can test it yourself, put

in your hosts file, then another entry with the same IP but different site above the browserscene one, then go to www.browserscene.com and see what happens.