Steve Kass

Mom, in front of a Resort Airlines C-46 Commando, probably on her honeymoon in 1950, but surely before September 28, 1953. The plane in the photo crashed at Louisville airport that day and was subsequently written off.

 
 
 
 
 
 
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Not long after my recent experience of laughing and throwing up, I took preventive measures, or what I thought were preventive measures, to keep it from happening again. I added a couple of F**news [obscenity censored] domains to my firewall’s list of blocked sites.

Not long after I added them, my Internet connection started acting up. Just the browsing part. Lots of broken image links, web pages loading without style sheets, and not a few “not available” or “may have moved permanently” errors, sometimes on major domains like bing and Google. Facebook, several news sites, and Weather Underground were especially troublesome. It was strictly a browser thing, a little worse on Chrome maybe, but at the same time Chrome told me the page was unavailable, I could ping the AWOL site without a problem.

It was mysterious enough that I even tightened my router and modem cables. I finally figured it out, but newsgroups, blogs, and Google search results, which usually help, didn’t have the answer. Maybe this post will help someone out.

The domain I’d newly blocked didn’t have a static IP address. It’s an akamaized domain, it turns out, that resolves to any of a dozen or so numeric IP addresses, and the resolution changes every minute or less. About 10% of the Internet seems to live on those same dozen or so IP addresses, too. (Among the domains there are static.ak.fbcdn.net, i.telegraph.co.uk, and abcnews.com.)

My firewall was blocking what it thought was the right IP address, but when the IP addresses of these akamaized sites flipflopped, the firewall was suddenly blocking the wrong site. Moments later, maybe it was blocking nothing, then the site I’d added, then different wrong sites…

Insert various image and DNS caching mechanisms between me and the Internet, and it’s an erratic mess of a mystery. At least it was for me. No matter how bad it was, though, it usually got better in 10 or 15 minutes. I didn’t go so far as to start using OpenDNS, which was one web-grown remedy I heard about, but I can imagine it might have changed the caching and resolution landscape enough to have made some difference. Enabling or disabling Google’s DNS prefetching, another web remedy, didn’t work for me. Once I unblocked the offensive domains, the Internet was butter again.

If you’re having this problem (the dodgy Internet problem, not the laughing and throwing up problem), first try running a traceroute on one of the problem sites you can’t browse to. If traceroute says it’s tracing a route to something like a20.g.akamai.net, or if successive traceroutes over a few minutes show different IP addresses for the domain, it’s possible something between you and the Internet is blocking one route to some of the akamaized web.

Despite the vicious insinuations, Obama and his supporters aren’t cruel and thoughtless—they aren’t hiding a “throw Granny under the bus” clause in the health care reform bill. Keeping Granny alive is one of the few things Americans agree on for now. Obama unequivocally refutes the insinuation. At the same time, Obama staunchly defends against a loud challenge to his plan to throw nannies under the bus instead.  Nannies, gardeners, food handlers, farm workers, janitors, if they’re undocumented immigrants, throw them all under the bus. No matter how many millions of them there are, no matter how hard they work for how little pay and benefits they get, no matter that they pay taxes, contribute to the local economy, no matter anything. They aren’t Americans. Throw them all under the bus.

The undocumented of America’s hard-working, poorest laborers, harvesting, packing, preparing, and serving our and our children’s food; caretakers responsible to our children and our homes; gardeners keeping our grounds beautiful. Them. Throw them under the bus. Don’t give them access to affordable health care.

America’s undocumented workers and their families deserve health care just like everyone living in this country. Grievously, no one, no one sees the value or the ethical imperative, or the public health benefits, to treat the undocumented workers fairly.

Quoting Representative Mike Pence on Van Jones:

His extremist views and coarse rhetoric have no place in this administration or the public debate.

Mike, whose extremist views and coarse rhetoric do have a place in the public debate? 

Pence is the House sponsor of the “Broadcaster Freedom Act,” which would prohibit the FCC from repromulgating the Fairness Doctrine. Not that the FCC is likely to do so any time soon, nor that they necessarily should, but Pence must really, really want no one to overrule him and his supporters about what should be kept out of the public debate.

Speaking about Pence’s supporters, click here to read Rebel Reports’ Jeremy Scahill on Pence, Blackwater/Xe, and other stuff.

This concludes my contribution to the public debate for today. Thank you for listening.

• [link] Google News results for “Barrack Obama”
• [link] Google News results for “Barak Obama”
• [link] Google News results for “Barrak Obama”
• [link] Google News results for “Brack Obama”
• [link] Google News results for “Barck Obama”