Flickr redirect?

[JimBee]

Hey everyone,

I've been having problems opening my Flickr recently, a very strange problem, actually, and I was wondering if anyone has experienced the same thing.

Occasionally, I click on my bookmarked icon of Flickr (I have my photostream favorited, and that's where I host all of my Lego-related pictures), and strangely enough it will redirect me to Lego.com, to a page that says "Sorry, this page cannot be found." As far as I know, Lego and Flickr don't have any association with each other, so the only link is the obvious one, and that's me uploading pictures of Lego. How my web browser knows to do this, I don't know, but it creeps me out.

Furthermore, I check isup.me (an external site that checks if a website is down or if it's just your connection), but when I type in Flickr.com it says that it is up. When I click on the link, it takes me the Lego.com homepage (not the "Page cannot be found" one from before). Additionally, I refresh my connection, close and reopen the browser (Chrome), and restart my computer. The problem persists when I change to Firefox, but I have not checked if the same thing happens on another computer (mainly because I don't have access to one). None of the ones that I did try, however, do not change anything. I also try other direct links to Flickr, including Google searches and other people's photostreams (from here and TBB).

The problem goes away in a few hours, but maybe once every month this happens. The Flickr staff don't seem to know anything about it / can't help, so I am wondering if any of my fellow FOLs have had a similar problem. Or better yet, if anyone can think of why this would happen in the first place.

I have a 2004 Dell computer running Windows XP and using Google Chrome.

[Darkdragon]

I have a 2004 Dell computer running Windows XP and using Google Chrome.

Well there's your problem. That combination is said to bring about the end of the world. Get a Mac.

No seriously though, I've been in the IT industry a long time and I've never heard of something like this. Are you positive it's not someone messing with you by running some sort of script to change that link? Do you have an plugins running on Chrome that could possibly be the culprit? Have you tried turning off all plugins and then reboot, clear cache, etc and try again?

What a strange issue.

[JimBee]

Never!

I'm pretty sure there's no one messing with me, no one is ever around my computer. The only plug-ins I have are flash players and security systems, and I don't even have an account on Lego.com... I rarely visit the site, actually. But I have rebooted, cleared the cache, etc. and the problem is still there. Like I said, though, it only lasts a few hours before returning to normal by itself.

[Emperor Krulos]

I tricked a colleague of mine by installing a greasemonkey script I wrote into chrome. Everytime he tried opening a local page he would be redirected to google.

• Do you experience the same problems with other browsers?
  
• Did you check the address in the bookmark?
  
• Does the same thing happen if you enter the address manually?
  

[Rick]

How my web browser knows to do this, I don't know, but it creeps me out.

Furthermore, I check isup.me (an external site that checks if a website is down or if it's just your connection), but when I type in Flickr.com it says that it is up. When I click on the link, it takes me the Lego.com homepage (not the "Page cannot be found" one from before).

This suggests to me that it was trying to load lego.com/link-to-your-photostream earlier (instead of flickr.com/link-to-your-photostream, which you have bookmarked), as it is now loading the lego.com homepage (instead of flickr). And this would mean that flickr.com is somehow mapped to lego.com.

The problem goes away in a few hours, but maybe once every month this happens.

This is the weirdest bit.

I thought about a possible entry in your hosts file, but that wouldn't explain the temporary nature of the problem. I also considered problems with your ISP's DNS servers, but it would be a really odd coincidence that they somehow have mapped flickr.com to lego.com's IP address (and that it happens every month or so).

So... uhm... no idea.

[JimBee]

I tricked a colleague of mine by installing a greasemonkey script I wrote into chrome. Everytime he tried opening a local page he would be redirected to google.

There's only one person I know who knows how to do anything like that, and he hasn't been near my computer in at least a year. I'm almost positive that no one is just screwing with me.

• Do you experience the same problems with other browsers?
  
• Did you check the address in the bookmark?
  
• Does the same thing happen if you enter the address manually?
  

Yes, yes, and yes.

I thought about a possible entry in your hosts file, but that wouldn't explain the temporary nature of the problem.

Wait. I had some problems similar to this when opening Facebook a few months ago, except instead of redirecting me to another website, I just got a "Page not found" error. Other than that the same things happened, where I wouldn't be able to access the website for a few hours (even if I tried everything that I've tried with this), and then the problem would go away. It happened once in a while, like this problem, so eventually I looked it up on Google. It took me a while to find it, but one solution was to type Facebook's web URL, plus some other script, in my hosts file. It worked.

I could try doing that for Flickr, but I don't know how to write it. Any suggestions?

[JimBee]

Good news, I think I solved the problem. This time I got an "Invalid URL" error, so I edited my hosts file with Flickr's IP address and the web URL. Checking the site again, it worked.

And yes, I did go through all the necessary stuff before, like clearing the cache, refreshing, etc. etc.

Thanks Rick for bringing that idea up, and thanks all of you for trying to help.

[Emperor Krulos]

Great to hear that it works now.

Editing the hosts file however is only fixing the symptoms and not the problem. So you experience it in all browsers and even with other sites (facebook)? So it is either your system that is configured incorrectly or your isp.

• Do you have any weird entries in your hosts file?
  
• Are you using an alternative DNS-Server?
  
• Are you using onion layering or something similar?
  
• Is your system infected?
  

[JimBee]

Oh, well that's strange... I don't know, ever since I edited the hosts file with Facebook, I haven't had a problem, and same with Flickr since I changed it a few days ago.

- Nope, no weird entries. Only the explanation and two entries for each Facebook and Flickr (one with a regular www.example.com, and another with https://www.example.com, both with the IPs in front of them)

- I tried to figure out what this means, but as far as I can tell you're asking about what I answered above.

- As far as I know, no. Though again, I have very little idea of what you're talking about, had to look onion routing on Google, so I'm really not sure if I'm giving you the correct answer here.

- No. I have a reliable security system and I haven't had any major problems since I wiped my computer about a year and a half ago.