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Do I have spyware on my Mac? Or: www.net.net oddities

Update Sep-07: A couple of new pieces of info:

A commenter said that he had a PC on the same network that worked just fine, so it seems to be a problem at the computer level after all.

I noticed that if I go to http://subjunctive.net.net (or with www in front), I get redirected to http://www.net.net/search.asp?Keywords=subjunctive. So I now think that there's some caching bug introduced in Tiger that sometimes tacks on an extra ".net". Hm.

Whoa. I just noticed that if you type something invalid.net, like http://gobbledygoop.net/, it'll redirect. Useful information! Can anyone else running OS X and reading this try this and see if it works?

* * *

Update Jul-26: I'm pretty sure it's not on my computer, but rather a case of DNS cache poisoning on Comcast's servers. *sigh* Nothing I can do but hope Comcast upgrades their DNS servers. Maybe they could get some from, oh, say, Infoblox? :P

* * *

I'm having this weird problem that comes and goes. Everything always works fine if I go to www.subjunctive.net, but if I try to go to subjunctive.net from home, I get redirected to http://www.net.net/search.asp?Keywords=subjunctive. HUH?! The really weird thing is, I get the correct IP back if I do a DNS lookup with dig or host, but my computer is apparently trying to contact the WRONG address when I actually sent an HTTP request:

kenlu@shell-beach:~% host subjunctive.net
subjunctive.net has address 66.235.220.215
kenlu@shell-beach:~% wget http://subjunctive.net
--07:08:58--  http://subjunctive.net/
           => `index.html'
Resolving subjunctive.net... 70.85.43.36
Connecting to subjunctive.net[70.85.43.36]:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 302 Object moved
Location: http://www.net.net/search.asp?Keywords=subjunctive [following]
--07:08:59--  http://www.net.net/search.asp?Keywords=subjunctive
           => `search.asp?Keywords=subjunctive.1'
Resolving www.net.net... 70.85.43.36
Connecting to www.net.net[70.85.43.36]:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 10,465 [text/html]

100%[================================================>] 10,465        38.15K/s             

07:09:00 (38.04 KB/s) - `search.asp?Keywords=subjunctive.1' saved [10465/10465]

Has anyone else seen similar behavior?

Update: I found I could get it to go away by power cycling my cable modem. Seems to indicate that the problem lies with Comcast. Weirdness.

Comments (5)

Well, I've seen browsers before that short out when given simply foo.net and start trying foo.net.com and so on. As a test, try "wget http://earthlink.net" ... and see if that also resolves to net.net? It might be a bug in your resolver system...

Yeah, I thought of that and tried various other *.nets, but it was only subjunctive.net that had the problem. See also my update to the post. Weirdness.

Also weirdness is how when I tried to post to my blog, it seemed the entries weren't going through, but I found 4 identical entires today from my various retries. Weirdness!

so i've run into the same problem, but mine is even more strange. when i try to go to lists.objectledge.net on my Mac using either Safari or Firefox, it redirects to a net.net search result page every time. but when i try it on my PC, it gets to the right page. what the XXXX is going on? and what's more, i can get to the subjunctive.net site fine on my Mac. arghh!

Interesting! I have no PC to try it on, unfortunately, but that would seem to indicate that it IS a problem on my end after all. Maybe it's a bug in OS X?

Btw, if you send an email to kenlu(at)subjunctive.net, I'll be sure to let you know if/when I figure this out.

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