[js1138]

It does, however, make a difference how many FReepers request pages in a given period of time. Too many requests can slow things down.

But your question seems to be about the slowness of your connection, and whether your slow connection can make FR slow.

There has been some speculation that the slowness could be due to thousands of bogus requests made by hackers.

[berkeleybeej]

There has been some speculation that the slowness could be due to thousands of bogus requests made by hackers

I'm asking this in general - I tried to get my McAfee Firewall operative today. I'm still trying to get it working properly.

But twice when I managed to get to FreeRepublic, I received a total of 6 port scan alerts and 1 blocked TCP package alert over a short period of time.

Is this type of port scanning normal? I checked the IP's and found that the activity came from centralhost.com and verio.net.

Thanks to anyone who can provide an answer (or links).