[Mr. Rabbit]

I suspect a DNS cache poisoning attack or some such that’s trying to swap the 174.xxx.yyy.28 malware IP for freerepublic.com, since that’s what I got on my AWS VM for “host freerepublic.com”. You may get different (or no) results on different parts of the Internet. It’s now back to the correct IP at my AWS VM, but be careful. DON’T put the 174 address in your hosts file — It’s a malware server from what I saw.

[InfraRed]

I have Comcast/XFinity for a provider, and have been using their DNS servers for years. Five or six weeks ago, I began experiencing issues. At that time, my browsers were randomly getting "404 host not found" messages. If I were to reload the page or click the same link again, the page would load properly. The problem became tiresome, so I switched to using Level3 DNS servers and the problem went away.

Today, I began experiencing issues again, but this time I was not getting error messages. Instead, I was taken to a Level3 search engine. If I attempted to click http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/articles:latest/ I was instead taken to http://searchguide.level3.com/search/?q=http%3A//www.freerepublic.com/tag/*/index%3Ftab%3Darticles&r=&t=0

I searched the net for a cause, and found a page describing malware which can cause this: http://www.malwarekillers.com/how-to-remove-searchguide-level3-com-browser-hijacker/

Not believing I was infected with malware, my first reaction was to switch my DNS configs back to XFinity/Comcast from Level3. Using the XFinity DNS servers in place of Level3 seemed to solve the problem.

[InfraRed]

Oh, one more thing... I already had freerepublic.com defined in my host file with 209.157.64.200 for an address. There is definitely something very strange going on.

[itsahoot]

I have been using a couple DNS server libs propose from some of the Mac websites 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 those seemed to be blocking Freerepublic for me. I had to actually remove them to log into FreeRepublic.