Informational question
Is anyone else unable to get to Talking Philosophy? I’ve been getting a page that says “Forbidden” for almost a week; is it just me or is it some kind of magnetic disturbance over the US?
Tip Jar
Is anyone else unable to get to Talking Philosophy? I’ve been getting a page that says “Forbidden” for almost a week; is it just me or is it some kind of magnetic disturbance over the US?
I used your link and got right in.
I am in the Seattle area, too.
The link works normally for me
Ah. Thanks. The magnetic disturbance is not even over Seattle then – I guess it’s just over me.
I didn’t even know that was possible!
Odd – I have no trouble bringing up the site. Have you tried clearing the cache in your browser, in case it’s pointing you to cached version of the page (during an outage) rather than the one currently available?
Worked fine for me, in the UK. It’s probably just forbidden to you. Do you have a different browser you could try? Or a different computer or device. Your IP address may be blocked for some reason.
Josh, yes. Dave, right, since other people – even someone in Seattle – have no problem, I figure it’s that my IP address is blocked. For some reason.
I’m trying to not jump to conclusions, but if that is the case I would be really really disappointed.
Well, I was trying to read the situation as charitably as possible, but I suspected that was overly generous.
How stupid.
It could be that, since you are blocked from commenting there, that the mechanism which does the comment-blocking somehow blocks your IP altogether from accessing the page.
Or, it could be that you’re so deeply, intrinsically, irremediably Gnu that the barest electronic touch from your internet connection would contaminate TP.
I can access it without any problem.
Yes I spent almost a week trying not to jump to conclusions but the effort has now probably broken down.
I doubt it’s the comment ban doing it, since it’s been in place for a year.
It’s interesting being a pollutant. :- )
Delete the cookie for that site and try again.
It is not interesting being a pollutant. And if your inability to access the web site is because you are being blocked, then someone should be very ashamed of themselves, whoever is responsible. I hope this is corrected right away. It is not acceptable that you are not permitted to post there. And it is definitely not acceptable if you cannot access it. This is very shocking, if the reasons are as you suspect.
By the way, in the video of Dawkins at the Ratzi protest, you might see a rather distinguished grey haired gentleman in the background, just over his left shoulder. That is Geoffrey Robertson, the author of The Case of the Pope, as well as a number of other books on human rights and international law.
Got through first try – from Berlin, where too many other things are inaccessible.
Well, there’s no way to confirm or disconfirm the reasons, Eric, because the webmaster stopped answering my and Josh’s emails months ago, when we were trying to get him to transfer the B&W domain to me so that links to the .com site would transfer here. That’s why links to the .com site are now just duds. So I’ll never know, and doubtless no one will feel any remorse, much less shame.
Thanks for identifying that guy on Dawkins’s left! I asked that very question on Jerry’s post. I also don’t know who the other guy is – the one to the left of Robertson. Anyway what a lovely gang – some of my favorite people – Richard, Peter Tatchell, Maryam, Johann.
I connected first try, and came across a piece entitled “Hitchens, running, and identity” which ended with a pretty girl singing “No one laughs at God”, which is basically the no atheists in foxholes argument. If you can’t connect, don’t worry too much. Drivel is drivel, no matter how pretty the girl…
It may not be intentional. I got, over the last few weeks, 403 forbidden error codes for this site (B&W) and this site alone. The situation persisted for a a week the first time around and then just disappeared. Then it happened again sometime last week and lasted for a few days. It was so odd and whatever I was advised to do, didnt help.
I suspect that your case, mirax, was the “Bad Behavior” anti-spam plugin blocking you. All of the IP addresses you’ve used here that I’ve checked have been in the Project Honeypot database, which probably means that the ISP you use assigns its customers new IP addresses frequently and that many of its customers are infected with malware. Every time you got an IP with a particularly bad history, you would have been blocked by the Bad Behavior mechanism, although it should have told you how to find out what the problem was and how to contact me if its self-service unblocking tool didn’t work.
I disabled that plugin a while ago, since it was causing more problems than it was worth–the other anti-spam countermeasures in place seem to be mostly doing their job. In any case, it’s unlikely that Ophelia’s being blocked by the same mechanism–none of the IPs I know for her are in Project Honeypot’s database.
Ophelia, you’ll almost certainly be able to read Talking Philosophy if you use this link.
If it’s any comfort Ophelia, I couldn’t access TP either, at least not first thing this morning, although I was able to access it without problems yesterday evening (I’m accessing from a standard (UK) residential BT broadband IP address).
Just now I swapped the BT DNS server addresses I was using to those of OpenDNS and voila, I was in. Swapped back to BT’s DNS server and was still able to access, although that may well be because my router cached TP’s details when I accessed over OpenDNS.
I don’t suppose this information is much help, but just so that you know, you aren’t the only one who has been unable to access :)
For the record, while unable to access using the BT DNS servers, I was able to access using the nyud.net mirror mentioned by Josh above.
Doh. Just realised you stated that you were specifically seeing “Forbidden” messages. My browser was displaying a message which I think was the “user friendly” equivalent to a “503 Service Unavailable” (i.e. server temporarily unavailable) code, which is another problem entirely.
Shutting up now, before I confuse matters further.
There is a file that can be attached to websites, called “htaccess”. What it does is allow the website admin to block access to the site for a range of IP addresses, or just specific ones. One common use of the file is to block access to known spammers.
I suspect your IP address may well be listed in that file at TP. Do you know how to use a webproxy, which allows you to surf the web but hide your IP address ?
I also had problems until clearing my DNS cache. I suspect that the DNS entry changed recently. Your IP address probably isn’t being blocked, it is more likely that you have stale information in your local DNS cache or that the correct information hasn’t yet propagated to your DNS server. Fixing this tends to be operating system dependent but a reboot will usually cure the problem.
Thanks for the link, Josh.
@Ophelia
Use an anonymous proxy and see , if you can get through then its probably your IP address thats been blocked. Though I dont know why you want to would bother :). cant send links because all anonymous proxy related links are blocked at work.
Deepak, I want to bother only for the sake of monitoring the backbiting about “new atheists”; there’s quite a lot of that, mostly thanks to “amos”, who drags every discussion back to the horrors of the dreaded gnus.
No, that plus reading Ben’s posts.
@Ophelia
Yeah I get that :).
Its just so many things and so little time kind of situation , right?.
Oh yes but some things are totally super really important!!eleven!one!
Heehee.