billpalmer.net

What are the odds that the Publisher of iProng.com is the only person in the world who's been getting a strange error message from iLounge.com for the past four days?

Earlier this week I mentioned how odd it was that I seemed to be the only person in the world who was getting a very strange error message from iLounge.com instead of being able to see their site. I asked friends all over the place to check and see if they were getting the same message, then I wrote about it here to see if anyone in the world was getting this same error message, or if anyone had ever even seen this particular error message in all their internet travels. I even logged onto my neighbor's network with my laptop, to find that suddenly I could access their site just fine simply by using a different IP address. In other words, my IP address is the only one in the world that is seeing this error message.

Being the publisher of iProng, their biggest competitor, the whole thing seemed a little, well, peculiar. I know what you're thinking, but they wouldn't do something like that, would they? Then again, there are only three possibilities here:

1) Through sheer cosmic coincidence, one person in the world was randomly selected to get this bizarre error message, and it just happened to be the Publisher of their main competitor.

2) Someone associated with their site thought it would be cute to block me from being able to visit their site.

3) Someone not associated with their site hacked their server and blocked me from being able to visit their site.

I find all of the above scenarios highly improbable, but nonetheless, one of the three has to be true. So two days ago I sent a friendly email to both of the principals of iLounge, informing them that I was getting this strange error message from their site and that I appeared to be the only one and that it appeared to be directly connected to my specific IP address. I was careful not to make any assumptions or accusations, but I figured I should make them aware of the situation nonetheless. For all I know someone has hacked them, meaning that we've got a common enemy here.

Relations between iLounge and iProng have never exactly been warm (this is our only competitor in which this is the case), but you'd think that this is something that they would want to get out in front of. You'd think they'd either reply with "We've had other people reporting this same error message, we're working on it," or even "We didn't block you and we have no idea why you can't see our site."

But two days later, there's been no answer from them at all. One of the two of them has published an article as recently as yesterday (so says my neighbor's internet access), so it's highly unlikely that they're both on vacation right now. Their failure to reply to my friendly email casts a new level of doubt over this situation, and leads me to think that just maybe, what I thought was impossible two days ago is indeed the case after all: someone on the iLounge staff thought it would be cute to block me from being able to view their site simply because I'm the competition.

I can't tell you how much I hope this isn't true, because it doesn't speak well to the future of the iPod website industry. But what else am I left to conclude?



Four days straight of seeing the above error message, and I'm the only person in the world who's seeing it, and it goes away as soon as I use a different IP address. Two days of no reply from them, after bringing the situation to their attention. It's not that I care about being able to visit their site, I'd just like to know why they would do something so childish and ultimately self-defeating, if indeed this is their doing. I really hope the explanation turns out to be something else.