tenlittlebullets | (no subject)

Feeling... slightly better now, although the mood swings mean that could change at any moment. There's still no official due date for GIANT PROJECT OF DOOM, but I'm fairly sure it will be two days before the oral defense, so I have a week and a half. I'm finally getting around to installing Ubuntu to make my life easier programming-wise--this is perhaps not the wisest idea with a giant programming project hanging over my head and a backup computer that keeps crashing because its wireless is on the fritz, but worst-case scenario I can use the university computer lab.

Speaking of computers crashing, is anyone else having serious, serious problems with LJ and a site called outboundlink.net? Every time I bring up my flist, it spends an outrageous amount of time transferring data from some site called outboundlink.net (sometimes outboundlink.me), usually well after the page has loaded. On the Windows computer with a recent version of Firefox, I sometimes have to open links (not just to external pages but to comment pages on LJ) in a new tab because otherwise it takes so long trying to go through this outboundlink site that the connection just times out. On the Linux computer with a more ancient Firefox, I have the sneaking suspicion that this site might have to do with why the computer keeps freezing. I mean, it might be the wireless acting up, but usually the freeze happens while LJ is doing shady business with outboundlink.net/.me, and I don't have the time or the patience to test it and see whether it still freezes if I don't visit LJ.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Here's the story behind the link thing. Friggin lj.

You know I didn't even realise that such a thing was happening. I tried visiting this outboundlink.net just by itself, and I only got a page that said Opera was preventing any redirection.

...so, now I remember again why I use Opera. I don't know what if anything you can do to fiddle with the settings for it. Opera informs me that if I wish I can have these redirections enabled on one of the many options menus, but shit, I'm not going to. I bet you could add "*.outboundlink.*" (or some variant) to your blacklist and that might help keep your browser from redirecting there? I don't even see the site in my history; I can't find any indication that I've gone there from my lj. Which means either I opted out of it or it's not happening on my lj or--as proved--my browser is rejecting it. This may possibly also explain why I can't click links in google ads on gmail anymore.

Yeah, outboundlink.net doesn't appear to have even a placeholder on their homepage, but they've undoubtedly got all sorts of scripts to fiddle with URLs that aren't visible if you just pull up the domain in a browser.

I blocked the LJ script responsible for it--http://l-stat.livejournal.com/js/pagestats/DR_v4u2.js--which is a bunch of deliberately obfuscated regular-expression gobbledygook that's meant to keep ordinary humans from ever knowing what the script is doing. People with more time and more RegExp-fu than I have managed to decipher it, and essentially whenever you mouse over a link, it sends the URL to outboundlink.net to be compared to a list (amazon, ebay, etc). If it's on the list, the script tinkers with it to add LJ's affiliate code so that every time you post a link to the Amazon page of a book you just read and someone clicks on it, LJ makes money. The really sneaky thing is that the JavaScript then makes it look like nothing's happening--when you mouseover the link, the URL that appears in your browser's status bar is the un-fucked-with version. You can only see the real version if you right-click, select 'copy link location,' and paste the URL.

Let's see if it works...

Ah, I see someone else already got you the link for what's going on, but just figured I'd drop in and say that I really noticed the difference between two accounts where I'd forgotten to opt out of the script on one (very slow load times, same problems you had) versus the other (which loaded speedily and absolutely fine). So the opt-out does seem to work, at least for now. :)

Oh LJ, stay classy.