Re: url redirected in chrome/chromium, but working fine, according to ping/traceroute, lynx, w3m, iceweasel.

[davidson@freevolt.org]

On Fri, 7 Oct 2016, Tony Baldwin wrote:

> I have a little business card website up for my big brother's media 
> consulting side-business at http://playomatic.myownsite.me.
> Now, at the moment, if I try to load it in Google-Chrome-Stable, I'm getting 
> redirected to a yahoo! search for "create web",
> If I try to load it in the floss chromium, I get a spammy landing page,
> But in all of Iceweasel, lynx, w3m, elinks it loads fine, and nothing has 
> changed on my server (no redirect added to my vhost by an intruder or any 
> such thing), also neither ping nor traceroute seem to indicate anything 
> untoward or fishy.
> The only thing I haven't tried is Epiphany, Konqueror, Safari, or IE.
> Oddly, it seems to work fine in chrome on my android phone, though.
>
> How can I determine what's interfering with this page loading in some 
> browsers, and not others? or what's redirecting my traffic, and how I can 
> stop it or prevent future re-occurrence?

This problem sounds bizarre to me.

One less-than-obvious conceivable factor that occurs to me is that
some webmail interfaces (looking at you, gmx.com) will point urls in
email text at creepy redirects (presumably so that your email provider
can log what you read).

For example, a link labeled

 http://playomatic.myownsite.me

will point to

 https://deref-gmx.com/mail/client/[Some-Alpha-Numeric-Code]/dereferrer/?redirectUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fplayomatic.myownsite.me

If one of those redirects happens to be broken, through no fault of
yours, then following such links in emails might result in unexpected
behaviour not unlike what you are seeing.

A shot in the dark, for what its worth.