Has flickr been hijacked?

This entry was published at least two years ago (originally posted on October 3, 2004). Since that time the information may have become outdated or my beliefs may have changed (in general, assume a more open and liberal current viewpoint). A fuller disclaimer is available.

Flickr hasn’t been loading for me at all today — all morning long it was giving me a DNS error saying that the server couldn’t be found.

Now I seem to be getting something…but I don’t think I’m getting what I’m supposed to be getting, and I’m afraid that were I running an exploitable browser (like, oh, Internet Exploder), I might be getting some nasty surprises.

Loading the main flickr page ( http://www.flickr.com/ ) stalls for a while, and then loads one of the many generic “looks like a search page while we install exploits onto your system” pages that float around when domains disappear. Included in the page are two javascripts, one of which ( http://www.flickr.com/js/pu.js ) is loading a popunder window.

This is really a shame. Looks like someone forgot to renew their domain on time, and it got snapped up from underneath them. Hopefully it all gets straightened out soon.

Update: They appear to be back. No word (yet?) on the flickr blog as to what might have happened.

iTunesX-Lover” by Sheep on Drugs from the album One for the Money (1997, 3:55).