Pill Report Site Problem

[sir pacman]

Been having trouble loading the pill report website. Started a couple of months ago and seems to take ages to come up. Sometimes more than ten minutes to get home page. Seem to go to "waiting for stl.pa.a1.traceworks.com" and then takes ages to download.

The thing that makes it seem even more dodgy is that you go to traceworks.com and is looks like a dodgy site with a questionable name.

Maybe just being paranoid.

Hang on someone is at the door!

 

[Seith]

I have been having no problems at all loading Pillreports.

 

[Bearlove]

First this has been reported - as soon as Ravenousblonde comes on line they will check with our techy people and see whats up?

 

[RedLeader]

stl.pa.a1.traceworks.com has been flagged as a spyware domain, or so it seems. Hard to really lock it onto PR traffic, though, and likely just an idiosyncrasy that you're machine is caught up with. I cannot seem to infer exactly what it's doing typically (spayware can literally do hundreds of things to your machine - ranging from harmless to ), but it's a common DOS override made done.

I will give you a possible solution (if you are using Windows), but it might seem just as intimidating:

NSFW:

1) Locate your Host File -> c: \windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

2) Rightclick -> Properties and uncheck "Read Only"

3) Open this file in Notepad

4) In this file, you'll see a list of IP Addresses (left column) and Domain Names (right column).

5) Add "127.0.0.1 stl.p.a1.traceworks.com" at the bottom of this list.

6) file->save

7) Reboot

You're just doing what's called a "DOS Override" against this traceworks domain.

This should make PR come back more smoothly, without said interference.

 

[RavenousBlonde]

If I remember correctly, the "traceworks" thing was a counter to see how many hits www.pillreports.com was getting. I am not that tech savvy on the back end of things, so i will ask the person that handles that and will see what is going on. It is a bit concerning that the traceworks site has been flagged as a spyware domain. I wish I could help you further, but I have no problems logging in.

 

[RedLeader]

^ Spyware is a very loose term. Don't be "too" worried.

But basically what I saw was that if you enter that stl.pa.a1.traceworks.com URL directly into Google, most of the hits come up on custom-made "host file templates." These are just files that people have created which contain information on a bunch of "nasty, annoying, bothersome, odd, etc. things from the web." By using this template on one's host file (this is just a file containing hostnames your computer will automatically block each time before connecting to the web), you can get rid of common nasties. In fact, a lot of spyware programs operate in this exact way; they catch something malicious and they automatically update your host file with the malicious information included. So again, if tech-savvy people are putting this specific one on these custom templates, it's never really a good sign. I hope that makes a bit of sense.

As for a counter, I don't know. The website looks somewhat legit, and there software may well contain working counters. But the protocol part of the domain "stl.pa.a1" reads fishy.