Recently I was in the middle of researching a blog post, when my internet connection crapped out, leaving me at an odd looking URL. The middle bit of it made sense – www.theaustralian.com.au – but what is up with the sslcam.news.com.au domain name?
https://sslcam.news.com.au/cam/authorise?channel=pc&url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.theaustralian.com.au%2fbusiness%2flatest%2fsmartphone-app-to-track-public-transport-woes%2fstory-e6frg90f-1226863043667
I then started researching the odd looking domain name, with the only thing of note being somebody else complaining about it:
What is that stupid sslcam redirect you get trying to load News stories? It's so stupidly slow.
— Richard Chirgwin (@R_Chirgwin) March 17, 2012
I then went back to the original link I clicked on, and followed the chain of network activity that followed.
First hit – the shortened link I found on Twitter:
http://t.co/wLP4Lj9kXP
Which redirected to the article on the website of The Australian:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/latest/smartphone-app-to-track-public-transport-woes/story-e6frg90f-1226863043667
When then redirected me to a page to check for cookies – presumably part of their paywall system:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/remote/check_cookie.html?url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.theaustralian.com.au%2fbusiness%2flatest%2fsmartphone-app-to-track-public-transport-woes%2fstory-e6frg90f-1226863043667
It then sent me back to the original article:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/latest/smartphone-app-to-track-public-transport-woes/story-e6frg90f-1226863043667
Which then bounced me to the mysterious sslcam.news.com.au domain:
https://sslcam.news.com.au/cam/authorise?channel=pc&url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.theaustralian.com.au%2fbusiness%2flatest%2fsmartphone-app-to-track-public-transport-woes%2fstory-e6frg90f-1226863043667
And third request lucky – the original article:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/latest/smartphone-app-to-track-public-transport-woes/story-e6frg90f-1226863043667
Quite the chain of page redirects!
The sslcam.news.com.au domain
Internet services company Netcraft have collated the following information:
Date first seen: January 2012
Organisation: News Limited
Netblock Owner: Akamai International, BV
Nameserver: dns0.news.com.au
Reverse DNS: a23-51-195-181.deploy.static.akamaitechnologies.com
Akamai Technologies is a company that runs a content delivery network used by many media companies use – their systems make websites faster to load by saving a copy of frequently viewed content to servers located closer to the end users.
As for the reason for the cascade of page redirects and the mysterious sslcam.news.com.au domain, I’m at a loss to explain it – sorry!
Footnote
The sslcam.news.com.au domain is also used by other News Limited websites – the Herald Sun also routes traffic to their website via it.
This happened to me, except mine won’t open any of news ltd web sites. Eg daily t, courier mail, the aus. It’s really annoying.
Ps how do you disconnect it? I have no idea. Thank you.
The only way around it I have found is to find the “headline” in the URL that is broken (eg: “smartphone-app-to-track-public-transport-woes”, paste it into Google, and then see if the article shows up there.
The redirect is done at the News Limited end, so there isn’t a way for the end user to disable it.
Thank you. Ironic, an American company blocks news pages in Australia.
kind of good in another way, it’s only no news ltd. Daily terrible graph, Herald, courier snail. Lol
Thank you. ????
The Irony is,
The “Untrusted Site” might be OS dependent, as I can’t see it on any of my computers.
You can dig into the details of their SSL certificate at this site – it doesn’t seem *too* horrible:
https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=sslcam.news.com.au&s=23.193.3.166
Their main flaw is the usage of the insecure SHA-1 hash algorithm, which is being retired in 2016.
Sucks balls, that’s all I can say.
I find if you go back to the original page where you clicked on the story, you can then click on it again and the second time it will bring up the right page.