Joel Spolsky writes articles on Inc.com and regularly links to them from joelonsoftware.com. Whenever I try to read those articles from work (for example, this one), I see a blank page and the following in the title bar:
why-circuit-city-failed-and-why-bh-thrives.html (GIF image, 1x1 pixels)
Interestingly:
1) It doesn't matter which browser I use
2) I am able to read the articles from home.
Yes, I have brought this to the attention of the folks at Inc.com and even provided a traceroute, but haven't gotten an answer yet.
Now I'm just curious: what could cause a page to be "seen" as a 1x1 GIF?
Update
- I checked with our network guy, and he says we don't filter any sites.
- I had the same problem one day trying to load, from work, a Rails site I'd been building from home on a paid host site. (Right now it loads fine.)
Looks like your company is blocking the site. I'd suggest you ask your work sysadmins the reasoning behind this, doesn't look much to do with the domain itself.
When I see 1x1 GIF, I think 'tracking pixel'. These are 1x1, normally transparent, images that people embed in web pages in order to get your browser to send a request to someplace, usually a third party analytics site, for behavioral analysis purposes. Why your request would be replaced with one I don't know; possibly a brain-damaged implementation of a tracking pixel mechanism, possibly a confused way of doing a block.
Probably a proxy server on your company that blocks images it regards as innapropriate or as ads?
Perhaps you have a proxy blocking
favicon.ico