hello, try to run a scan for malware with the free version of malwarebytes and adwcleaner & reset firefox afterwards.

It's not malware. It's load balancing. AkaDNS.net belongs to Akamai Technologies, one of the world's largest content delivery networks.

• http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20060806160840AAykHcT
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akamai_Technologies
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_balancing_%28computing%29

However, you should be seeing www.yahoo.com in the address bar, and the site should of course actually load. See the following article:

• Server Not Found - Troubleshoot connection problems

however the user agent seems of the question's owner seems to be corrupted (not sure if this might be related to some sort of malicious software)...

First of all, "akadns.net" is not malware-related but a domain from Akamai. It is/was used for load balancing services. Read more here: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20060806160840AAykHcT and here: http://forums.techguy.org/1325618-post3.html

The weird thing is that you only experience this issue in Firefox and not in other browsers installed on the same machine. I would suggest you to reset Firefox to make sure that no add-on or config is the culprit: http://mzl.la/MnSTZB

Btw: "yahoo.akadns.net" doesn't load for me too.

Modified February 5, 2013 9:50:28 AM PST by heelarious

Question owner

But for the Akimai address, it would seem to me that this would require a redirect, i.e. an actual http request being sent?

anyways, very strange that it would just 'rewrite' an address that I manually type in the address bar; perhaps FF 'caches' the redirect? so that it doesn't actually send out an http request? I suppose that's possible

You could turn off DNS Prefetching and try again: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/server-not-found-connection-problem#w_dns-prefetching

Question owner

Well, the problem has gone away. Still would like to understand what FF was doing.

The only thing that seems to make sense is that FF cached www.yahoo.com => http://www.yahoo.akadns.net/

and http://www.yahoo.akadns.net/ is no longer a valid domain. but you would think that ff would detect that and invalidate its cache

ps: btw, i did startup ff in safe mode, so it wasn't any add-ons

Well, "madperson" is right, your user agent is weird. In fact it's quite uniqe with that "nomagic bot" included (at least Google says so).

Afaik the default one for you should be: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:18.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/18.0

So better search for malware I would say...

Question owner

Nah, that's a custom user-agent string I defined for my own purposes.

BTW, how/where did you see that user-agent string? not sure where google fits in (perhaps it was automatically added to the initial support request, but don't see it on this page)

your user agent is shown under more system details on the top right section of the page next to your original question - it just looked unusual to me and therefore i've thought it might have something to do with the issue since some toolbars etc. also modify the ua-string...