Malwarebytres does not like some of the posts I click on!

[EarlG]

11. The folks replying in this thread have made a decent guess, but I'm not sure it's correct

When you're browsing DU, the information that you're viewing is not all hosted on DU. When members link to media that is hosted on other sites -- for example, YouTube videos, tweets, and images --- that media is not lifted from the host site and then re-hosted on DU's servers. It remains on the host site, and DU's software simply displays it as is.

Therefore, when you're browsing DU, each page is really a mix of content from different sources. The vast majority of that content is hosted on DU's servers (eg. the entire page layout, user-written text, etc.), but some of it isn't (eg. images that are linked to from elsewhere).

Generally speaking, viewing mixed content is considered "safe" (although that probably depends on your view of network security), and modern browsers will alert the user if the browser thinks that any content which it is about to load is "dangerous."

A lot of the time -- and especially on DU, because we only allow a few types of outside content to be linked to -- this happens because the page contains an image with an http:// prefix instead of an https:// prefix. The former (http) is the original standard protocol for Internet data transfer, whereas the latter (https) is a more modern, secure version which encrypts the data that is exchanged between a website and a browser.

These days, the vast, vast majority of websites use the https protocol, but some still use the old version, and it also possible to retrieve an image from an https site by using the http prefix. I have seen situations where people's browsers throw errors because they load a DU page which contains an http image prefix.

Since you suspected sheshe2's post as being the possible culprit, I checked those and and the images in her sigline all use the https protocol. I did find one image on the page that does not -- the image in lindysalsagal sig line has an http prefix. But I'm not sure that's the issue in this particular case.

This may be the answer:

The error message in your OP is an "outbound" error, and the website that it is blocking is located at 104.207.254.75. That is NOT a DU IP address. Instead it belongs to "Liquid Web L.L.C" which provides VPN services.

Are you using a VPN? If so, that is probably the issue. When you use a VPN, you connect to your target server (in this case, DU) by connecting to another server first, which then connects to the target server. This obscures your personal IP address from the target server, because the target server can only record the IP address of the VPN server, not your personal IP address. People do this legitimately, for privacy reasons.

In this case, it appears that MalwareBytes thinks that the VPN server -- the one you are connecting to before you connect to DU -- is compromised.

If you are using a VPN, my advice would be to either try disabling it and visiting DU to see if the error persists, or force your VPN program to connect to a different server by changing the location.

If you are not using a VPN, we will have to continue the conversation...