May 5th, the internet, and you April 30, 2010

On May 5th (Cinco De Mayo, how festive), you might start to run into surfing issues. While the article talks about mostly corporate networks having issues, they make a dumb assumption: That most home users will be directly connected to the network. With so many home networks behind routers these days, and with many of those routers having some sort of basic firewall, there's going to be issues.

The first thing you should do is go to Ripe Labs and grab this tool. Save the file down to your machine, and then run it (you may need to associate it with the Java Virtual Machine), and you can find out if there's an issue with either your home firewall, or even your ISP's DNS.

If you're directly connected to the internet, and according to the test results you're affected, your ISP needs to implement the fix. If, however, you're running everything behind a home router, and you still run into this issue, it's a very good idea to go out and grab the latest firmware for your router.

EDIT: Yeah, not so much. I was in the middle of a rather crazy day on Friday, and I took this one at face value. Whoops.