I don’t know the answer to your question, but may I ask a question of my own which is also of interest to all on FR?
When FR is down, we used to have another spot on Yahoo to converse about the outage. That way, we knew whether it was our own computers, or FR that was having a problem. I lost the address for that site. Does anyone know it?
The Yahoo group freerepublic2: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/freerepublic2