Still out on west coast as of Tuesday AM. The Mac fix worked but only once. To get on now I have to use Startpage as home page, get to site via proxy, and then once on site, click “unproxy” to actually enter and sign in. So, has it been determined if this is a hack job?
The way DNS Servers work is they resolve domain names to IP Addresses, the domain name Registrar one uses, maintains the record to the Name Server and other WHOIS information.
In the case of this issue here, gkg.net who is the Registrar for FreeRepublic.com is pointing to a nonfunctional Name Server:
Name Server: NS.ROBINSON-DEFEHR.COM.20081216130856.DELETED.GKG.NET
Name Server: NS2.ROBINSON-DEFEHR.COM.20081216130852.DELETED.GKG.NET
ICANN gives this information to all Root DNS Servers, that means that as the DNS Servers update they will lose the IP Address for FreeRepublic.com which causes this issue.
So the only way to fix the problem is to get GKG.NET to update the Name Server to be correct again.