Craigslist, Authentium Flap Ends

The inability to access the Craigslist.org classifieds sites vexed users of Cox Interactive and caused some to blame software provider Authentium for the problem. ZDNet's George Ou discovered that a fix at the Craigslist end has been put in place, and he about the issue between his company and Craigslist in a Q&A with Murdok: What exactly was the nature of the problematic packets that ran afoul of the firewall product? The network packets coming from the Craigslist.org web site were unusual in that they contained a zero-length TCP window that usually indicates a server is too busy to handle more data. The Authentium firewall driver responded by sending data only one byte at a time. This slowed down the web request and made the Craigslist.org web page load very slowly or not at all. Ou recently did a little network packet checking and found the servers on the Craigslist side had been fixed. He verified that with colleagues, and noted in his post that "Craigslist never acknowledged any issues on their end yet they fixed it silently after all the smoke had cleared." Some sort of acknowledgment of the fix would be welcome from Craigslist, as Cox and Authentium had been portrayed as apparent villains in the