Introduction
This page has information on how to access the Ridley Report during an Internet outage or crackdown. You don't have to understand this information right now, but you might want to copy it to your hard drive because when you need it most it won't be accessible easily.
If you don't understand this, just ask your most techie friend. They'll either understand it or be able to quickly figure it out.
More Technical
The RidleyReport.com website depends on the ubiquitous Domain Naming System (DNS) that makes the Internet human-friendly. Basically, every computer on the Internet is assigned an Internet Protocol Address (IP Address). DNS servers keep track of IP Addresses that have names assigned to them. When you type an address into your browser, the browser asks the nearest DNS server what IP address to talk to.
One concern is that the "master" DNS servers can be turned off or otherwise manipulated by "evil forces" (name your own threat here) to make sites like RidleyReport.com not readily accessible. This page should help alleviate those concerns.
Direct IP Addressing
On some sites, where the machine is only serving up one website, you can directly type in the IP address in the URL instead of the domain name. It would be like
http://123.45.67.89But if the webserver is hosting more than one site, it can't tell by the IP address alone which site you want, so it fails. RidleyReport.com is hosted on a server with many other sites, so that won't work.
Thankfully, there is a solution - and it works on pretty much every computer on the Internet.
Overriding DNS
The DNS system can be overridden easily on your own machine. All you have to do is add a line to your "hosts" file. That line is:
65.23.153.113 ridleyreport.com
MS Windows
On Windows, the hosts file is located at C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts - note that the file "hosts" does not have a .txt extension even though it is a text file. Also, you need administrator privileges to edit the file. You can edit this with any text editor - NotePad works and is available on every Windows system.
Mac
The Mac system makes it a little harder by hiding the hosts file. The simple workaround seems to be to save the above line into a file (such as "hosts.txt" somewhere), then import that file using the command line
sudo niload hosts . < hosts.txt
Linux / Unix, etc.
On Linux, as well as other Unix variants, the hosts file is located at /etc/hosts. You need root access to edit the file. Just sudo or log in to a terminal as root and use your favorite editor to add the line.
