Watching videos online

The site you are trying to load a video from is not the singular source of the information (Adobe Flash video) you seek. In my initial visit, scripts and referrals were needed from OVER TEN SITES, before the video would finally be enabled. For my analysis, I selected number 35707 "How to create a political campaign petition".

Six sites were requested/referred for the initial page;

eyespot.com
dmtracker.com
intellitxt.com
thewheelof.com
expertvillage.com
googlesyndication.com (relatively benign, required for almost every video now)

Once the video HTML was loaded, scripts and data from another FOUR sites were mandatory, before any video would load:

adbureau.com (referral to staples, below)
staples.com (requisite preface video ad for Staples and Dell)
74.86.224.204 (SoftLayer Technologies Inc., whose server hangs in endless loop)
74.201.86.228 (Internap Network Services)

That was just the list of 'other parties" involved, to run the flash player (and its first video ad for Staples/Dell). The list of "third parties" goes on and on from there.

What does all this mean?

In order to view ANY video from this site, you must have your computer set up to allow free reign to a long list of different domains, and allow each one of them nearly unrestricted access to your computer. This is like falling in love with a woman from Kansas, who seems upright. But she has had NINE unprotected sex partners recently, besides you. This means when you have sex with this woman from Kansas, you are actually having sex with TEN PEOPLE -not one!

There is always a serious security risk of such a "Java-Orgy". Even if you presume ALL of the sites are legitimate and benign, any of the referral sites could be hijacked momentarily by Chinese or Russian hackers, who could substitute their own scripts/software to run instead of the intended scripts. This happens all the time, hundreds of thousands of times each day. There is a war out there at this level, unseen by most people. You must also consider the overwhelming strategic difficulties of the scenario: Each site is located in a different region (city, state or country), and each server is linked to a serial script, which will fail if ANY one of the contingencies are missing (exactly what happens in your case and mine). In my case, the ad from Staples/Dell loaded fine, but the next step in the required script was to get data from IP address 74.86.224.204 (which an IP/domain search shows is "SoftLayer Technologies Inc."). Unfortunately, the "SoftLayer Technologies" server hangs in endless loop, and never loads the video I selected. It constantly reports "contacting 74.86.224.204"... then "waiting for data from 74.86.224.204", and these two actions repeat back and forth endlessly (I closed the browser after 12 minutes of this).

Overall, my advice to you is to skip this risky expertvillage.com web site! Entirely! It is entirely too convoluted, has far too many associated/peripheral partners, and some of the contingencies (partners) have servers that are running slow, have low performance, or poorly designed scripts.

For example, Google's YouTube has several required scripts, but usually these come from 2 or three different Google or You Tube sites, and ALL of those contingency servers have alternate sites, if one server is overwhelmed or out of order. Thus, even when there is a major problem with one of the required parts of the You Tube video, you still get the video -served from an alternate location.

On a software level, if you are an avid video watcher on line (and/or insist on using this expertvillage.com site), I also advise you to "smarten up your PC itself" with safe software, and safe settings, to control and restrict how rogue or poorly designed sites run scripts on your PC:

Download FireFox and keep it current (updated) to make sure you have its latest security patches. Then download/install and learn "NoScript" and "FlashBlock', two essential modules for Firefox that help you control sites like "expertvillage.com". Next, if you are using Windows, set your "Program Access and Defaults" to use Firefox as your default browser, and also UN-check the "allow access this program" button next to "Internet Explorer". All of these settings are available in the top of the start menu, or also from Start Menu/Settings/Control Panels/Add-Remove Software, then choose the appropriate box on the left of that control panel.