I am having problems with the Guardian web site. The pages are slow to load and sometimes cause my computer to restart without any warning. My PC hangs while "waiting for ml.2mdn.net" to load. Hugh Gemmell
Guardian Unlimited has its own help desk, which you can contact by emailing userhelp@theguardian.com. They like queries that include a full description of the problem, the web address of the page that's a problem, the date and time (because the site changes continuously), and the type and version number of your browser and operating system. They usually have the answer before I'm even asked the question.
In this case, however, I can tell you that 2mdn.net is one of DoubleClick's advertising servers (the DoubleClick that is being taken over by Google). The problem seems to have been that the ad server was down for a time over the Christmas holiday. Usually ad servers are not down for long, because while they are, the provider is losing money.
If you have any problems reaching a website, it's usually worth trying another route. Two that I use are IDzap.com, the free version of an anonymous surfing service, and Loband (loband.org).
With IDzap, I'm going to websites via a proxy server with cookies and JavaScript blocked and other information hidden. This prevents the site from trying to do anything too clever, which is a frequent cause of screwups. There are some alternative anonymous surfing services. Loband just strips out everything -- colours, images, Flash and other rubbish -- reducing graphical web pages to plain text.
