I think I identified the problem.
I filed a false positive report with AVAST since the VirusTotal screener found no issues. They came back with a statement that says they trigger on any domain they know to be using the name servers at '
afraid.org'. Turns out that at work I can't even resolve the '
www.gebish.org' domain name, and I filed an issue with my IT department. They came back with "we black hole any domain using '
afraid.org' as their dns server."
This issue with '
afraid.org' came up in another context -- the
fabric8.io site was experiencing these same problems for the same reason. When I reported this to them, they changed their DNS provider to CloudFlare and poof -- all problems solve.