I have read that article, and I have just tried the plugin (episenhauer) on one of my site. It worked fine until I opened the plugin’s option screen (dashboard > settings > hit counter).
Everytime I open the option screen, it always ended with “Connection Timed Out” and then… I no longer can access the site (or the wp-admin).
The situation could be resolved by changing my IP address, but the same problem would occur whenever I tried to open the option screen again.