The title is meant to be a representation of the two-note ‘you lose’ trumpet sound that you hear now and again on The Price Is Right.

In this case, Tino of all people is the loser: for he has once again been suckered into coming into Panera only to find that the network is kaput. The network here is now well and truly down more than it’s up, at least when I’m here. It’s even more kaput than usual today, too. Usually, the problem is that their captive portal authentication thing doesn’t work. Today, there’s no network at all:

I note that the Hyatt — the Reston Panera is in the lobby of the Hyatt — somehow manages to keep their network running: but then they charge $10 a day for it, so they have an incentive to keep it running.

Panera has an incentive, too: I wouldn’t come here without the network (particularly since my phone doesn’t work at all in here). It’s just a less-obvious incentive.

The place is entirely empty, in any case, and some of that is probably due to the fact that the network isn’t there. It’ll be even emptier in the future: I’ll be here less often, since the ‘free’ network access is far too costly in terms of uncertainty.

The last time I wrote about Panera Bread’s counterproductive filtering of web content on their ‘free’ wireless network, I assembled a list of URLs and wrote some software to test those lists against Panera’s filter.

I was at Panera again recently, and I ran the test again. Some of the sites that were blocked when I did my original test in January are now unblocked.

Specifically, Daily Pundit, formerly blocked for ‘weapons’, is now accessible, as are Forvideo and Kalyr.com. Gut Rumbles and Jane’s Net Sex Guide are also, inexplicably, both now okay.

However, some new sites have been added in the last couple of months. I used the same list both in January and this weekend, so these are websites that were positively not blocked then, but are now:

http://imao.us/

Anti-idiotarian rantblog, ranked 37th in the Blogosphere Ecosystem.

http://www.abionline.org/

The American Beverage Institute. This is a website that advocates abstention from drinking and driving. BANNED! by Panera. The WCTU website is also streng verboten at Panera: a theme is developing.

http://www.catotheyoungest.com/

At the moment it’s just showing an Ensim login page (and has been since at least Friday morning, according to the Google cache). Forbidden nevertheless. You can see here the Blogspot incarnation of this warblog.

http://www.chriscmooney.com/

Chris C. Mooney is a freelance writer living in Washington, D.C. (his bio page says), and a senior correspondent for the American Prospect magazine. There doesn’t appear to be anything objectionable about his website.

http://www.coolpick.com/

A cool-site-of-the-day kind of thing. The only justification for blocking this would be that it’s a tired concept.

http://www.retrospice.com/

Another site experiencing technical difficulties. Right now from home, I see a bare directory index showing no content The Google cache indicates that it was this way at least as early as 9:00 a.m. yesterday, though, so it’s blocked even though there’s no there there. When there was a there, there were ‘hot babes of yesteryear’ there, so maybe blocking it at least makes a little bit of sense — but remember, it wasn’t blocked in January.

http://www2.thelinuxshow.com/

I’m not sure how this ‘www2′ address got into the list; there’s nothing here but an Apache test page. Nevertheless, it was available to Panera customers in January but isn’t today. At http://www.thelinuxshow.com/ we can see that this is the home of the ‘oldest, longest running and without question most listened to webcast focused on Open Technology in the known universe’.

Unfortunately, I did not record why these sites were blocked. To be honest, I forgot the test script was running, and I didn’t check the results before I left. I will be modifying the tests to automatically record this in the future.

The following forty-six websites were all observed to blocked by the nanny filter on the network at Panera Bread late in the afternoon of 23 January 2004.

I got the list of URLs to try by loading in the contents of my own RSS aggregator, as well as the blogrolls from instapundit.com, dailykos.com, and atrios.blogspot.com.

There seems to be a slight anti-conservative bias in the list, but this could be due to nothing more than the fact that Glenn Reynolds — widely considered ‘conservative’ — has approximately one zillion sites on his blogroll, and that the filter blocks websites related to ‘weapons’. Certainly there are also a bunch of lefty sites that are also blocked for no real discernable reason.

For each site that seems to be improperly blocked, I’ve stuck in a short quote that should serve to illustrate what the site is like.

Many of the sites branded as “adult/mature content” — as Tinotopia once was – probably got that way by using four-letter words once in a while. The question then is: why is Panera protecting its customers from this? I can understand them not wanting people looking at farmsluts.com in there, as it might put other customers off their feed. But political weblogs? I think the problem is that the main market for the nanny filter consists of schools: and so when you use the network at Panera, you are assumed to have the intellect and sensitivities of a child.

(more…)

I was sitting in Panera Bread last night, fumbling around with proxies in an attempt to get around their ham-fisted network filtering. Now they’re blocking an art gallery’s website for ‘nudism’. The site does, indeed, feature photos of paintings and sculptures featuring people without clothes on, but I’d hardly classify this as ‘nudity’, much less ‘nudism’. I didn’t have time to check whether they block the National Gallery Of Art, but I’d bet the answer is no: even the people at SonicWALL would see that that’s silly.

They’re also blocking Cory Doctorow, for reasons that are an utter mystery to me.

As I was saying, I was sitting there trying to make use of the network at a blazing 100 kpbs or so — did I mention that the network was also slow? — when in my distraction the over-loud piped-in music caught my attention, and held on. It was bad, noodley jazz without any real genius or even feeling behind it.

I could not help thinking of how this stuff must be produced: I imagine that someone, somewhere, locks a bunch of musicians in a room with horns (it’s heavy on horns, the better to cut through the Panera background noise) and dope, turns on a tape recorder, and goes away for a few days. When the someone comes back he duplicates the tape and sends it off to people who need jazz in bulk. It’s sold by the yard.

We used to joke that Dressel’s Pub, in St. Louis, always played the World’s Longest Jazz Album, because it never ended and it seemed, at least, to never repeat: but at least that peculiar album contains recognizable and good music.

Anyway, I present for your listening enjoyment two snatches of jazz by the ton, as recorded last night at Panera. You can download the file here, or listen to it in the embedded Quicktime thingy that will appear below if your computer supports Quicktime. It’s kind of quiet, and there’s a lot of background noise, but this is how Bulk Jazz is meant to be, er, enjoyed.

As I have mentioned before, Panera Bread’s free wireless network blocks Tinotopia on the grounds that it is an ‘adult’ website. If you enter the URL here, you can see that in addition to being ‘adult/mature content’ and ’society and lifestyle’ — I assume this group exists in the list for people who like to micro-manage, and who are afraid tha their employees might be doing something non-work-related during working hours — Tinotopia is also listed as ‘Usenet News Groups’. I have no idea what the hell this is supposed to mean in this context. It does help to confirm that these lists are put together more or less at random, though.

Tinotopia isn’t meant for children, and I try to keep the fart jokes to a minimum. In that, I suppose that the content here is relatively ‘adult’ and ‘mature’. I believe that the block-list people are using those terms as euphemisms for pornography, though. (Or maybe not; they also have a ‘pornography’ category!)

So you might say that, in some senses of the terms, Tinotopia is an ‘adult’ and ‘mature’ site, even though there are no skin pics here. It’s certainly a ’society and lifestyle’ website, as the whole point of it is to allow you, the reader, to experience a bit of the Tino lifestyle, and to imagine what it might be for you to live in such high society yourself.

But Usenet newsgroups is just wrong, no matter how you look at it.

Anyway, earlier this week I set up a proxy server on tinotopia.com that I figured would allow me to do whatever I wanted, independent of the block list — the Sonicwall blocker only acts on http traffic, so you can still get to other things on Tinotopia. I figured out all of Panera’s networks (they have a whole raft of /29s) and told that proxy to accept connections from them, and tested the lot from home.

Today when I got here — I’m at Panera as I write this — I tried things out, and was astonished to see that, despite the fact that my requests were indeed going through the proxy (I was watching the proxy activity log), I was still being blocked! The Panera firewall was actually looking at what was being transferred and not just at the host it was being transferred from!

I quickly established an SSH tunnel back to Tinotopia and started encrypting the traffic — something I suppose I should be doing on a public wireless network anyway — and it all started working.

T-Mobile uses ‘Hotspot’ as the brand name for their paid-subscription wireless networks in Starbuckseses, airport lounges, and other such places. The name seems to be catching on as a term for public 802.11x networks in general.

But what do you call a public wireless network that’s not particularly useful? A coldspot perhaps, though Sears might sue. Last night Nicole and I were hanging out in the Reston Town Center Panera again, and at first we couldn’t get a connection at all, again. The wireless network was there, but the authentication server wasn’t, so nothing could happen.

After a short while, the wireless network went away all together and then came back, and the authentication server was back in the land of the living: someone had rebooted the access point, solving the problem. Score one for Panera.

But our enthusiasm — or my enthusiasm, anyway — soon waned:

That’s right, Tinotopia was unreachable from that network. To say that this limits the usefulness of the network for me is something of an understatement. Note also that there’s no way to lodge a complaint about this, no ‘I think you must be mistaken’ button. And there doesn’t appear to be any place on Sonicwall’s own corporate website to complain, either. They’re just not interested.

Strictly speaking, I suppose they’re accurate. Tinotopia is meant for adults, if only because most children are not interested in urban planning, Chinese ‘markets’, and what Tino thinks of various hotels. (Honestly, it’s a bit amazing that anyone is interested, but there you are.) I discuss ‘mature’ topics here if ‘mature’ is the opposite of ‘juvenile’. It’s just that I can’t see how this should be a ‘Forbidden Category’. I tried to figure out what might have tripped their sensors, as it were, but the Sonicwall website doesn’t list a category called “Adult/Mature Content”. Just Violence/Profanity, Partial Nudity, Full Nudity, Sexual Acts, Gross Depictions, Intolerance, Satanic/Cult, Drugs/Drug Culture, Militant/Extremist, Sex Education, Questionable/Illegal Gambling, and Alcohol & Tobacco. All the sites that I found blocked, though, were because of “Adult/Mature Content” or “Pornography”. ‘Pornography’ I can figure out on my own. Of course none of the sites I was trying to visit were actually pornographic in any sense of the word; the only thing close was Fark, which, among other things, offers links to other sites that might be thought of a pornographic.

Anyway, Tinotopia being blocked was the big problem. I have a proxy server set up to get around problems like this, but guess where it is? I’ll have to re-jigger the system to encrypt my proxy traffic. I would have done this last night while I was sitting there, but — you guessed it — a good number of websites with information having to do with proxy server configuration are also considered ‘pornographic’ etc. so I couldn’t get at a lot of documentation.

Panera is a private company, and of course they’re free to offer whatever kind of wireless network service they like. Most places take the option of not providing any wireless network service at all, so I suppose that Panera is still doing better than average. But then providing no wireless network doesn’t cost anything; Panera’s approach both costs them money and, if these filters don’t improve, don’t really offer their customers all that much utility. I can work around this with minimal trouble, but most people can’t. Panera’s free network is a significant competitive advantage in attracting the kind of people who would use it. But once someone runs up against a blocked website, it’s going to plant a seed of doubt in his mind for the future about the potential usefulness of the network. I’m sure that only a tiny fraction of things are actually blocked, but because a few things that I wanted to read happen to be from that tiny fraction, to me the network appears to have huge holes in it. I don’t think of Panera as offering free wireless Internet service any more; I think of them as offering a shiny toy that can be used by some people for some things.

Just as I write about my recent bad experience at Panera with a non-working wireless network, others have been getting exposure lately complaining about overly-stringent filtering of free wireless networks, including that at Panera.

As it happens, earlier this month I ran into this very problem at Panera Bread in Webster Groves, MO — scant miles from Panera HQ in beautiful Richmond Heights.

I was going through my regular list of weblogs (which I read via the excellent NetNewsWire), and all of a sudden I was confronted with a page telling me that something I was trying to read was pornography. The site? Tightly Wound, a weblog about education. The current top entry is titled ‘I wanna work for the History Channel.’ Porn, ladies and gentlemen. I don’t know whether it’s the title (certainly anything ‘tight’ on INTARNET must be porn! say the censors) or the ‘woman’ in the domain name that pulled the trigger. (The ‘big arm woman’ is so because of ‘judicious overuse of the hammer of Righteous Smiting’.)

Techdirt points out:

While it is annoying for some — and there should be an easy way to point out that a site shouldn’t be blocked, they are still providing the service for free, so there’s only so much people can do.

Thus further bolstering my claim that ‘free’ goods are fraught with trouble.

Panera Bread, Reston Town Center, Reston VA, as seen on 20 September 2004 at 5:30 p.m. That the wireless network was temporarily kaput probably had something to do with the fact that it was so deserted. That, plus everyone in Fairfax County seemed to be spending the hour stuck in traffic out on Reston Parkway.

Panera is a St. Louis thing; in St. Louis, they’re called ‘St. Louis Bread Company’, but it’s exactly the same restaurant once you’re inside (or inside most of ‘em, anyway: the very old locations still have their original decor, which isn’t as nice). I’ve been a fan of the place for fifteen years, and when I moved to Washington one of the things I missed most about St. Louis was the ability to get decent bread. I’m sure that there are good bakeries somewhere in Washingtonia, but you have to understand that in St. Louis there are St. Louis Bread Companies all over the place; you can get (reasonably) good bread anywhere.

Anyway, it’s always been a competent operation, and so I was not particularly surprised when Panera started offering free wireless network access in all their company-owned locations (and, it seems, in a good number of the franchise locations, too). They didn’t embark on a ’study’ like McDonald’s is famously supposed to have done somewhere; they didn’t sign up with T-Mobile for their laughably expensive service; and they didn’t roll the service out to a very few locations with a promise of more to come at some unspecified time in the (distant) future. They just installed the damned APs, stuck some very small stickers on the front doors, and turned the thing on.

And, best of all, they don’t explicitly charge for the service. It must cost them something to operate the network, and so a small part of the price of every bowl of soup they sell goes to pay for the network, but the point is: if you’re in the place, you’re connected, without buying anything else.

And this is great, because it’s a better accommodation for the way I use the network in a place like that. I have a home and an office; I am not going to do serious work in a noisy restaurant while running off battery power. I’m going to check my e-mail, read the news, and exchange a few IMs with people I know who don’t like talking on the phone any more than I do. Starbucks (to name one example) wants me to pay the Germans $30 a month — $40 a month if I don’t sign up for a yearly contract — to be able to use the network in their shops. This is about what I pay for my DSL service at home. For a service that I have use while running off batteries, in a place where I have to spend money just to occupy a seat, that’s more than a little too much for occasional use; so I will hang out at Starbucks’ less and Panera more.

Which is how I wound up at Panera with a little bit of time to kill the other day, and found the network to be hors de combat.

I stuck around for a while to see whether the network would start working again — I could connect to the local access point, and the DHCP server was working, but it appeared that their connection to the outside world had gone south — before giving up and leaving.

This is the problem with ‘free’ goods. That I’m not directly and overtly paying for the service means that Panera doesn’t expend a lot of effort to make sure that I’m satisfied with my non-purchase. On Panera’s regular public website, there appears to be no mention at all — aside from notations in the location-finder — of their wireless network service. I actually approve of this, because they don’t mention that they have air conditioning and electric lighting either, and I think the network in a place like this should be a basic utility.

But it’s not, yet, and so there’s not a crack team of people dedicated to tracking down and solving the problem — or at least to putting up some kind of notice of the problem to be served from the local AP — the way there almost certainly is should, say, one of the ovens break down.

All in all, though, if this is the worst thing that happens to me all month, I’m ahead of the game. But I’d still like to see a high-bandwidth works-(almost)-anywhere network service that charges some kind of reasonable price. As much as I like not paying for Panera’s service, I’d prefer to pay for what I really want.