The Daily Parker

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Google blocked at Peet's Coffee in HMB

I've spent the morning working at the Peet's Coffee in Half Moon Bay, Calif.. For some reason, this location has blocked HTTP access to most Google addresses.

The most obvious symptom is that browser requests to Google, Youtube, and other Google properties (including GMail) simply don't go through. Chrome reports "connection reset" after timing out; IE simply spins into oblivion. Another symptom, which took me a few moments to figure out, is that sites that have Google Analytics bugs (like this one) sometimes, but not always, fail to load. Reading the page source shows that the entire page has loaded, but the browser doesn't render the page because part of it is being blocked.

Using nothing more sophisticated than Ping and Tracert, I've determined that the block occurs pretty close to my laptop, possibly even in the WiFi router or in Peet's proxy server. Pinging Google's public DNS service (8.8.8.8) works fine, as does making nslookup requests against it. But pinging www.google.com, www.youtu.be, and www.gmail.com all fail. Tracerts to these URLs and directly to their public IPs also fail at the very first hop.

Google IPs appear to start with 74.125.x.y. Tracert to 8.8.4.4 passes through 74.125.49.85 a few hops away; www.google.com resolves to 74.125.224.84; etc. However, reverse DNS lookups show something slightly different. 8.8.4.4 resolves back to google-public-dns-b.google.com; however, 74.125.224.84 resolves back to nuq04s07-in-f20.1e100.com. 74.125.224.69 (www.youtu.be) resolves back to another 1e100.com address.

All other sites appear to work fine, with decent (megabit-speed) throughput.

So, the mystery is: who has blocked Google from this Peet's store, and why? I have sent Peet's a request for comment.

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