Filters and LA Observed

I've spent the last couple days having meetings at the Seattle Public Library (the central library in downtown).

The people involved with helping us out with our meeting room were really wonderful and went out of their way to help make us comfortable. The library itself is a very intriguing building that I need to take some pictures of before I head south tomorrow. It's open and airy and uses natural light very effectively. If you're coming to Seattle, visit the library. It's worth a look.

Situated in a city that's probably a little obsessed with technology, wireless is everywhere. The signal strength is very good and they've got a very big pipe that we took ready advantage of.

I only ran into one problem. Yesterday it confused me, but I finally paid enough attention today to figure out a part of it.

LA Observed is being filtered by the library (or some entity downstream), but it's a pretty nasty filter. Rather than temp fail (or even perm fail) the connection or suppress the DNS entries or anything that might make a typical HTTP connection fail quickly so the client could move on, the connection is being accepted and then nothing. Nada. On Tuesday I chalked it up to a problem with the site. Today I realized that I could make connections from other boxes that I was connected to, but not directly from my laptop via the libraries network.

Kevin Roderick has talked about filtering recently because his site is being filtered by the LA Times. I thought that was pretty odd before but now I'm really interested. Of all the nonsense I subscribe to via RSS, what could LAO possibly be doing to be filtered?