On Sat, Aug 1, 2009 at 11:21 AM, Alan McKinnon<[email protected]> wrote: > On Saturday 01 August 2009 16:53:08 Paul Hartman wrote: >> Hi, >> >> For some reason, YouTube doesn't work for me in some web browsers. It >> acts like the hostname is not found. When I do host "www.youtube.com" >> lookups and tcptraceroute to port 80 and everything else I have tried >> to diagnose it seems to work just fine. I'm not using a proxy, I don't >> have youtube in my hosts file, and I haven't encountered this problem >> with any other website, including all of Google's other sites which I >> use frequently. I'm totally baffled. >> >> Loads perfectly fine in: >> lynx >> links (text and graphical mode) >> Opera >> >> Does not load at all in: >> Seamonkey >> Konqueror >> Firefox > > Those three browsers can all use the same plugins, I'm not sure about the > first three. I'd be checking for stuff that works like AdBlock. I especially > know of extensions that block YouTube
To add more confusion: I just tried accessing YouTube over Tor from the very browser in which it refuses to work normally and it loaded fine. So I am leaning heavily towards this being an ISP issue. The fact that traceroute shows no errors really makes me wonder if my ISP (a Cable TV provider) is intentionally blocking YouTube (their competition?). But only for certain browsers? It doesn't make any sense. Following that thought -- I wonder if there is a special YouTube server for my ISP and the standard/outside YouTube server farm is blocked? I've read about Google hosting servers at or near major ISPs to reduce the number of hops, but have never heard anything about my ISP doing it. I do not use my ISP's DNS servers, so I could very well be trying access a "different" YouTube. I guess I will have to do some lookups on their servers and compare the results. My ISP's DNS servers have 3 strikes against them: 1. It is slow, slow, slow, slow, slow... and did I mention slow? :) 2. They have previously sold user's DNS/browsing history to advertisers. They claim to have stopped, but... 3. They "hijack" DNS, making every invalid address resolve to an address anyway, which when viewed in a web browser goes to an "error" page (full of advertisements and "sponsored links"). You never know if a hostname is really invalid or not, which makes troubleshooting non-HTTP connections interesting.
