406 Not Acceptable

This is rather strange. Recently I’ve noticed the BBC will not let me watch any video content site with Firefox 3 beta 5 on Ubuntu. Now I know this is not a country based issue, I live in the UK. Secondly, I know it is not an issue with my ISP that makes me look like I am accessing the content from abroad. How do I know this? Simple, by switching user agents.

First I clear my cookies and try to watch a video, say one of Fabio Capello’s crazy interviews in English, the site greets me with the following message:
“Sorry this content is not available at the moment”

Now, if you’ve had ISP issues before with the BBC’s site you will know that if your ISP has acrazy routing scheme up the BBC site will give you the following message:
“Sorry this content is not available in your country”

Notice the difference?

Now all I have to do to watch the video is clear my cookies once more and use the User Agent Switcher plug-in for Firefox to gain access. Simply switch the agent to crappy old Internet Explorer on Windows Vista and enjoy the videos…

Well done Hull for their victory over Bristol in the Championship play off final! The Premiership is going to be full of underdogs or historically ’smaller’ clubs next year; thus, it should be really interesting at the bottom of the table. Looking forward to the Leeds Doncaster game tomorrow too; although, revision might just get in the way! I tried to read throughout the match… and it didn’t really turn out so well. Fifteen pages in 90 minutes isn’t really progress!

Oh, the BBC have some new kids show called ‘Meta4orce’ on their homepage. Now I get the idea with the number 4 being used instead of just calling the program Metaforce, like ‘2 Fast 2 Furious’; however, it looks like the shows creators have made a little mistake. The way it currently is, the title would be pronounced Meta-four-orce; now I doubt that was the intended pronunciation!