St. Louis Bread Company banned MySpace.

[Drew Somervell]

It's true. No MySpace at Panera. Let them know how you feel about this. Here's the address.

[e-mail]

They claim that somebody might accidentaly see something offensive on somebody else's screen.

The Circuit could be next.

[Bill Streeter]

I sorta have mixed feelings about this. I hate myspace in so many ways, but at the same time thats a pretty lame policy.

[MattHurst]

just in time for the midwest bloggers meeting too! i'd like to second what Bill has said. Notice this is a move by corporate Panera rather than the localized STL Bread Co. I doubt they'll notice a local player like The Circuit just yet.

[Scott Lasser]

Try the Hartford Cafe on Hartford and Roger. They have free wifi.

[Bill Streeter]

Yes, the Hartford is great, and not corporately owned. Nice place to hang out too! I take my kid and dog there for coffee when the weather is nice.

[brain]

i think there should be a protest were a dozen or so people go into breadcompanies in mass and load up 2 girls one cup during lunch rush. also i dont see anything inherantly wrong with myspace. if you look at it as teenage hook up online then yeah its grating. but all i know is when i was trying to get into being touring rock band guy i would have everything short of suck a dick to have it at arms reach. i mean you can book whole tours using nothing but myspace and turn a profit. i know its somehow cooler to scour around town for a copy of book your own fucking life and rely on a handfull of phone numbers to line up a tour but ........actually no. thats lame as hell. hell its great in town too.

[kopper]

I'm wondering just how "offensive" someone's profile on Myspace can be... I mean, I know I've seen profiles for strippers and scantilly clad ladies ... um, well only a couple of times, though, heh heh ... anyway, my point is that none of those profiles showed anything worse than what you'd see on a Victoria's Secret TV commercial. Myspace is pretty good about removing accounts of people that violate their policies for inappropriate content.

So is this the *only* site they're blocking or do they block other social networking sites as well?

[Drew Somervell]

Youtube used to be blocked but that changed some time ago. I know I can't access my flickr account at breadco. but I'm done worrying about it. Their lack of vision has opened up new places for me to go for my morning interwebnet fix. Mississippi Mud and The Hartford Cafe have been getting my dollar monies lately.

[John Reimers]

Drew, there are ways around this. Proxy websites are best but might be blocked.. depends on how smart their System Administrator is.
Try using Google translate... http://www.google.com/translate_t. There you can enter the site name (/www.myspace.com). It will ask what language to translate from and into English. I just tried German to English and Spanish to English.. both brought up Myspace in English and I was able to log in just as if I had gone to http:/www.myspace.com directly.
This is a bit of an old trick and again, depends on how smart their SysAdmin is. I haven't tried it at Panera but I doubt they would block Google. If the SysAdmin is smart they will block Google Translate. What happens is when you do this, their filters see Google.com, not Myspace.com and they let it through.
Another way is to do a WHOIS for and put in the IP address instead of the URL.
I can't imagine why Panera would block Myspace.. seems to me if you are a paying customer you should be allowed to access any site (except maybe porn or warez sites). Hell, Myspace is not illegal.
Going to another hotspot as you have is a simple and effective workaround.
Another way is to enter the IP Address instead of the URL. I just did a Traceroute to Google and came up with the IP Address: 64.233.197.99. Myspace comes up as 216.178.39.74. So you would enter http://216.178.39.74 instead of www.myspace.com. I just tried that a voila, Myspace.
If this works at Panera you can add another attribute to your resume.. Hacker. tee hee.
If enough people write to Panera and say "I can't access Myspace at St. Louis Bread company. Why do you block Myspace from paying customers? Anyway, I just go to a different place with wireless that doesn't block Myspace and eat there. They get my money now and you don't. I am not the only one who has encountered this and now avoids Panera in favor of other places like the Hartford Cafe (among dozens of others). Myspace is VERY popular and every day you continue to block it you are losing customers and their money. Consider that and please write me. Explain why you block Myspace. You are alienating customers and losing money. Frustrating but there are plenty of alternatives".
Just a thought...

[John Reimers]

Sorry, not WHOIS but ReverseDNS. Go to http://www.all-nettools.com/toolbox, where is says NsLookup, type in www.google.com (or any URL) and you will get the IP address. Example result:

www.google.com canonical name = www.l.google.com.
Name: www.l.google.com
Address: 64.233.169.103
Name: www.l.google.com
Address: 64.233.169.104
Name: www.l.google.com
Address: 64.233.169.147
Name: www.l.google.com

Any of these IP Addresses will work. Google has almost 3,000. IP addresses but they will all get you to the same place.

Cheers,
John

[Dana Loesch]

People can choose to avert their eyes from a computer screen. Way lame.

[Sheena Von Killer]

I think Bread Co. blocks lots of sites...I read an artical a few months back in the RFT...lame~