Seems the latest 'update' to libwww-perl broke things that used to work with POE::Component::Client::HTTP.

After the upgrade my script dies on certain requests but always in the same spot and giving the same error:
HTTP::Message content must be bytes at /home/overlordq/lib/POE/Component/Client/HTTP/Request.pm line 187
The relevant lines in PoCo::Client::HTTP are: 
      eval { $content = $response->decoded_content };
      if ($content) { $response->content($content); }

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Digging through HTTP::Message, this has to do with utf8 stuff in the content, and the relevant lines in there are:
In the content subroutine is a call to _set_content, and in _set_content is a call to _utf8_downgrade: 
*_utf8_downgrade = defined(&utf8::downgrade) ?
    sub {
        utf8::downgrade($_[0], 1) or
            Carp::croak("HTTP::Message content must be bytes")
    }
    :
    sub {
    };

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Looking through the libwww changelog I noticed: "Don't allow HTTP::Message content to be set to Unicode strings."

Any suggestions on what's a man to do? And which module has the wrong behavior so I know where to report it? FWIW, here's the headers being sent back from the server that causes the error and possibly a related cpan bug: 
HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Date: Thu, 01 May 2008 02:30:39 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.5
Cache-Control: private, s-maxage=0, max-age=0, must-revalidate
Content-Language: en
Vary: Accept-Encoding,Cookie
Expires: Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Length: 12241
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Connection: keep-alive

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In reply to libwww-perl, POE and Unicode by OverlordQ

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