The metadata API is returning bad data. It doesn’t appear to be happening with any other API. The following link is the curl output of calling the API: http://pastebin.com/u9yyw2Vc
You’re looking at a compressed response (Content-Encoding: gzip).
Have a read of the following existing threads and let me know if you need any more info:
Completely missed that header. Thanks for pointing it out. Now checking for gzip and deflate. Know if any other content-encodings may be returned?