Project Euler Forum

I was using project euler as usual, when upon trying to open a link in a new tab, it just showed "403 Forbidden: Request forbidden by administrative rules"
Did some googling, and adding to the bottom of my hosts file in /etc/ seemed to fix it.
All works fine now, but I still want to know-- what could have caused this?
Is this some sort of DDOS protection that I tripped, is this my ISP being weird(live in america and have never had isp-related issues), or something else?
Thanks in advance.

I had the same error today, with the same fix, for what it's worth.

Thank you for reporting this. I'm not aware of any network maintenance or changes our hosts have made that may have caused this, and I very much doubt you've triggered a block. However, I have just submitted a ticket to support to ask if they know anything about this.

Are you still experiencing the same problem? If you remove those explicit IP references from your hosts file do you still get a 403 error?

No, strangely enough, removing those lines does not make the issue reappear.
Works fine without it now.