Score:2

403 Forbidden error when accessing website using Ubuntu

us flag

I'm trying to access the website www.spea.pt (Portuguese Society for the Study of Birds). When I access the website from Arch Linux (or from my android phone) everything works. However when doing so using Ubuntu (18.04, 20.04, Kubuntu 21.10, or even my Ubuntu touch phone) I always get this error:

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access this resource.

Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

This occurs regardless of the used browser. Does anyone have any ideas on why this is not working? Is there maybe some block list built into Ubuntu?

ChanganAuto avatar
us flag
I can confirm this happens also in Ubuntu 21.10 but only with Firefox. Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge open the website correctly.
us flag
I had only tried Chromium and "Web". Both these browsers must have "ubuntu" in their user agent string. Google chrome and MS Edge must have a different user agent string?
24601 avatar
in flag
There are 34 answers in [this Q&A from SO](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10873295/error-message-forbidden-you-dont-have-permission-to-access-on-this-server) to look through/
us flag
Thank you for trying to help @24601, but the link you provided is for host side solutions, whereas I was looking for a client side solution since I have no control over the SPEA website.
Score:7
us flag

It seems like simply changing the browser agent string solves the issue. Replacing the word "ubuntu" with "linux" suffices. I'll try to contact the website owner since this looks more like a website issue than an Ubuntu issue.

mangohost

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