strange "403 Forbidden" error on accessing https://algorithmsbook.com/

[ko567]

This is PM 33.5.0 on FreeBSD. Web console says:

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The character encoding of the HTML document was not declared. The document will render with 
garbled text in some browser configurations if the document contains characters from outside the US-ASCII range.
The character encoding of the page must be declared in the document or in the transfer protocol.  

Firefox displays the page fine.

[adoxa]

Both Basilisk (2025.01.04) and Pale Moon (33.5.1) worked fine here (Windows 10).

[Moonchild]

Unable to reproduce here either. Perhaps your IP/region is blocked by the website? Did you make any preference changes that could influence web access, like changing the referrer, user-agent, or similar?

[Night Wing]

Works for me also without any problems.

At this time I am using 64 bit linux Pale Moon 33.5.1 (GTK2) running in 64 bit linux Mint 22.1 (Xia) Xfce.

[ko567]

Unable to reproduce here either. Perhaps your IP/region is blocked by the website? Did you make any preference changes that could influence web access, like changing the referrer, user-agent, or similar?

I updated to PM 33.5.1, and the problem remains. The IP/region can't be blocked because Firefox works. As far as I know/can tell, I haven't made any changes like the ones you mention.

The only possibly relevant extensions I have are Modify HTTP Response, which has only one rule

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/discourse|^community\.|^forum\./

and uBlock Origin.

[mmouse]

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Web console says:

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The character encoding of the HTML document was not declared. The document will render with 
garbled text in some browser configurations if the document contains characters from outside the US-ASCII range.
The character encoding of the page must be declared in the document or in the transfer protocol.  

I'm sure that this is too obvious for the people who have already replied to say it, but I'm not so sure for the original poster, so I'll say that a 403 error code means that the web server has denied access to the normal home page and the page displayed by the browser must be the corresponding error page - that could be not very well coded because that's often not a priority to put a lot of work in designing error pages. The browser can't magically turn an error page into the normal home page. Looking up the address gives 96.127.129.50 but that's not an obvious candidate like Cloudflare for strange blocking rules. Maybe give a look to the network tab to see if the query is redirected. It could be useful to compare the network trace (using tcpdump or whatever) between accessing the page through PM and with wget (I tried wget algorithmsbook.com and it downloads the very simple home page without problem).

[mmouse]

Well, thinking this a bit more, I believe that it's entirely possible for a site to deny access to its home page according to the user agent.
I just stumbled on this:
https://www.popularmechanics.com/scienc ... t-vehicle/
clicking on the link for the word 'published', the linked site (www.sciencedirect.com) reports an error with PM:

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There was a problem providing the content you requested
Please contact our support team for more information and provide the details below.

However, creating a new preference with a fake user agent such as this:

general.useragent.override.www.sciencedirect.com;Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:127.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/127.0

is enough to get the sciencedirect.com site to display the linked article.
So it's possible that a similar trick could work for the original poster, maybe there was a specific user agent set that the web server was denying.

[adoxa]

As far as ScienceDirect goes it (being cloudflare) doesn't like Firefox less than 120.0 (i.e. Firefox/120.0 works, Firefox/119.9 does not; seemingly rv doesn't matter, nor does Goanna or Basilisk).