Project Gutenberg inaccessible through VPNs, TOR, or anonymizers

4 points

11 years ago

Following the recent library - TOR relay thread, I thought I would highlight this Project Gutenberg error message from

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/.

I was trying to download a copy of the Communist Manifesto -- not that I support the authors' views.

Considering the years of volunteer effort that has gone into building this resource, I think they should be more supportive of the freedom to speak/read than this:

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Error 403

Maybe you have just a wrong url. Go to http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/ first to see if the error persists.

If you get the error again check that you:

Don't use anonymizers, open proxies, VPNs, or TOR to access Project Gutenberg. This includes the Google proxies that are used by Chrome.

Don't access Project Gutenberg from hosted servers.

Don't use automated software to download lots of books. We have a limit on how fast you can go while using this site. If you surpass this limit you get blocked for 24h.

We have a daily limit on how many books you can download. If you exceeded this limit you get blocked for 24h.

If you use the RSS feed, set your update interval to 24 hours.

If you are sure that none of the above applies to you, and wish us to investigate the problem, we need to know your IP address. Go to this site, don't sign up, just copy the IP address (it looks like: 12.34.56.78 but your numbers will be different) and mail it to us. If that page also shows a proxy address, we need that one too.