WebClient.DownloadString 403 Error

[18experience]

I've been testing using WebClient.DownloadString and sometimes I encounter an error: "The remote server returned an error: (403) Forbidden". It is based upon which url I use. For instance, this works:

        Dim wc As New Net.WebClient
        Dim strResult As String = String.Empty

        Try
            strResult = wc.DownloadString("http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_of_the_United_States")
        Catch ex As Exception
            MsgBox(ex.Message, MsgBoxStyle.OkOnly, "ex")
        End Try

But this doesn't:

        Dim wc As New Net.WebClient
        Dim strResult As String = String.Empty

        Try
            strResult = wc.DownloadString("http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama")
        Catch ex As Exception
            MsgBox(ex.Message, MsgBoxStyle.OkOnly, "ex")
        End Try

The only difference is the url. The only difference I can see in the pages is that the second page is a bit larger. However, I also tried "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust", which is larger than the Obama page (it would appear) and it worked just fine. I can load the Obama page in a WebBrowser just fine, so I have no idea why DownloadString is failing on that.

Any thoughts? Thanks.

Sorry about using political pages, I just during testing that the Obama pages always fails.

[Negative0]

The Obama page worked fine for me. Could it be a firewall blocking it?

[18experience]

"The Obama page worked fine for me. Could it be a firewall blocking it? "

See, that's what I thought. But I originally ran into this problem while testing at my friend's house (U-verse package, he just plugged in the router, no special settings). But, I have the same problem with the same page here at work. I can load the Obama page in Firefox (or a WebBrowser control), it just won't play nice with DownloadString. I've seen this error on a lot of wikipedia pages (though I didn't save any of the other examples) as well.

Though, if you can get it without problems, one would think it would be some of network issue.

[18experience]

I search the forums just for "403" and got a few more results.

On this thread:
http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.p...&highlight=403

User Banjo seemed to have a similar problem and stated "Just to let you know it was an ip block thing, it's a secure site thats why. Thanks for the help."

Does that mean Banjo resolved it, or just gave up? If Banjo did resolve the problem, the thread doesn't indicate that. If the problem was resolved, can anyone glean from that thread how Banjo resolved it?

I don't know if wikipedia is a secure site, but I doubt it as this is a problem that I find very rarely.

Thanks