Strange 403 Forbidden reply with a certain phrase in quotes - others get it too

[muriel_volestrangler]

Post a reply with anything in the title, but the body consisting of the following, but enclosed in either single or double quotes:

not connected in

I get a "403 forbidden" reply when I do.

[Glorfindel]

1. I did it. Got the same result.

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. It's bizarre - drop the "in", or the quotes, and it's OK

I was posting an excerpt from a news story.

[questionseverything]

2. "What's bosy"?

[marybourg]

4. Body?

[muriel_volestrangler]

5. Yep - corrected (nt)

[questionseverything]

6. Anything in the title

“Not connected in”

[muriel_volestrangler]

8. Hmm - slightly different quotes

If I use the slightly skewed double quote - ” - it works OK, as it did for you. If I use the purely vertical double quote - " - I get the 403 Forbidden error.

[questionseverything]

11. Anything

I was trying to help but I can’t find the ‘’ purely vertical double quote’’

[muriel_volestrangler]

13. Ah - on my (British) laptop keyboard the standard double quote is purely vertical

Producing the slightly skewed one is a lot harder (I copied from your post).

A post below suggests it's a security feature. You did help by showing it's only certain types of quotes are involved.

[questionseverything]

14. Cool 😎

[Glorfindel]

7. I actually got a "403 Forbidden" message.

Bizarre, indeed. Who knew that there at least two categories of "Forbidden"?

[muriel_volestrangler]

9. Sorry, it was 403 - I wrote 404 by accident

Too used to talking about "404 no such page", I guess.

[usonian]

10. There is protection against hack attacks

and some characters are apparently forbidden, as is some HTML.

As an outside example, Mister Null has real problems with computers, as it's a reserved word.

https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/

But there's a dark side to being a Null, and you coders out there are way ahead of me on this. For those of you unwise in the ways of programming, the problem is that "null" is one of those famously "reserved" text strings in many programming languages. Making matters worse is that software programs frequently use "null" specifically to ensure that a data field is not empty, so it's often rejected as input in a web form.

Quotes and html blocks can contain payloads designed to inject code or database commands.

"The internet's one tough town"

[muriel_volestrangler]

12. Yeah, I was wondering if that is what causes it

I see that "not connected" is an SQL term. But it is, for some reason, the addition of "in" to that that causes the problem.

[usonian]

15. There are also those temporary blockages.

But I thought that would be off-topic.

But strange things do happen. I can't access archive.{md, ph, is } when using iCloud Private Relay, a kind of vpn.

When I was doing admin work, users would ask me to "fix the internet" when it went down. I would check our stuff and wait it out. Usually a fiber cable cut by bulldozers somewhere in San Jose or a router programmed wrong in a data center in an unknown location.

Monitoring systems pick those up and alert staff. I worked on one and it was interesting to implement.

There's a history behind monitoring equipment and the Perl programming language. For computer geeks. Later.