Virtualbox.org "402 Payment Required"

SpikedCola · 2025-12-12T14:39:10 1765550350

I can't access virtualbox.org any more, they now show an error page saying "Payment Required", with status code 402.

Interestingly, if I change my user agent to "curl/7.70.0", I can browse virtualbox.org again.

They seem to be unhappy with my user agent specifically:

  curl -H "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/109.0.0.0 Safari/537.36" https://www.virtualbox.org 
  
  <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
  <html><head>
  <title>402 Payment Required</title>
  </head><body>
  <h1>Payment Required</h1>

f30e3dfed1c9 · 2025-12-12T15:41:35 1765554095

I just downloaded VirtualBox-7.2.4-170995-OSX.dmg and Oracle_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-7.2.4.vbox-extpack with no problem.

SpikedCola · 2025-12-12T19:13:30 1765566810

If you wouldn't mind, I would be curious - if you run the above curl command, do you get the same error?

It could be a combination of IP + user agent (+ something else) that's causing me trouble.

f30e3dfed1c9 · 2025-12-12T22:43:30 1765579410

I get this with your curl command:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN"> <html><head> <title>402 Payment Required</title> </head><body> <h1>Payment Required</h1> <p>The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.</p> <p>Please contact the server administrator at www@virtualbox.org to inform them of the time this error occurred, and the actions you performed just before this error.</p> <p>More information about this error may be available in the server error log.</p> </body></html>

SpikedCola · 2025-12-13T21:26:53 1765661213

Thanks for that! So it's most likely user agent then. Wonder why they don't like it.