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Here's a funny story that I haven't got to the end of yet.
I have been getting "Access Denied" messages on various websites, sites I have previously had no issues getting to but now cannot, for example I can't get to the Steam store anymore I get this instead
Access Denied
You don't have permission to access "http://store.steampowered.com/" on this server.
Reference #18.a4052017.1649144458
I didn't have much luck with google, lots of people claiming it was all caused by Windows proxy settings, but my proxy settings were turned off, others mention clearing caches and cookies etc, but I browse in incognito mode so no help there.
One thing I found that did resolve this was to browse via a VPN, this points to some sort of block affecting my fibre public IP address.
I then found a post in the depths of the net titled "Why is Akamai blocking me" from there I discovered Akamai's IP reputation lookup page (https://www.akamai.com/us/en/clientrep-lookup/) which gave me the following response, and seemingly the reason I was seeing all these access denied messages
Your IPv4 Address 222.153.x.x received a bad risk score.
The IPv4 Address was associated with the following malicious activity:
Scanning Tool
Web Attacker
Web Scraper
I don't have a static IP, just whatever Spark randomly assigned me from it's pool. I thought perhaps I got unlucky and ended up with a bad IP from someone who had been misusing their internet ;-) but no it looks like all addresses in this range have a bad risk score according to Akamai.
It seems quite difficult to get support from Spark these days, I don't feel up to sitting on the phone for an age then trying to explain this issue, and the help from the app let me type a novel before saying its not a human and maybe someone will get time to look at the problem in the next few days...
I'm tempted to ask Spark for a static IP but I don't know what range they would use for that and if I might not be any better off.
Short of VPN'ing the entire households traffic I'm not sure what else can be done.
