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Locked Out of Google App Engine

Originally published by "dbarker" on 2008-05-22 11:37:00Z

403 Forbidden: In writing my earlier tinydb post, something odd happened. All requests to tinydb were stopped with this message.

We’re sorry… but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.

The message wasn’t from tinydb, but rather from Google itself. I’m still locked out, 45 minutes later.

It’s IP-based, because I can no longer hit tinydb from any machine on my network.

This is cause for a little concern. I wasn’t doing anything strange, and I only hit a couple URLs on the domain (through Firefox, I might add – not through a Web service-ish client).

If you can get locked out this easily, it makes me wonder about the viability of tinydb in particular, and Google App Engine in general.

Comment by "Frank van Puffelen" on 2008-05-22 16:55:00Z
As far as I can tell, the problem was not restricted to tinydb.org nor to Google App Engine. My personal blog suffered the same fate and it is blogger based (custom domain name but hosted on Google's servers), so it has nothing directly to do with GAE. It seems more likely that Google had an interesting problem with all of their hosted apps. :-)
Comment by "ppatpel@aol.com" on 2008-06-14 08:39:00Z
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