Using the default lynx User Agent and visiting economist.com gives a 403. changing it to "firefox" allows me to visit the site. Why would they do such a UA based filtering?
Lynx is great for rendering text (99% of The Economist's content) but not so great for displaying images (100% of The Economist's ads).<p>There's probably a simpler explanation involving no malice.
Sometimes I use Lynx on text-heavy pages for readability (monospace feels easier on the eyes) and just to have a fully keyboard-driven browser, especially with the arrow keys. Just curious if that's your use case too?
I have blocked a version of Lynx on my own site - there was a scraper tool using Lynx as the User Agent, presumably as a way of requesting the most scraper friendly version of the site. Somehow I traced it back to a pirate/cracking group using the scraper to monitor my site for software updates, so they had the best chance of releasing 0-day cracks of my software. (Should've been easy for them to work around, but I guess I'm small enough that it wasn't worth their time.)<p>Lynx itself is awesome though, I used to use it a lot in my University days.