I have no idea what's going on.

[jaseface]

So, this is kind of a long story, but I'll try to make it as short as possible. I'm studying abroad in Istanbul. I got here a week early because that was the cheapest flight, so I'm staying in a hotel until I can move into the school's dorms. Youtube is banned in Turkey because the Turkish government is idiotic. But it's fine - one can just use vtunnel or another proxy, and everything works.

Ok, with that out the way: I switched hotels today, because the first one I was in didn't have any hot water. At the one I was at before, vtunnel worked perfectly. I came here, had trouble connecting to the wireless (kept getting a "connected with limited access" message), so I called down to reception and had their house tech support guy come up. He basically took my computer away into another room, over my protests, did some shit with it, brought it back. I was on the internet, but at the top was a prompt reading something along the lines of "would you like mozilla firefox to remember the password "127" (my room number) for "http 1.228.432…." or something along those lines. Before I could ask him about it, he just said "Iyi aksamlar" (turkish for Good evening) and walked away. I didn't think anything of it, so I took a nice long shower. When I got out, I wanted to watch a movie on youtube, so I went to open Vtunnel and got this message:

Request denied by pfSense proxy: 403 Forbidden
Reason: ACCESS DENIED Client address: 192.168.1.109
Client group: OPT1
Target group: blk_BL_redirector
URL: http://vtunnel.com/

Now I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt the guy had fucked something up. But just to make sure, I tried a bunch of different proxy sites, and they all came back with the same message. So I called back down to the lobby, asked them to send the tech guy back up so I could get him to un-do whatever he did, even it meant going without Internet for the 2 days I'll be here. Unfortunately, it was a different guy who didn't speak a lick of English. He just shrugged, said he didn't know what was wrong, and went away. The guy who did this is apparently gone and won't be coming back over the weekend.

So I've turned to the kindness of people more knowledgeable about this sort of thing than I am. What exactly did this guy do? And did he do it just to this internet connection, or did he do something to my computer's connectivity settings? As is probably apparent by now, I'm not very knowledgeable about the intricacies of internet connectivity.  But I hope someone can help me, by telling me what's going on, and what I can do to reverse whatever he did.

Thank you!

[jhabers]

check in your ie settings if he set a proxy. Tools>Internet Options>Connections>LAN Settings

[Efonnes]

That message is likely coming from their router.  The router is apparently running a proxy server that blocks those sites.

I have no idea what he would have been doing to get your computer to connect, but it is likely unrelated.  I suppose it could have been proxy settings in the browser, as jhabers suggested (but firefox's settings, rather than IE's).  If so, you will need to remove those proxy settings when you go somewhere else.

[jaseface]

Thanks kindly for your answers. You're right, it seems that the fault lies in the hotel's internet server, not something he did to my computer or connection settings. So that's a relief.