GitHub issue #3519: CC100: Using HTTPS for the data source URL fixes load_dataset()
State: closed | Created: 2022-01-04T18:45:54Z

Without this change the following script (with any lang parameter) consistently fails. After changing to the HTTPS URL, the script works as expected.

```python
from datasets import load_dataset

dataset = load_dataset("cc100", lang="en")
```

This is the error produced by the previous script:
```sh
Using custom data configuration en-lang=en
Downloading and preparing dataset cc100/en to /home/antti/.cache/huggingface/datasets/cc100/en-lang=en/0.0.0/526ac20780de5e074cf73a7466e868cb67f960b48f6de42ff6a6c4e71910d71b...
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/antti/tmp/cc100/cc100.py", line 3, in <module>
    dataset = load_dataset("cc100", lang="en")
  File "/home/antti/tmp/cc100/venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/datasets/load.py", line 1694, in load_dataset
    builder_instance.download_and_prepare(
  File "/home/antti/tmp/cc100/venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/datasets/builder.py", line 595, in download_and_prepare
    self._download_and_prepare(
  File "/home/antti/tmp/cc100/venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/datasets/builder.py", line 661, in _download_and_prepare
    split_generators = self._split_generators(dl_manager, **split_generators_kwargs)
  File "/home/antti/.cache/huggingface/modules/datasets_modules/datasets/cc100/526ac20780de5e074cf73a7466e868cb67f960b48f6de42ff6a6c4e71910d71b/cc100.py", line 117, in _split_generators
    path = dl_manager.download_and_extract(download_url)
  File "/home/antti/tmp/cc100/venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/datasets/utils/download_manager.py", line 308, in download_and_extract
    return self.extract(self.download(url_or_urls))
  File "/home/antti/tmp/cc100/venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/datasets/utils/download_manager.py", line 196, in download
    downloaded_path_or_paths = map_nested(
  File "/home/antti/tmp/cc100/venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/datasets/utils/py_utils.py", line 251, in map_nested
    return function(data_struct)
  File "/home/antti/tmp/cc100/venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/datasets/utils/download_manager.py", line 217, in _download
    return cached_path(url_or_filename, download_config=download_config)
  File "/home/antti/tmp/cc100/venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/datasets/utils/file_utils.py", line 298, in cached_path
    output_path = get_from_cache(
  File "/home/antti/tmp/cc100/venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/datasets/utils/file_utils.py", line 617, in get_from_cache
    raise ConnectionError(f"Couldn't reach {url} (error {response.status_code})")
ConnectionError: Couldn't reach http://data.statmt.org/cc-100/en.txt.xz (error 503)
```

Note that I get the same behavior also using curl on the command line. The plain HTTP "curl -L http://data.statmt.org/cc-100/en.txt.xz" fails with "503 Service unavailable", but the with the HTTPS version of the URL curl starts downloading the file.

My guess is that the server does overly aggressive rate-limitting. When a client requests an HTTP URL, it (sensibly) gets redirected to the HTTPS equivalent, but now the server notices two requests coming from the same client (the original HTTP and the redirected HTTPS) during a brief time windows and rate-limitter kicks in and blocks the second request! If the client initally uses the HTTPS URL there's only one incoming request which the rate-limitter allows.