php - How to avoid "HTTP/1.1 999 Request denied" response from LinkedIn?

Question

I'm making request to LinkedIn page and receiving "HTTP/1.1 999 Request denied" response. I use AWS/EC-2 and get this response. On localhost everything works fine.

This is sample of my code to get html-code of the page.

<?php
error_reporting(E_ALL);
$url= 'https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/5-essential-strategies-digital-michelle';
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 5);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
$response = curl_exec($ch);
$info = curl_getinfo($ch);
curl_close($ch);
var_dump($response);
var_dump($info); 

I don't need whole page content, just meta-tags (title, og-tags).

Answer 1

Note that the error 999 don't exist in W3C Hypertext Transfer Protocol - HTTP/1.1, probably this error is customized (sounds like a joke)

LinkedIn don't allow direct access, the probable reason of them blocking any "url" from others webservers access should be to:

1. Prevent unauthorized copying of information
2. Prevent invasions
3. Prevent abuse of requests.
4. Force use API

Some IP addresses of servers are blocked, as the "IP" from "domestic ISP" are not blocked and that when you access the LinkedIn with web-browser you use the IP of your internet provider.

The only way to access the data is to use their APIs. See:

• Accessing LinkedIn public pages using Python
• Heroku requests return 999

Note: The search engines like Google and Bing probably have their IPs in a "whitelist".