Thinking about it, I have an idea as to a possible reason for the problem: overzealous anti-hacker protection. Certainly wget is a commandline http/ftp client from linux thats often used as part of php-based worms and hacks, and it could be that your host took a heavy-handed approach to avoiding one of the php worms that did the rounds (there was one that mangled any site running phpBB). I can't think why cc is blocked, but whatever they're using doesn't care about any characters before the 'c's. Possibly there's an exploit involving it.