@squarism yup, they removed it from the list of bad sites.
it shouldn't impact gem install and yet I was able to gem install before it became bad, but i wasn’t able to after it became bad, and when it stopped being marked bad I could install again.
I suspect that my ISP (comcast) may have been doing something related to it. Switching my gem source their ip address worked, which implies it wasn't anything on rubygems.org 's server that was the problem.