I'm having trouble with Download in Manage Repositories: it just hangs for ages and then errors. n800, mapper 2.3.1-os2008

I've discovered that this is because it is attempting to download from port 8080 on the remote server(s), i.e. the "webcache" port. This doesn't get through my firewall. Is there any reason why it doesn't use port 80?

Interestingly, when I try to view http:gnuite.com in my Firefox browser on my PC, it redirects to http:gnuite.com:8080, so that also fails.