Permission denied contacting wordpress.org

Hi, I have installed WordPress 2.8.3 on freehostia. Everything runs well but when Im going to search a theme from the Dashboard I get “An Unexpected HTTP Error occured during the API request.”. According to other posts I have edited my http.php and set the timeout to 30 secs. I added “print_r($response);” too to see what is failing. Everytime my blog is trying to contact other site (or at least wordpress.org and google.com) I get a “Permission denied” error.

Any idea about how to fix it? Thanks