This issue affects the ghapi library when trying to download non-JSON data. See #AnswerDotAI/ghapi#22 (comment)
The issue arises because a decode flag needs to be provided to urlrequest from the call in urlsend ( https://github.com/fastai/fastcore/blob/master/fastcore/net.py#L170 )
I'm not certain of the best solution - just passing kwargs or a specific flag etc.