Despite me selecting Minecraft 1.12.2 as the "affected version", I only picked that because there was no older version allowed to be picked. This bug actually only affects older versions, but it is a new bug that has occurred as the result of somebody re-configuring download permissions on http://s3.amazonaws.com/MinecraftResources/

I have discovered that old versions (such as 1.5.2) of MC that depend on the "resources" folder to hold the sound files, don't have sound anymore. Looking at the log, it turns out that the HTTP requests to the server that holds these sound files all trigger a 403 error from the server. The HTTP status code 403 means "forbidden". An example of one such error message in the log is:
java.io.IOException: Server returned HTTP response code: 403 for URL: http://s3.amazonaws.com/MinecraftResources/sound3/damage/hit2.ogg

In other words, it appears that some employee at Mojang has configured the server to block access to these files. While this has no effect on newer versions of MC, that download resources from a different location, it certainly has an effect on those who want to run older versions of the game.

So I politely request that these files be set so that they are no longer blocked from downloading.