It seems to be a windows problem. The artifacts failing on windows builds on linux (I take that you run linux and the version number you mentioned, 3.5.0-17, is a linux kernel version and not maven's version. Maven has reached 3.1.1 stable).

I'll see if I can get some artifacts from maven this afternoon on my mac. Aries' parent pom tries to pull snapshots from [snapshots.repository.codehaus.org] and the linux box I tried is a corporate box locked away from the Internet. I'll let you know how it goes.