Slashdot Mirror
An HTTP Status Code For Censorship?
New submitter Tryfen writes "UK ISPs are being forced to block The Pirate Bay. One is using 'HTTP 403 Forbidden' to tell users that they cannot access the site. From the article: 'However, chief among my concerns is the technical way this censorship is implemented. At the moment, my ISP serves up an HTTP 403 error.' ... As far as I am concerned, this response is factually incorrect. According to the W3C Specifications: "The 4xx class of status code is intended for cases in which the client seems to have erred."' So, should there be a specific HTTP status code to tell a user they are being censored?"
Here's the rest of the list for those looking to be similarly innovative. Personally, I vote for 418.9: Government is a tinpot.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
As for the error code, 403 (Forbidden) is described as "The server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it". Is this not technically accurate?
It's not accurate because the server didn't even recieve the request. The request was intercepted in transit and blocked by third party.
Censorship need not be to hide the existence of information from the public, only restrict their access to it. The Chinese government is actively trying to hide the existence of the Tienanmen square massacre, and that's certain the form of censorship we think of most, but it's not all of it. The British government isn't hiding that the pirate bay exists, they are simply saying you aren't allowed to access it from within the UK. Pixelating porn or graphic violence isn't telling you that people don't have penises or their heads blown off it is done because seeing it could (according to the censor) be damaging to you.
For the british government a 'censorship' code makes a lot of sense. "You are attempting to access material forbidden to persons within the UK, for information on why this information is blocked click here'. The same could be said for much of the 'morality' police in the middle east. "This site contains blasphemous material and to protect you from its content we are preventing your access, this helpful message brought to you by the police of vice and virtue'. In fact in those cases a censorship status code would be an indication that the bureaucracy is doing the job it is tasked with doing, and something they can point to as places they have blocked.
In the same way your anti phishing filter might be censoring you from some malicious website, they're quite happy to tell you that you've been blocked from that site, because you've actually asked them to censor it for you. The government in the UK especially, was asked by the public who voted them into office to make decisions, including censoring material (as that is a government power) in their best interests.
The UK government through the film classification board censors films and games, or it used to until some of that power was transfered to the EU. What criteria they used for censorship wasn't a secret, and they even had processes for appeals and re-evaluations if you felt like the censorship was unfair. Everyone knew what they were doing, because that was their mandate, rate films, restrict access to them, and prevent harmful material from getting into the UK. Website censorship isn't fundamentally any different, by 'importing' a banned film from the US or france or whatever you were doing the mail order equivalent of changing your DNS provider. The fact that the legal situation in the UK hasn't caught up to DNS providers yet doesn't mean it won't.
The problem with that is that the oldest manuscript reference we have to the number is a reference in writings by Iranaeus in the 2nd century AD where he says that the number is 666. The oldest manuscript copies of Revelation 13 which have the number as 616 are from the 3rd century AD. Iranaeus was a student of a student of the author of revelation. While it is possible Iranaeus was wrong about what the author of Revelation originally wrote, it is reasonable to assume that he was correct, especially since he refers to scribal errors in the number in some manuscripts.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I have heard this is because, in Arabic, 6 is "ellah", which has obvious similarities to "Allah".
Wrong.
In Arabic the number 6 is pronounced "sitteh". If fact, there is no number pronounced anywhere close to "ellah" or "allah". The only two numbers from 1 to 10 that even start with a vowel are 4 (arba'a) and 10 ('ashrah). And because Arabic numbers follow a pattern, just like most languages, this rule holds (ie: 40 starts with a vowel, 400 starts with a vowel, etc).
Perhaps you're recalling this ( http://www.beholdthebeast.com/islam__quran_and_666.htm ) Christian propaganda?