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An HTTP Status Code For Censorship?

Posted by Soulskill on from the you-can't-get-there-from-here dept.

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?"

5 of 369 comments (clear)

  1. Re:So what if there SHOULD be, nobody will use it by SuricouRaven · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Quite a lot, actually. Censorship isn't always entirely secret. Sometimes it can actually achieve great popular support, when the population believes that it is enforcing morality. I'd guess the biggest reason for faking an error rather than admitting censorship is actually accountability - it reduces the chance of detection should one of the list-editors screw up and block something innocent. Take the Virgin Killer incident - most ISPs served up a fake 404 error for that. If it'd been just a minor site, rather than wikipedia, it might never have been noticed.

  2. Re:HTTP 451 by lightknight · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I nominate '703 - Your government is being a twat.'

    Some others:
    701 - Your ISP is being a twat.
    702 - Your organization is being a twat.
    704 - Your ISP is being a twat, and has messed with your DNS request, sending you to a spamvertizement for the domain requested.
    705 - Your ISP is throttling / packet shaping the living hell out of your connection.
    706 - Variant HTML requested (mobile, Flash-free....lots of flags in here).
    707 - The current server time (in ticks since the epoch) & the server's time zone.

    --
    I am John Hurt.
  3. Thailand by FRiC · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Thailand used to have a huge graphical image on a special server for censored websites. Any access on a censored URL would be forwarrded to that image. Apparently the load was so high the server would constantly crash, and eventually they deleted the image, so you get a 404 error. Now they got smarter and just display a text message telling you the website is censored by the government.

  4. China Does It by tobiah · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Many of the services/messages blocked in China come with explicit warnings that they have attempted something illegal. And some don't.

    --
    "The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
  5. Re:It's all in the point of view! by nabsltd · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's not accurate because the server didn't even recieve the request. The request was intercepted in transit and blocked by third party.

    The "502 Bad Gateway" seems to be the correct code for the behavior. The definition may not be 100% accurate in that it implies the proxy (which is what this censorship is) actually received a reply from the target server.

    It would be quite funny if an ISP set the following response:
    305 Use Proxy
    Location: https://tpb.pirateparty.org.uk/