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"451" Error Will Tell Users When Governments Are Blocking Websites

Posted by timothy on from the captain-beatty-approves dept.

Daniel_Stuckey writes "To fend off the chilling effects of heavy-handed internet restriction, the UK consumer rights organization Open Rights Group wants to create a new version of the '404 Page Not Found' error message, called '451 unavailable,' to specify that a webpage wasn't simply not there, it was ordered to be blocked for legal reasons."

6 of 255 comments (clear)

  1. This may work........ by allaunjsilverfox2 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Until they block the 451 page and redirect it to a 404.

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    1. Re:This may work........ by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Maybe we can have a contest for the most creative 451 pages. Who knows, maybe they can display personal information about you derived from your IP address, your cookies and even turn on your computer's camera. Ahhh, good times when you know the government isn;t just blocking the site, it's spying on those who tried to access it.

    2. Re:This may work........ by Hatta · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Seems to me that issuing such an error code would already violate the gag order they routinely apply to these court orders.

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  2. Already exists? by mwn3d · · Score: 5, Interesting

    According to the Wikipedia article on HTTP status codes 451 already exists for exactly this reason. This doesn't seem new.

  3. We're going to need some subcodes or something... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I would be strongly in favor of not having censored pages look like nonexistent or technically glitched pages, as there's nothing more insidious than silent censorship; but I have to wonder if an HTTP response code is the right tool for the job.

    The various existing codes are not particularly granular, and an anti-censorship pressure scheme that has any hope of succeeding needs to be granular.

    It doesn't help me if all I now is "Example.org is unavailable for legal reasons". I need to know what jurisidiction, what law, what court order(if any), what private actor (in the case of something like the DMCA), and ideally the asserted reason. Ideally, all that information would be properly marked up (not just a text blob) so that a browser could pretty-print it for the end user, a spider gathering statistics or scraping could gather statistics, and so forth.

    You need to, as directly as possible, tie the entities responsible for the fact that you can't see the page to the message that you can't see the page. If you don't do that, people might generate some diffuse displeasure; but will have little way of knowing who is behind the problem.

  4. Re:woosh by blackest_k · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I guess the average user probably wouldn't but who doesn't get the rather obvious reference to Fahrenheit 451 and the burning of books?

    I think its probably the perfect symbolism, and even if most people don't get it now they will learn.
           

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