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HTTP Error Code 451 Approved For Censored Web Pages (mnot.net)
An anonymous reader writes: The Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) has finally approved the new 451 status code for HTTP error messages involving web pages which have been repressed or removed for legal or political reasons. The initiative was proposed in 2013, and gained interest from various groups, such as Lumen (formerly Chilling Effects), who see the potential of the Bradbury-inspired code to help develop comprehensive indexes of censorship on the internet. Mark Nottingham, chair the IETF HTTP Working Group, says, "It'll be an RFC after some work by the RFC Editor and a few more process bits, but effectively you can start using it now."
Censored
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Use 451 for legal reasons,
Use code 452 for political ones.
And a citation of what particular stature is being offended.
How about instead of a special code to indicate when a page has been censored, we just, you know, refuse to censor it in the first place?
The question is what kind of internet we want to have in the future. One where people here can't see this subset and people there can't see that subset? Geo-locked content and politically inconvenient things disappearing?
Does no one remember John Gilmore: "The internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it?" That could still be true if nerds the world over would refuse to cooperate with censoring regimes.
Next HTTP status 205: Present, but spam, trojan or other irrelevant content.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
No
Wecome to Nazi Germany!
"Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Please step back from the centrifuge." - Ray Bradbury
the 403 status code says "Forbidden", but it doesn't say "I can't show you that for legal reasons."
because 403 is relaying constraints affected upon the target site path from the browsers configuration. "I cant show you that for legal reasons" is explained by blogs, chilling effects, boingboing, twitter, email, mailing lists, and sometimes even slashdot. keep your social web bullshit out of my nginx. all this code does is afford one more excuse for the user to stop investigating why or how this site was blocked. the new code isnt a redirect to information, and conveys nothing meaningful outside of boilerplating.
By its nature, you can't guarantee that all attempts to censor content will be conveniently labeled by the censor.
thats right. multinational corporations that dont want you reading about salmonella outbreaks and exploding recalls will not use 451. they will purchase an abundance of airtime on $news-website and then threaten any evidence of coverage with bankrupting the site. additionally your government isnt about to 451 your favourite e-zine that exposes the secret torture prison in cuba, theyll just null route that traffic. the FBI just hijacks your DNS and points it to their boilerplate eagle and shield jpg designed by a bureaucrat with all the comprehension of internet censorship as a four year old. Did your favourite website just get a gag order and secret court warrant? that sorry, 451 isnt going to show up because it would violate the conditions of the gag order. 451 is as useless as do not track, but social justice warriors love it.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I wonder how many people today will get the reference ?
exactly, the title was Fahrenheit 451. Just a weird incidence, of course... :-)
Too bad 101 (Switching Protocols) is already in use.
101 OK, And Big Brother Is Watching You Would have been a nice one as well.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Fahrenheit 451.
It was a prophecy, not just a novel.
The tighter they close their fist the more webpages will slip from their grasp.
Or something like that.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
It is one thing for 'the man' to try and strangle society over being power hungry and a particularly foul individual that has difficulty qualifying as a human being, but for the dev's to play ball with this sickness by building framework is an outrage. Perhaps this is another 'gift' afforded by the H1B?
who see the potential of the Bradbury-inspired code to help develop comprehensive indexes of censorship on the internet
So if I want to censor you and not have it tracked I'll just give you a 403 or a 500. Which is pretty much how it works now. This won't allow anybody to truly see how much censorship there is. What a waste of intellectual bandwidth.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
I've been suspecting for quite some time now, but something like this makes it fairly obvious to me: The Internet is well on it's way to being more or less destroyed. I wouldn't at all be surprised if in the next 10 years or so, it gets literally fragmented to the point where it's just the 'U.S. Internet', and the 'PRC Internet', and the 'E.U. Internet', and the 'U.K. Internet', and so on, with no interconnection between the disparate networks, and before too much longer than that, no interoperability between them anyway. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
> because 403 is relaying constraints affected upon the target site path from the -browsers configuration-
Are you thinking of 406, which indicates the client (browser) configuration wouldn't accept the response?
403 is access denied for -any- reason other than authentication failure. It could be the resource is only available 9:00 - 5:00 (business hours), it could be restricted by IP address, it could be available only to the 93rd caller. The server explicitly is not required to indicate why access has denied; meaning you don't know if changing the browser configuration would have any effect or not.
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rf...
Obvious Ray Bradbury tribute is obvious. Ray was a great author, he deserves it.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Could we use this when my local corporate firewall blocks a page? It would be great if apps recognized that. Sometimes, an application goes to download a file or register something, and instead of getting a file with the expected result, it gets back HTML with something like "This page was blocked... click OK to accept and continue" which obviously the application doesn't know to do. But if it got a 451, I can at least know what happened and possibly do something about it.
This appropriateness of this code is based around an interpretation of the novel that the creator doesn't share:
http://www.laweekly.com/news/r...
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Terence Eden's Blog There is no HTTP code for censorship (but perhaps there should be) where Tim Bray announced the Internet-Draft proposal.
I hope that they finally amend it to include the
451 Unavailable for Legal Reasons of Resource magnet:?xt=urn:ed2k:354B15E68FB8F36D7CD88FF94116CDC1&xl=10826029
XD
Remember seeing this back at the beginning of 2013. Why does it take three years for one single solitary status code to be "approved"? There sure as heck was not continuous ongoing work or discussion commensurate with the delay.
I often get the distinct impression nobody including authors actually care about documents they are working on.
Isn't this the same brand of crap as asking website managers to implement a web canary in their HTML? I thought we'd all already discussed that here and concluded that as wonderful as it sounds, it also sounds like a great way to end up in a reeducation camp somewhere.
Using a 4xx response says that it's the requester's fault for making a bad request. It should be a 5xx error because the provider is at fault for withholding information.
I tried watching Halt and Catch Fire, but I couldn't get past the one dude's eyebrows. I mean, short of using a machete, no one could.
A lot of comments have referenced about it but nobody's linked to it yet:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I think it would be useful to also specify a header with thich the server (or proxy) can tell the user agent the scope of the block. Mainly so that the user can know it the block can be circunvented by using a proxy or not.
From past experience, governments will not only censor content, they will censor the act of censoring. A corollary would be the fisa court ordering a web site to hand over its encryption keys and not tell the site users of the security insecurity. Therefore, this error code is useless.
Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Can I get a 451 and/or 452 T-shirt anywhere?
Just askin'.
Censorship, or rather, repression of information of any kind is a danger to freedom and therefore a danger to our civilized society. It always reminds me of one of the quotes in SMAC:
"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. "
True in the game, but true in real life as well.
And on the Eighth Day, Man created God.
4xx means client error. 5xx means server error. we need 6xx for government error.
I just got my Amateur Radio license, it's AX.25 from here on in baby.