Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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?
Agreed - though I think this proposal is part of doing just this, at least as a form of protest.
After all, maybe your government clamps down and demands you shut down a page -or else. So, to keep your employees out of prison, you slap on a code 451 (love the number, BTW), and then perhaps you try and get sneaky and stick a link underneath it that says "please refer to your search engine for alternate locations of {content title/keywords, etc}" (or similar - enough to give the content away, but just on this side of keeping the government from arresting you).
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
This is a wrong headed idea of how HTTP works. You make a request to a server and you get a response. One way of handling content removed because of censoring is to let it return 403, 404, or 500 or various other codes. By having a code that allows the server operator to return a code specifying that the content is censored we have some other things that can come into play. A user may have a proxy that would allow them past the censorship. A user may have an appeal process to learn why the content is censored and if the censor order can be rescinded. If the current error codes are returned, the user is never sure if it is censored, a badly run web site, or an old and stale link. If your goal is to hide the fact that you are performing any censoring, then you may still return error codes other than 451 without breaking the standards.
In a practical use-case, US jurisdictions have a DMCA take-down request. Instead of returning some other error, they may now return 451 to let people know that the site was specifically requested through legal channels to not show that. In the US, it is not illegal to submit the request or let the users know why they cannot access the content.
> How long until we get a proxy-based search engine for all the censored content on the internet?
Don't we already have part of this?
The problem is we still have idiots who think censorship is the solution. Censor is precisely part of the problem:
Only cowards censor.
Certain people censor they are too insecure to discuss something rationally and too afraid of other people's propaganda that they think ignoring the problem will make it go away.
Ignoring a problem doesn't make it go away.
While the 451 is a "cute" solution, it is not really address the root problem.