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."

Comments

451

[pushing-robot]

Censored

Re:451

[Moof123]

Should have been "Error 1984 Big Brother Disapproves"

Re:451

[radarskiy]

451: Halt and Catch FIre

Re:451

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Arguably, the correct code for 1984-style censorship is either a 404 or a 200 that returns a page full of historically corrected and party approved content.

The honest censor is the one who says "yup, this exists and you can't see it." The effective censor is the one who successfully conceals the existence of whatever they are trying to keep you away from.

Re:451

[UnknownSoldier]

> 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.

We should differentiate between the two

[deodiaus2]

Use 451 for legal reasons,
Use code 452 for political ones.
And a citation of what particular stature is being offended.

Re:We should differentiate between the two

[fustakrakich]

Law is political

Re:We should differentiate between the two

[Penguinisto]

Law is political

I believe GP was wanting to differentiate between stuff that's banned by law for obvious reasons (child pr0n, malware, etc), and stuff that's banned by a legal body due to purely political/speech reasons (e.g. calling one's national governmental leader a poop-eating doody-head).

Re:We should differentiate between the two

[Anonymous Coward]

That is pointless. For those cases governments do not want information revealed, the censorship demand will come with a gag order forbidding to even tell that it is being censored. In these cases this code cannot be used.

Therefor such a code only has value in a state based on justice and integrity where the rule of law is generally accepted and respected. Ironically this is a state least likely in need of such a code.

Re: We should differentiate between the two

[donscarletti]

No, you and he are making the distinction between laws that you like and laws that you don't like.

I agree that many laws, like the laws against child porn and malware are good. However if we tolerate the notion that these are not political issues since they are stemming from the natural order of things, then we must tolerate that to others, that the list of natural apolitical issues may be broader than they are to you and banning other things is not a political issue either. There is not a regime on earth that bans things that it does not consider harmful to the people. Remember that.

christ who cares.

[nimbius]

not since the april fools teapot code has something so silly been proposed. from TFA:

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.

Too bad 101 is already in use

[Errol backfiring]

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.

Re:A nod to Ray Bradbury

[Moof123]

Except he predicted giant screens on the walls that people obsessively watched. We instead obsessively watch tiny screens that go with us everywhere.

huh?

[Virtucon]

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.

Re:huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

The point of this code is that it's a signal from the ISP or website holder to the user saying 'I'm sorry, I can't dish out this page because the government/corporation/the Bavarian Illuminati won't let me'.

Re:huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.

Re:i have a better idea.

[Penguinisto]

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).

So much for the Internet

[kheldan]

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.

you thinking of406? 403 anything but auth, accept

[raymorris]

> 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...

Fahrenheit 451

[Locke2005]

Obvious Ray Bradbury tribute is obvious. Ray was a great author, he deserves it.

Ironically...

[Etcetera]

This appropriateness of this code is based around an interpretation of the novel that the creator doesn't share:

“Useless,” Bradbury says. “They stuff you with so much useless information, you feel full.” He bristles when others tell him what his stories mean, and once walked out of a class at UCLA where students insisted his book was about government censorship. He’s now bucking the widespread conventional wisdom with a video clip on his Web site (http://www.raybradbury.com/at_home_clips.html), titled “Bradbury on censorship/television.

http://www.laweekly.com/news/r...

Re:Ironically...

[Moof123]

I read the article you linked, and frankly it left me scratching my head. I think he managed to write a book about censorship unintentionally, as it was the only way to get to his real point about the perils of television. When I read the book I found the whole picture walls thing to be secondary rather than primary. Maybe he pulled a Homer?

It would be like finding Orwell's diary and finding out he thought 1984 was about the perils of video cameras rather than government control, propaganda, and surveillance (to badly simplify).

How long does it take for a new status code?

[WaffleMonster]

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.

Obligatory

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

A lot of comments have referenced about it but nobody's linked to it yet:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

This is reference to Fahrenheit 451

[sinij]

Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:i have a better idea.

[malditaenvidia]

I'd settle for ISPs just giving usenet access along with the internet service like they used to do.