Error 451: A proposed Internet status code for censorship
If a website you're trying to reach is blocked for legal
reasons, do you have a right to know about it?
Developer advocate Tim Bray thinks so, and he's got a
perfect error code for it: 451, a tribute to the late Ray Bradbury's landmark
novel about censorship, Fahrenheit 451.
Bray, a self-described "general-purpose Web
geek" who helped develop several key Internet standards, wrote a formal
specification for his proposal and submitted it to the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF), the body that develops and promotes Internet standards. The
group is slated to take up Bray's proposal at next week's annual meeting, which
begins Sunday in Vancouver, Canada.
"I've been told by the chair of the IETF HTTP
Working Group that he'll give the proposal some agenda time at the next IETF
meeting," Bray told CNNMoney by email. "It's not a big proposal;
shouldn't take long."
Most internet users are familiar with "404 Not
Found" errors, the HTTP status messages that come up when you click on a
broken or dead link. Another common error, "403 Forbidden," is
displayed when you try to reach a site whose server won't grant you access to
it.
That's the error code U.K. blogger Terence Eden hit when
he tried to reach The Pirate Bay, a notorious hub for pirated content that is
frequently targeted in lawsuits. Eden's Internet provider had been ordered to
block out the site, but Eden wasn't happy with the 403 error response it
generated.
"As far as I am concerned, this response is
factually incorrect," Eden wrote on his blog.
He points out that it wasn't Pirate Bay's server that
refused to allow him access. "The server did not even see the request. It
was intercepted by my ISP and rejected by them on legal grounds," he
wrote.
Eden called for a new "HTTP code for
censorship" -- a call Bray answered with literary flair.
The idea quickly caught on, sparking discussions on
nerd-news gathering spots like Slashdot and Hacker News. Commenters kicked it
around in Spanish on meneame, in Russian on habrahabr and in German on
NetzPolitik. One Slashdotter commenter called the idea "so painfully
obvious."
If the proposal gets the official nod -- what Bray calls
"the famous IETF 'rough consensus' level of approval" -- the spec
would be revised and eventually published. Then it would be up to browser makers
and website operators to implement it.
"There'd be remarkably little engineering required
on the server side," Bray said. "My bet is that should this go
forward, most servers would provide explanatory text with a 451."
Bray's proposal suggests that the 451 "Unavailable
For Legal Reasons" status return details on the restriction and what legal
authority is imposing it. The code would remain optional -- and Bray
acknowledged that its use could be controversial.
"In my idealistic moments, I hope that the likelihood
of being so identified might encourage certain parties to think twice about
seeking to block parts of the Web," he said. "I think most people
agree that censorship is sometimes justified, but it's just common sense that
when it happens, it should happen out in the open."
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