After a three-year campaign, the IETF has cleared the way for a new HTTP status code to reflect online censorship.
The new code – 451 – is in honor of Ray Bradbury's classic novel Fahrenheit 451 in which books are banned and any found are burned.
The idea is that rather than a web server, proxy or some other system returning a 403 code to a browser when information is blocked – i.e. you are not authorized to see it – the 451 status code will mean "unavailable for legal reasons." Specifically, according to a draft RFC:
From the article posted above, as explanation of the link.
graeme_p
4:22 am on Dec 23, 2015 (gmt 0)
It is needed. Other articles on it mentioned that one reason was that some people were using 403 for this which is not specific. 410 is quite close to what is wanted, but is also not specific.
IN fact, I think we need two codes for this: one to indicate that the information has been removed from the origin server, the other to indicate that it has been blocked by an ISP.
lucy24
5:07 am on Dec 23, 2015 (gmt 0)
a limited number of status codes
Huh what? I checked the horse's mouth [w3.org] and found that 400-class codes currently max out at 417. (Aha. So that's why the Teapot Error is 418 exactly.) Counting on fingers tells me this means approximately 5/6 of 400-class errors are up for grabs.
Fahrenheit 451 wasn't actually about censorship though was it. I've also got a vague impression that the "451" figure was some kind of conversion error, but never mind that.
graeme_p
5:22 am on Dec 23, 2015 (gmt 0)
Not quite: there have been a number added since and a number of unofficial ones that are too widely used for an official definition to clash with them: [en.wikipedia.org ]
If every proposed code was approved they would be used up pretty fast.
RhinoFish
7:51 pm on Dec 23, 2015 (gmt 0)
420 = server response is not reliable (aka, our webmaster lives in an area where pot is legal).
topr8
10:48 pm on Dec 23, 2015 (gmt 0)
i might start returning a 402 to all those unwanted bots and scrapers
