HTTP Error 451 now adopted as global standard for web pages that are censored by governments
by: J. D. Heyes
NaturalNews.com
Thursday, December 31, 2015
Authoritarian governments all over the world – including some that are supposed to be democracies – are increasing their control over content exchanged on the Internet, because the only way they can continue controlling the various issue-oriented narratives is by silencing critics and those with competing ideas.
As noted by Motherboard, there is a new official Internet status code – HTTP 451 – developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the independent group that is responsible for the creation of many of the Internet’s operating standards. So now, when a website has been blocked for so-called “legal reasons” (in other words, the page has been censored by a government), web surfers will be presented with the 451 “error” rather than the more generic 403 “forbidden” error.
The tech site says this is actually a victory of sorts, however – for transparency. Now, surfers will know precisely why a site is being blocked and what content a government tends to censor.
The code has been under development for about two years. It was first introduced by software engineer Tim Bray in 2013 after he was inspired by a 2012 blog post written by security analyst Terence Eden, whose call then for a censorship error code was plain:
My ISP have recently been ordered to censor The Pirate Bay. They have done so unwillingly and, it would seem, have complied only with the letter of the ruling. Their block is, for now, trivial to circumvent. I am concerned that this censorship will become more prevalent. As network neutrality dies, we will see more sites ordered to be blocked by governments who fear what they cannot understand.
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