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I wonder about the applicability of this status code to 'friendly' blocking. In my workplace, as in many others, we have a web proxy that blocks certain request
by jcrawfordor 11y ago
I wonder about the applicability of this status code to 'friendly' blocking. In my workplace, as in many others, we have a web proxy that blocks certain requests for security or policy reasons. I would like it if the vendor implemented something like this for its capture page, as it'd make it easier to identify where requests are blocked and why in various logs. In particular, user-agents could tell the user when a request is blocked for this reason, which would be more robust than the HTML message it returns and would make help-desk operations a lot easier - "this thing doesn't work and I get a browser notice about blocking," instead of "this thing doesn't work" and then having to dig through logs.
Just a thought about applications for this beyond the obvious (but less common in the US) state censorship - it can be seen as a technical help for making sure security and policy controls are clearly communicated to machines as well as people, which makes it easier to figure out when those controls are overbroad.
- meowface 11y agoSounds like you need to switch to a different proxy vendor. The one I'm familiar creates a log with a specific policy deny status message, and other information about the request to help determine why it was blocked, like the categories it's classified under. It also provides the user with a block message, listing the site's categories. There's also no need for them to actually use status 451 for a feature like that.
- nothrabannosir 11y agoI think OPs point was not the proxy but the integration of the client. If your browser gets a 451, it can (theoretically) give a better error message. Not every resource is HTML; this would work for images, XHR, etc too. No amount of changing proxy servers will help you with that.