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The 451 status code is now supported
- dcw303 11y agoThis could be really useful. If this was done by other big content sites (Youtube for example) then a search bot could build up an index of banned resources. A repository of burned books.
- asymmetric 11y agoYouTube also bans content based on your location (e.g. In Germany), so the index would have to take that into account.
- dcw303 11y agoThat's a good point, I didn't think of that. I suppose there is a semantic difference between content that has been taken down globally for DMCA infringement, and content that is blocked in a particular region.
- franciscop 11y agoThere is some difference, but error codes are made broad to allow for different cases. "Resource is unavailable due to an external legal request" seems to cover both of these cases.
- captn3m0 11y agoThat actually makes for a nice usecase: correlate bans between geographic regions. You just need to access the same content from multiple locations to build a better index.
- mrweasel 11y agoI really wanted to use it when our German customer try to view product pages for games that are illegal in Germany, but the business people said no.
- legulere 11y agoYou probably meant an advertising ban to under 18 year olds (no, a form asking for your birthday isn't enough). Only very few games are actually banned, KZ manager (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KZ_Manager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KZ_Manager) for instance. For those only distribution is banned, possession is legal.
- duaneb 11y ago> but the business people said no Did they not want to be associated with blatant censorship? That sounds pejorative but I mean it literally.
- mrweasel 11y agoI think the issue was that you basically can't even allow the Germans know that the games exist. We can't even show the product page and just not all them to buy it. It is blatant censorship, but it's either that or the German government closing down you operations in Germany.
- tormeh 11y agoCan you really not tell them about it, or can you just not advertise it? A product page would probably count as advertisement, but an error code is obviously not.
- rmc 11y agoWhich for Germany, would be nearly anything with music on it. Fucking GEMA.
- instanceofjava 11y agohttp://www.instanceofjava.com/2016/03/java-interview-questions-final-keyword.html http://www.instanceofjava.com/2016/03/java-interview-questio...
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- edent 11y agoOriginal discussion on HN from 4 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4099751 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4099751
- SilasX 11y agoI thought this was an interesting comment[1] in the context of AWS: >If the .ru site sent 404s for nonexistent users and 451s for real ones, you'd be able to gather potentially useful information. It's like if I go to bad-porn.com and type your email into "forgot my password", it should neither confirm nor deny the existence of your account, simply tell me the request was received. In any event if delivery of the requested resource is legally prohibited, why would I go to the trouble to determine whether the resource exists? >A final analogy: 10 year old enters US gas station: "Have you Marlboro 100s, menthol?" gas station attendant (without checking whether or not he has this particular brand/style of cigarette): "get out of here, kid. [HTTP/1.1 451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons]." Amazon will similarly return 404 for S3 assets which exist but which you don't have the right to see. Annoyingly, they will also do the opposite of the cigarette analogy in the AWS console: they will gladly let you walk though the whole process of configuring and launching an EC2 server and only reject you at the very end because you don't have permission. Hence my "AWS bar joke": http://blog.tyrannyofthemouse.com/2016/02/some-of-my-geeky-tech-jokes-with.html http://blog.tyrannyofthemouse.com/2016/02/some-of-my-geeky-t... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4100526 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4100526
- sanqui 11y agoI was under the impression that the 451 status code should be used for requests blocked by proxies, where the original content is technically still available at the source but blocked for some reason. Probably got the wrong idea.
- 0942v8653 11y agoTo clarify this: > This status code indicates that the server is subject to legal restrictions which prevent it servicing the request. The "server" here could be a proxy server or the original, hosting server. > The use of the 451 status code implies neither the existence nor non-existence of the resource named in the request. That is to say, it is possible that if the legal restriction were removed, a request for the resource might still not succeed.
- mattlutze 11y agoIt's like IETF's own Glomar status code.
- westi 11y agoSome of the original discussions around the status code referred to proxies but adoption at the moment seems to be mostly but hosting platforms like github, wordpress.com [1] etc. I think the original ideal scenario was that a 451 would be generated by the in-country blocks that get put in place by ISPs due to legal requests from organisations. However, they aren't incentivised to do this as much as hosting platforms are and so I don't think we will see large adoption there. Instead, hosting platforms are using the status code both for DMCAs and other legal requests where the content may only be blocked for certain countries as part of a pragmatic response that keeps the rest of the service up in those countries (In country blocks are usually overly heavy handed :)). [1] https://transparency.automattic.com/2016/01/05/error-451-unavailable-for-legal-reasons/ https://transparency.automattic.com/2016/01/05/error-451-una...
- Shanu 11y agoVisit www.orderline.in
- Shanu 11y agoVisit www.orderline.in
- lolidaisuki 11y agoI actually saw the status code 451 in the wild. First time I saw it was in December and after that in January, both on the same site. The site that was blocked was archive.is. This block was targeted at Finland and none of the different Internet connections I tried could get to the site, I tried my home connection, cellular and connecting from my school network. It's a shame that anyone even thought of censoring such an useful tool for history and other legitimate uses. I wrote a thing about it to a Finnish newspaper and a few weeks after that the block was gone. I suspect that the newspaper conatcted archive.is and it was removed so they don't get bad publicity. It was kind of ironical that I had to subvert the archive.is censorship to read an archived version of a thread discussing web censorship in Sweden. I think this error code is a bad idea as it legitimizes censorship.
- m12k 11y agoDo you think you'd have found out and been able to do anything about it if you hadn't gotten that code? Legitimizing censorship is obviously not desirable, but having it masquerade as generic 404's doesn't solve the problem either, it just hides it.
- lolidaisuki 11y ago> Do you think you'd have found out and been able to do anything about it if you hadn't gotten that code? Yes because I really wanted to see that thing. If I get 404 on something I want to see I will try through Tor and I will try with at least a few circuits. And if Tor gets through I then usually test with other networks just as I did with this. I know that many people probably don't do that and you have a valid point with the masking but a better solution would be stopping censorship, not a new errorcode
- niels_olson 11y agoBut there's the rub: most of the time, most people aren't looking hard for something they know to exist. They are just casually passing through. The 451 is more about raising the alarm for that much larger group.
- chippy 11y ago"Responses using this status code SHOULD include an explanation, in the response body, of the details of the legal demand: the party making it, the applicable legislation or regulation, and what classes of person and resource it applies to." So in the articles example, GitHub should really include who is requesting the DCMA in the response.
- WillAbides 11y agoWhile it isn't part of the 451 response, you can see the takedown notice submitted to GitHub. Load the blocked content in a browser and you will see a message with a link to the takedown notice. Here's an example: https://github.com/popcorn-official/popcorn-app https://github.com/popcorn-official/popcorn-app
- gjtorikian 11y agoThat's a really good point. I'll see if I can fix that in the response (I'm hoping I can just easily pluck the DMCA link from the repo).
- chippy 11y ago
- nothis 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451 Coincidence? I think not!
- ChrisArchitect 11y agoha, was thinking the same thing - sure enough, it's totally named after that
- WizardlySquid 11y agoUh yeah no shit, it's a reference to that novel.
- schlowmo 11y agoBesides the reference to Fahrenheit 451 the referece to Life of Brian at the example from the RFC made my day: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7725#section-3 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7725#section-3 "Unavailable For Legal Reasons This request may not be serviced in the Roman Province of Judea due to the Lex Julia Majestatis, which disallows access to resources hosted on servers deemed to be operated by the People's Front of Judea."
- jasonjei 11y agoI wonder if China would respond favorably to the code 451 (which would be ironic) or if they would take offense at it. If something is to be censored, wouldn't the censor want to deny its existence? Imagine trying to watch a movie critical of China in China--status code 451.
- kijin 11y agoChina doesn't try to hide the fact that they censor a huge chunk of the Internet. In fact, they seem rather proud of it. Perhaps they could even use 451 as an easy way to detect potential "terrorists". Sort citizens by the number of 451s they generate each month, send a cop to the top 1% of them, and publish this fact to scare the other 99%. They're already using TCP resets as a core component of their censorship regime, so I wouldn't be surprised if this Internet standard got co-opted, too. So instead of: You are not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported. They'll get: HTTP 451. This incident will be reported.
- ape4 11y agoThis means webcrawlers/bots can now compile stats.
- TuringTest 11y agoI like the Farenheit 451 reference. Is that intentional, or does destiny have a sense of humor? Edit: Wikipedia knows it all, as always. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_451 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_451
- apalmer 11y agoHelp Me Understand: I am a government who is censoring content. I do not like the explicitly saying I am 'censoring' the internet I instruct my infrastructure not to use the status code 451. and I instruct my nation's infrastructure to reject or rewrite all responses with 451 status code to 404. What stops me?
- uremog 11y agoNothing. This is not some kind of mandate. What the general public gets out of it is that, for sites nice enough to use it, the viewer will know why they cannot view something. The alternative is for them to not know why.
- mperham 11y agoTLS.
- thrillgore 11y agoA whistleblower.
- libria 11y agoYou are correct that censors are the least likely to use this code, but for sites that are being censored by the content controller, this is better than 404 "this content never existed". Instead it says 451 "this content did exist and probably exists somewhere else if you hurry and keep searching"
- drivingmenuts 11y agoNothing. In fact, if I were a censoring country, I'd just look at who emits a 451 and take appropriate steps toward the site owner. This is political bullshit. I really wish the standards body would stick to strictly technical issues and leave the politics to the individual members on their own time.
- jasonjei 11y agoIf I understand NSL correctly, its existence cannot be published without a government waiver? So in the case a repo needs to be taken down due to a NSL, what does GH do? 404? 401? 451? Returning 451 in response to a NSL would definitely violate NSL requirements?
- jessaustin 11y agoProbably 404 would best fit the intention of an NSL, although I think 400 would also be defensible.