HTTP 451 Unavailable

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Sushubh

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Sometimes a 403 Forbidden message appears when a court has ordered a website to be blocked. 403 Forbidden is supposed to appear when a website wants to refuse access to somebody.403 Forbidden shouldn't be shown when a site is blocked for legal reasons. That's not what it's meant for.
People should know that 403 Forbidden only means that the site wants to deny them access.Error 451 would let people know that a court ordered the site to be blocked. This might be because it contains restricted political content or carries copyright material.
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Why do we need Error 451?

I support this movement. We need more transparency if the governments around the world are going to enforce internet censorship.
 
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Oh great - but India will still use 403 for few more years.
 
I am guessing CMS software would get plugins that can be used by web publishers. At least the ones that keep up with times.
 
It of course won't handle censorship where the entire site is blocked by ISPs upon govt order... you will just see that "This website blocked thanks to your govt" message like we do for some sites now... before the website can even load to send an HTTP 451 response.
 
This code (451) is not for a website / forum. No change / plugin is required on ANY website.

This is when Government redirects / blocks a website.

Government is supposed to send 451 code instead of 403 access denied.

Currently when Government blocks a page - original page is blocked and replaced by 403 page.

But now its supposed to show 451 Unavailable message (Its very minor change)

But I doubt Indian government would bother to do this!
 

I have installed epic browser and whenever any site show error message. I just open epic browser and open it.
 
amish said:
Government is supposed to send 451 code instead of 403 access denied.
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To the best of my knowledge 403 is a server code. It is shown when the server is blocking access to the visitor. Usually because the visitor's IP is blocked. This new error code is designed to differentiate between the block from server/web-publisher and the government/authorities.

WordPress.com is already using 451 for blocks enforced upon them by governments around the world.

Error 451: Unavailable for Legal Reasons

Default messages like the infamous ‘Error 404 – Page not found’ or its close cousin, ‘Error 403 – Forbidden’ strike us as inadequate for situations where sites are unavailable for legal reasons. Enter the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). They have approved a new HTTP error status code: Error 451, named after Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel ‘Fahrenheit 451’. This development comes after 2 years of campaigning by groups such as the Open Rights Group and Article 19.

We are strongly opposed to Internet censorship, and believe that geo-blocking is both inappropriate and an ineffective remedy for controversial speech. The introduction of the new HTTP error code is a welcome one, and we have gladly adopted it on WordPress.com. The error code will be returned to visitors from those countries where we have been forced to block websites for legal reasons, and allow statistics to be gathered on the number of these kind of blocks worldwide more easily.
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There are of course two ways of blocking content. One is where you ask services like YouTube to block certain videos in a particular country. And YouTube does that on their end. The other one is of course which is more visible to us here in India. Where government asks the internet service providers to block access to certain domains or web pages. This block is probably done at ISP end and I don't think the server even finds out how many people were trying to access it but couldn't because the hit never reaches the server hosting the blocked content.
 
Yes wordpress wud block on global server.

What I mean is Government is not going to ask individual hosts to block pages but instead it will send "takedown" notice.

If there are big international providers where "takedown" notice can not be sent in that case it will block on ISP level and shud ask ISP to send 451.
 
That's the thing, HTTP status codes are sent by the web servers themselves, ISP (or the govt) cannot "send" http status codes it is part of the text data returned by individual websites themselves, like HTTP header, then HTTP body which contains the actual webpages...

If a govt asks website to block webpages and they agree then they (the websites) will send HTTP 451 error code, if they don't agree (rogue websites) then govt asks ISPs to block the website/URL itself - either no response or the common message presented by ISP something like "This website has been blocked by order of govt blah blah"
 

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