HTTP 451

08 July 2016

Censorship is something we’re likely to see more of as time passes, as the illusion of democracy intensifies. Paradoxically we’ll know about it due to the limited ‘sense’ inherent in our laws.

Ok, ‘sense’ might be overstating things a bit.

We live in an age of Super-Injunctions denying even the reporting of a legal action, DMCA takedown notices requiring immediate content removal without the luxury of rebuttal, and censorship by weight of numbers of uninformed and excessively antagonistic comments (don’t read the comments on web sites!)

An initiative coming from the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) - the organisation documenting and influencing the standards upon which the Internet relies to work smoothly - looks quite interesting.

Brand new status code HTTP 451 (in honour of Ray Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451’ novel) should serve a notification indicating that the requested page is unavailable due to a block imposed as a result of a legal demand.

Unfortunately only time will tell how useful this will be. Actually no, scratch that dismissive response; it will be at least an indicator of the ‘freeness’ of ‘our’ ‘society’.

Now, tinfoil hats arent required here, just common sense.

Grab a friendly politician and…

Ah, a flaw.