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Comment by lolidaisuki | Hacker News Reader

> 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

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Well, I suppose the point is, we're not going to stop censorship with a vote from IETF.

But, we can enable Internet companies to better-expose when rights requests and censorship has been used to block information.

Before, all you'd get on GitHub (per the release) was a 403, which could have been any number of things and was, in any case, an obfuscation of why you couldn't access the resource. If a person doesn't see a reason to investigate, they'll just move on.

This gets us closer to conversations about censorship.

If I visit a website and get a 404 error, I'll assume that the website is down or my URL is incorrect.

If I get a 451 error, I'll know it's censorship and can use something like Tor to get around it.

Actually, I'm sure there will be some browser extensions soon to automatically use a proxy if a 451 error is returned.

But 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.

Stopping censorship would be good, but there are a lot of DMCA takedowns which are rightfully. Censorship is more complicated.

This status-code is a great solution to inform the public about it.

This code is meant for censorship, not DMCA. Replacing the content with "sorry, this thing broke copyright laws" is how you deal with DMCA, not stopping people from accessing whole sites.

That's what I was thinking as well. DMCA is just an excuse. Github already blocked content at the request of Russian government, and I'm sure they will block more stuff that they're not legally required to remove in the future.

Er, citation required? IME they do what's required by U.S. law and have previously been fairly principled about not complying with extrajudicial requests.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_GitHub#Russia

It is not! Read the RFC - http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7725 - helpfully entitled "An HTTP Status Code to Report Legal Obstacles."

Those obstacles could be censorship, or copyright infringement, or illegal mathematics - anything.

The problem with the DMCA takedown process is that it makes it easy to get information removed without having to prove anything, so it does get used for censorship (and harassment of competitors and to force anonymous speakers to choose between being silenced or revealing their identities in a counter-notice and ...)

It's pretty much the go-to thing for anybody nefarious who wants to have something censored without all the trouble and blatant impossibility of having their claims vindicated in court.

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