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Comment by schlowmo | Hacker News Reader

Besides 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

"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."

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I 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.

China 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.

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