The 451 status code is now supported

Besides the reference to Fahrenheit 451 the referece to Life of Brian at the example from the RFC made my day:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tools.ietf.org&#x2F;html&#x2F;rfc7725#section-3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tools.ietf.org&#x2F;html&#x2F;rfc7725#section-3</a><p>&quot;Unavailable For Legal Reasons<p>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&#x27;s Front of Judea.&quot;

This 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.

&quot;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.&quot;<p>So in the articles example, GitHub should really include who is requesting the DCMA in the response.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Fahrenheit_451" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Fahrenheit_451</a><p>Coincidence? I think not!

I like the Farenheit 451 reference. Is that intentional, or does destiny have a sense of humor?<p>Edit: Wikipedia knows it all, as always. [1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;HTTP_451" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;HTTP_451</a>

Original discussion on HN from 4 years ago <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=4099751" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=4099751</a>

I 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.

Help Me Understand:<p>I am a government who is censoring content. I do not like the explicitly saying I am &#x27;censoring&#x27; the internet I instruct my infrastructure not to use the status code 451. and I instruct my nation&#x27;s infrastructure to reject or rewrite all responses with 451 status code to 404.<p>What stops me?

If 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?

This means webcrawlers&#x2F;bots can now compile stats.

I actually saw the status code 451 in the wild.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;t get bad publicity.<p>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.<p>I think this error code is a bad idea as it legitimizes censorship.