403 - forbidden

Gizmodo reports how the supposedly sedate and apolitical group of infrastructure programmers called the Internet Engineering Steering Group have approved a new draft HTTP status code, along with the familiar bunch of bugs and failures that users might encounter—404 Not Found, designated as 451 (as in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451) for pages and files suppressed due to pending legal demands—a takedown notice served or government censorship. Disclosing and logging what’s being blacklisted by whatever standards, be it the political views of dissidents or what’s considered blasphemous or people privileged enough to be forgot, does go quite a distance towards, if not reform itself, then at least towards assigning blame rather than hiding behind technical problems.