The Tor guys have also said that the blocked-by-origin vs blocked-by-intermediary distinction is interesting to them. And I’m not deeply opposed to it. But I wonder if there are even more subtle distinctions lurking in there, I’m a little nervous about diverting attention away from where it should be pointed, which is what the legal demand actually is. Maybe one status code is still the right thing, with explanations of the details of the blockage implementation left for human-readable text in the message body. There are a lot of other distinctions you could try to capture - civil vs criminal law, intellectual property vs not, temporary vs permanent.dnd we don’t want to go down the path of designing a universal taxonomy of blocking scenarios. On Thu, Jan 8, 2015 at 5:36 AM, David Krauss <potswa@gmail.com> wrote: > > On 2015–01–08, at 5:33 PM, Eliot Lear <lear@cisco.com> wrote: > > I think "Forbidden" is the very word that Tim is objecting to, and > introducing intermediaries into this seems to be missing the point. It's > NOT that intermediaries are forbidding anything but that someone somewhere > has told the site owner that material should not be made available. > > > The difference between the filter residing on the same server as the > origin, or in a government facility, is minor. > > If information is not allowed to get from the origin to a particular user, > that can be generally modeled as the behavior of an intermediary. > > Let's also disentangle this just a bit. There are two different issues: > > - Some legal demand, as Tim points out (like a DMCA takedown notice, > or a government ordering a site to take down content); or > > These scenarios are more likely to result in 404 than 403. > > > - an intermediary network refusing to serve content, perhaps because > the network owner has a policy against certain content, but this would have > nothing to do with anything regarding legality. > > Whether a filtering policy is codified in actual law is besides the point. > (But they often are.) > > I think the distinction of intermediary vs. origin is spot-on. User agents > can use this to display different interfaces. Users deserve to know that > they’re not dealing with the origin. Whether everyone will comply by > opting-in to 451 is another story, but at least it’ll be there. > -- - Tim Bray (If you’d like to send me a private message, see https://keybase.io/timbray)
Received on Thursday, 8 January 2015 15:24:51 UTC