Error 451: A New Dystopian Internet Code With a Very Important Meaning

A new internet code inspired by the dystopian writings of Ray Bradbury aims to let users know when websites are unavailable because they have been censored by the state—Error Code 451.

The Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG), a global body which reviews internet standards, on Monday approved the XML specification, which can be used to alert users when requested content has been blocked by “legal obstacles,” typically government censorship. Tim Bray, a former Google engineer and co-author of the code, suggested the term in 2012 as a reference to Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, a 1953 novel in which books are outlawed and burned—an allegory for state suppression of free speech.

“[A]s censorship became more visible and prevalent on the Web, we started to hear from sites that they’d like to be able to make this distinction,” wrote IETF HTTP Working Group chair Mark Nottingham in a blog post last week. “More importantly, we started to hear from members of the community that they wanted to be able to discover instances of censorship in an automated fashion.”