Tunisian journalist sues government agency for blocking Facebook, claims damage for the use of 404 error message instead of 403
Submitted by ONI-MENA on 12 September, 2008 - 06:50.Tunisian journalist and blogger Zied El-Hen filed a suit this week in a Tunisian court against the Tunisian Internet Agency for blocking the social networking Web site Facebook, according to a report by Reuters (Arabic). The journalist demands about $5,000 as a compensation for the damages which the blocking caused to him. He said the fact that the Tunisian President himself had to intervene to have the site unblocked last week is an evidence that the blocking was wrong and illegal.
In an interesting technical argument he said that the the agency mislead him by serving the message 404 (Not Found) error message instead of the 403 message (Access Forbidden), which the agency serves to users who attempt to access banned sites. This action of misleading (Not Found vs. Forbidden) caused him material as well as punitive damages, he said.
The 404 message or Not Found error message is a standard response code which means that the user connected to the site, Facebook in this case, but the site, Facebook, could not find what was requested. The 403 (Forbidden) message, however means that the user was able to communicate with the site, Facebook, but the server forbids him/her from accessing the site.
The President of Tunisia Zine Al Abidine Ben Ali ordered the unblocking of the site last week after it was blocked by the country's ISPs without giving any reason.
ONI will monitor the progress of this unprecedented legal case and report any development.
its good
Very good article thanks..
Tunisian journalist blog
Tunisian journalist blog have been blocked .It's really horrible to read because journalist are the responsible people who focus on the public issues.Make the government to move accordingly to the problem.
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shiny
California Dui
Tunisian journalist blog
Tunisian journalist blog have been blocked .It's really horrible to read because journalist are the responsible people who focus on the public issues.Make the government to move accordingly to the problem.
==================================================
shiny
California Dui
Here is a screen shot I took
Here is a screen shot I took during WSIS in Tunisia in 2005. You can see that the 404 page is taken from Internet Explorer, but I was using Firefox! You can see from the HTTP headers that the 404 is fake.
One important issue to remember in this case is that Tunisia is using SmartFilter, a filtering product developed by the U.S. company Secure Computing. This product is used in many countries including in Saudi Arabia, Oman, Sudan, United Arab Emirates, and previously in Iran. In these other countries they use SmarFilter to show users a blockpage that indicates to the user that the content is intentionally blocked. Instead, Tunisia uses this blockpage functionality to fake a 404 error page.
Tunisia uses SmartFilter to block access to categories of websites, such as pornography, but also adds their own targets, often political web sites, to the blocking lists. Sometimes content that was not intended to be blocked is blocked in all of Tunisia due to miscategorizations by SmartFilter.
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