In a well-intentioned yet dangerous move to fight online fraud, France is on the verge of forcing browsers to create a dystopian technical capability. Article 6 (para II and III) of the SREN Bill would force browser providers to create the means to mandatorily block websites present on a government provided list.
I don’t agree that it’s “well-intentioned” at all but the article goes on to point out the potential for abuse by copyright holders.
cross-posted from: https://radiation.party/post/64123
[ comments | sourced from HackerNews ]
I’m imagining Firefox creating a clientside file called
government-blocklist.txt, with the understanding of “don’t touch this file, you scamp 😉”Or putting the option to disable the blocking in about:config… Or even just the settings page
dump the .txt file to the desktop for easy removal by user
“it was a bug, see it’s in our database. Don’t worry about the priority being set to ‘suggestion’”
Should cars be required by law not to let you drive to drug deals? Should glasses be required by law not to let you read banned books? Should testicles be required by law not to produce government-unsanctioned sperm?
how to get all browsers to remove access for france
#BanFrance
Browsers can have different releases per default language, so just have the fr-fr distribution have the blockers and others not
the good ending? no more French?
This is dumb on so many levels. It’d be trivial for people to obtain a web browser that ignores this. The biggest browsers in the world all have open-source code bases, so anybody could build something with near feature parity but none of the restrictions, and then distribute it wherever. Enforcing this would be just create another game of wack-a-mole, with no advantages for the copyright holders, and potential abuse against even non-pirate users. Very slippery slope.
Websites containing instructions and links to such an illegal browser would also be banned
As I said, wack-a-mole. You ban a site, different one pops up, people share links in DMs and other platforms. Sharing that stuff isn’t banned in other countries, so they can’t actually take down anything. Good luck stopping that when you can’t even properly get sites blocked at the DNS/ISP level.
And this doesn’t even get into VPNs and proxies.
Yeah. It’s not gonna stop people from this community, French or not.
But the French government if crazy about copyright, I wouldn’t be surprised if they actually tried it. Just the insanity alone that you can’t take pictures of Paris at night because the Eiffel Tower lights are copyrighted… xD
websites like github?
That could very easily be all websites. It would never be feasible to stop.
Unlikely, given that this would violate the 1st amendment pretty blatantly.
What is the French first amendment?
Welp, this is embarrassing. I totally glossed right over that…
Looks like it was to give independence to the French African states.
The laws already require you to not infringe copyright. This is a new front in the same old war.
Yes definitely, but currently the onus is on the user to not infringe. The French proposal is putting at least some of the onus on the developer of the browser which is a new front, I agree.
I feel like we would be less forgiving of this happening in other mediums.
Imagine this: car manufacturers are required by law to prevent their vehicles from driving to locations where crime might happen.
Every lesson we had to learn about legislating the use of stuff, we are having to re-learn in each country for cases on a computer or on the internet. This is so stupid and clichè I suspect it’s the bugbear of some plutocrat lobbying the French government, rather than someone brainstorming ideas without a staffer there to tell them the public would just ignore the law and get more computer literate.
If the reason for this is to prevent pedophilia content, then this will do nothing. People who access that sort of thing on the dark web aren’t going to be affected by this whatsoever.
When pedophilia prevention is used as an excuse, 100% of the time it is a move to restrict peoples’ rights and/or freedoms. 100% of the time.
The US has the playbook down easy. Every single law that they want to pass that is solidly against the citizens best interests they say “oh… pedophilia!”
You can’t argue against it because they will say “oh, so you think pedophilia is good and shouldn’t be stopped?” When in reality, the biggest rings of pedophilia aren’t perpetrated by online websites but by rich businessmen, polititians, and churches. Their friends, corporate masters, and partners.
Browsers are open source
There’s literally no way to enforce this.
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Which can be easily circumvented.
Yeah, that’s not actually working, but VPN sales are going up.
And tor activity too
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The main sites yes. Others are ignoring it
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why govts love to censor the public internet?
Most governments are greatly influenced by lobbyists, who are often tied to media companies. It gets worse since a lot of old people vote for heavy conservative parties, which in turn are even stronger leaning into lobbyism.
It gets worse since a lot of old people vote for heavy conservative parties
This is shifting in (at least) three countries - Norwegian, British, and American millennials aren’t turning to vote for the right wing parties, instead are keeping their trend of voting left. Other countries like Italy have the opposite problem, where even younger voters are starting to vote for the right wing parties. It’s kind of tangential but I think it’s good to point out that we’re seeing exceptions to this rule.
If you control information, you control the will of the people.
How would this even be enforced?
If google implements is drm technology they are actively implementing already now, the answer is an absolute yes.
Download firefox now.
Firefox and Mozilla have been struggling mightily lately. Downloading Firefox won’t help when Mozilla goes out of business. The best thing you can do is donate to Mozilla IMO.
Mozilla gets the vast majority of their revenue from having Google be the default search provider for Firefox.
Is firefox the only way to protest against this? i have gotten so used to chromium based browsers
I switched recently and it was an incredibly smooth transition. I was also worried, having been on Chrome for so long, but I don’t regret switching at all.
Service providers in many countries are required by law to do this through DNS for years. The UK, Italy, Germany and Brazil are just a few that I’ve had personal experience with. Moving this to the browser really isn’t necessary since there will always be easy ways around these types of blocks.
“The internet treats censorship as a fault and reroutes around it.”
yeah but those usaully are bypassable if you have vpns or custom dns or whatnot. even for neewbies that just use vpn client sw.
if they force it at browser level, in theoty, that would even override vpn / custom dns unless you have a modifyied browser that removes the block or otherwise doesnot comply. which most novices wont know how ot do.
another good reason to use ff / foss browsers if you aren’y already. kinbda hope they do it, just to drive up marketshare of foss bowsers lol
I don’t disagree at all, especially about the need for FOSS browsers.
Despite all the problems we have in the United States, this would be struck down in court SO fast due to the first amendment to our constitution. The government making a list of speech you are not allowed to hear is pretty much the most cut and dry violation of that.
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It wouldn’t make it too SCOTUS, they’d decline the appeal after lower courts ruled it unconstitutional.
How would this stop anything, though? Most of the scam sites are one-off things and people call the numbers and are redirected to otherwise legit screen-sharing software to be scammed.
I can’t think of a single specific site that any government could block to stop scams. This shit is just bound to be abused.
![[HN] Will Browsers Be Required by Law to Stop You from Visiting Infringing Sites?](https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/0d542d2e-2515-4843-aec2-a9567f396d6c.png){kind=link}