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’”
ainsi mieux protéger nos enfants
This is to protect our children of course.
As usual, so anyone who is against this law can be depicted as someone who is supporting pedopornography.
Yep, the other go to is calling people right wing extremists.
There is absolutely no need to bring left vs right identity politics into the discussion, please stick to the topic of piracy. Same goes for the replies below. Thanks.
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Why should we give up on trying to listen to each other’s point of view?
It’s never too late to learn how to participate in a community.
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Yes, I agree. My point was left v. Right or anything like that. I was just pointing out that it’s another label I’ve seen thrown out label I’ve seen thrown out there in the last few years when trying to discredit people.
I guess my point didn’t come off they way I meant it looking at all of these replies.
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I don’t like the idea of conflating falsely accusing people of being a pedophile with calling someone out for holding harmful right-wing beliefs.
The first (saying someone is supporting pedophiles) is oftentimes used as a method to support bans on anti-encryption technology. It is a bad-faith justification for harmful and 1984 type legislation.
The second, however, is an argument used by right wing extremists to justify hate speech.
To be clear - I’m not saying the government should mandate a ban on conservative media. I’m just saying that as a normal citizen, it is a justified, non-harmful act to call people with harmful right-wing beliefs ‘right wing extremists.’
I don’t like the idea of conflating falsely accusing people of being a pedophile with calling someone out for holding harmful right-wing beliefs.
Here in the states, among common harmful right-wing beliefs is the assertion of calling LGBT+ folk groomers, especially when protesting trans folk existing.
The use of bad-faith child safety and child victimization rhetoric to push questionable legislation, especially targeting general privacy or the rights of marginalized groups is so prevalent that it dwarfs by order of magnitude actual child welfare interests (like healthcare access, free school lunches and bullying in schools)
So I’d be skeptical of any rhetoric that asserts a policy might protect children.
I’d also be skeptical of IAccidentallyCame’s good faith regarding right wing rhetoric. As the world’s plutocratic elite runs out of lies to justify the hierarchies that keep them in power, right-wing rhetoric, including hate speech, is on the rise as a last defense against general unrest. They would rather the world literally burn than give up their wealth and power.
Oh, and the world is literally burning.
Yeah I intentionally didn’t go through their post history. Don’t have time for that lol. I mostly wrote that out for anyone who read his post and thought maybe there wasn’t a counter argument to what he said.
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It was a good faith comment, I’m merely pointing out another tactic that the powers that be try to use to discredit people. I’m not comparing pedophilia allegations against being called a far right extremist. I’m just pointing out it’s a separate tactic.
I guess I wasn’t too clear on that, wasn’t expecting these sorts of replies.
Do you have an example though?
I mean I know about using being a murderer, terrorist apologist, pedophile being used in bad faith, when was someone touting “if you are against this law, you’re a rightwing extremist” in bad faith?
Could you give an example of a situation where people who are against such a law are unfairly dismissed by being falsely accused of being right wing extremists? I think this might be a valid comparison but not sure how often this really happens.
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
the good ending? no more French?
#BanFrance
Browsers can have different releases per default language, so just have the fr-fr distribution have the blockers and others not
No, Fuck that. It takes resources to develop shitty features like that. I’d say block downloads from France and call it a day.
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.
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.
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.
There’s literally no way to enforce this.
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Which can be easily circumvented.
The main sites yes. Others are ignoring it
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Yeah, that’s not actually working, but VPN sales are going up.
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Browsers are open source
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.
If you control information, you control the will of the people.
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.
How would this even be enforced?
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.
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.
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.
![[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}