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 ]
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.
Eh, it’s unenforceable. Just theater from a bunch of politicians that don’t understand the technology. I wouldn’t worry about it.
when in history did a law being unenforceable stop clueless politicians trying anyway?
I’m not saying they won’t try, just that it doesn’t matter. They have no power here
What about tor
Or older versions of browsers, or browsers that don’t comply, or browsers compiled for literally any other country
Straight to jail.
To shreds you say
me on my way to prison after i use an outdated browser (it didnt have the blocklist)
How would this even be enforced?
Browsers are open source
Just comment out the “download list of sites to block” part and recompile
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?
I have an even simpler example: should cars be required not go over the speed limit?
No because they’d lose the ticket revenue
this is already a thing for cargo trucks
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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’”
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.
And tor activity too
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how to get all browsers to remove access for france
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.
#BanFrance
the good ending? no more French?
But then, no more good eating :-[
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.
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.
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.
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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It’s all good dude. You are right, it has been used in the past to discredit people. I think there is an argument to be had that in most instances, the label was applied for good reason, but I wouldn’t go as far as to say that it was correct 100% of times. Kinda like the label “Nazi.” Honestly that is thrown around so much that it starts to lose it’s meaning! (Perhaps that is the intent…?)
Hope you have a good weekend. 👍
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.’
When they actually do have far right beliefs sure. But I think they were referring to people using the “right wing extremist” tag as a bludgeon for any views right of their own, or things that may not even be right at all.
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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Well I had time to waste and this comment seems a little out of pocket from the rest. Dude actually said we are outgrowing profit motives as a species. People’s opinions are like a stained glass mural, each piece can be different.
Well said
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?
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.
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.
The biggest rings of pedophilia are all made up of rich businessmen and politicians, (I’ll keep churches separate since they are not people) is that really what you’re saying?
Pretty sure the biggest rings of pedophilia are probably just randoms shooting shit with their own kids or child prostitutes in poor countries, otherwise we would’ve heard about new politicians and businessmen getting identified everytime someone gets caught with x00GB of videos and pictures
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France and dystopian copyright laws, name a more typical duo.
The UK and… in fact, no. I’m glad it’s not us this time. Lets roast France some more.
Is it still illegal to take pictures of French buildings?
Apparently not just “they could sue you” illegal. Last I heard you can go to jail and get a criminal record… For taking a fucking picture of a building.
Guess I was a criminal at 5 years old lmao. I definitely took a photo of the eiffel tower.
French here, never heard anything about that. Do you know more about this?
There was a huge shitstorm about taking pictures of the Eiffel tower, because of some “artist” with a doubly inflated ego had decorated it (with lamps) and so he said it was taking photos of his “art”.
That’s one thing I remember from like 10 years anyways :-)
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