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The French government is considering a law that would require web browsers – like Mozilla's Firefox – to block websites chosen by the government.
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What is with everyone's obsession, government or company, to moderate the web. It's seriously depressing and exhausting.
Authoritarian tendencies since the web is a bit too close to providing its users with freedom of speech.
for real. it’s been extremely disconcerting watching both companies and nations erode and distort privacy norms so blatantly in the past few years. i’ve never really been a paranoid person, but it’s starting to feel like a coordinated effort to cut the metaphorical brakes so that when we approach the next digital privacy rights crossroad, we are completely unable to exert any control over the direction that society moves.
it used to be that i would hear about an attack on digital privacy once every year. now it seems to happen almost daily. it’s exhausting and worrying all at once.
it used to be that i would hear about an attack on digital privacy once every year. now it seems to happen almost daily.
It could be that you've become more informed lately.
I feel like the situation has been deteriorating at a relatively steady pace for at least a decade, if not two.
facisim is on the rise again, that's all.
Companies it's because they want to be the ones serving you all the information and data and all the privileges that comes with like add profits, etc.
Governments because a huge global tool for information sharing, economics, etc grew under their noses for the last three decades and they ignored it until it was almost out of their control and are now panicking to try and grasp some back.
The Internet’s been ubiquitous for more than two decades now, and the people writing laws to regulate it in most democracies still lack even a high-level understanding about how it and the software they use to access it works. They also seem to go out of their way to avoid working with anyone who actually does know how to implement safety measures in less dangerous or exploitable ways. It’s inexcusable.
They ignore experts/scientists because they're a liability when all you care about is personal financial gain and fulfilling the role your oligarch/corporate handlers bankrolled you to fulfil.
thatsthepoint.jpeg
I don't know what France is like these days, but as I see the US and my country flirting with conservative homophobic politicians, I absolutely refuse to tie the porn I browse to my government ID.
Come on, do your thing french people! We know you want to!
This is too technical to incite the mass. Chances rely on parliament opposition and anti-constitutionality.
How do they propose to enforce this, when browsers are free and open-source and can easily be downloaded from hosts outside of France?
People that propose this kind of stuff always know exactly nothing about how the internet, or technology in general, works.
Not taking their side, but politicians who say that a nuclear plant shouldn’t be built next to a nature preserve don’t have to know the exact physics going on inside it. Common sense and popular opinion that that would be stupid and unnecessarily risky is enough for the decision to stand.
One thing that would save the internet would be to require a passport to be able to use it, ie no more anonymity. Abuse or fakery should get draconian penalties.
I know that would be bad for people of certain countries with oppressive governments, but for the West it would stop the rise of mgtow fascism in its tracks.
In this case Mozilla likely has staff and contributors working out of France. Chances are they make money from there too. Mozilla would either need to forfeit the above or comply if the law is implemented.
Enforcement from decent sized economies can often be as simple as having too much economic power to ignore, which often isn't that high of a threshold.
They don’t have to. Because 90% of the population are either too lazy or too uniformed to do anything but download it from the first link that Google shows them, and the other 10% who care aren’t important enough to warrant enforcement.
They can probably enforce it on the major ones and that will be enough to censor 95% of the population.
WTF?! „… force browser providers to create the means to mandatorily block websites present on a government provided list.“
Today it’s some terrorist / pedophile / fraudulent site, tomorrow it could be some opposition, news or whatever could be disliked site on that list.
If they can, they will.
Senile boomers try to do impossible things in tech because stupid. Censorship is stupid, Google and French goverment hand in hand trying to destroy the free and open internet.
Do they have this saying in France: "Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater" ? These days, everyone seems so intent on breaking what we have that at the end I'm not sure what we're going to have left.
Or how about "if it ain't broke, don't fix it?" It's not like the internet has suddenly changed. It's basically been the same for decades in terms of ease of access to content. They say it's to combat fraud, harassment and protect children. Who was doing that in the 90s? Who was doing that in the 2010s? No one. Society didn't collapse. Children didn't turn into depraved fiends when they grew up. What changed?
I think that's besides the point. The social media boom (FB, Twitter, Insta, TikTok) was a point of no return for the internet, stepping out of its "only nerds spend time on it" reputation. Nowadays, everybody and their grandma can be taken for a ride by bad players on the internet, because (imho) let's face it, most people are like deer in the headlights, they just can't tell bad stuff from good on the internet.
The internet becoming such a phenomenon with the "unbathed masses" put it on the radar of the regulators much more than in the 2010s, and of course the 90s when only nerds were on it (myself included).
It's like new designer drugs. When only few people know of them and use them, they remain legal until they become popular and people die from overdoses.
Just block it at the ISP who puts this feature into the actual browser has this country even used the web before???
Brother, you don't know how fucking tech illiterate our government is (with a nice topping of being wannabe autocrats)
Mastercraft hacking required to completely invalidate this effort.
whipped up a quick meme
I could see Mozilla being forced to comply and then letting it be known that if you delete a certain part of the firefox source and recompile, it goes away.
I don't think they can be forced to comply. Even if they have a local office they can just leave and tell Macron to fuck off. The government will probably force ISPs to block Mozilla's website (at DNS level because politicians/idiots) and nothing will actually change.
The real shit would be if the EU wanted this...
An 'unrelated third party' would do it
I hate that these articles are always couched in excusatory language like, "While motivated by a legitimate concern..."
These people are not your friends, they're your enemies. Don't accept their frame in the argument.
I knew those Fr*nch were up to something 😡
Our president. We're for nothing ._. And yeah, he's loved by no one
They indicted 7 people for Terrorism last year because they encrypted their disks, used tail as their OS and signal for communication.
Jesus France is really fucking over their people aren't they?
They've had quite an authoritarian tendency since quite a while, with legislation about surveillance and encryption, plus the most violent police in Western Europe (possibly in all of Europe) which was purposefully made to be so through legislation granting them increasing amounts of immunity and legal cover to use ever more harmful equipment to "maintain public order".
In parallel, quite a lot of ex-PMs of France have been convicted of Corruption.
I suspect these things are related.
I guess from the perspective of lawmakers, it's no different requiring browsers to not display certain sites than requiring book stores to not sell certain books.
I can even see the "logic" in that to a degree, especially if the people talking about it are rather tech averse.
https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Coming_War_on_General_Computation
This seems like a relevant read (I'm a big fan of this speech/essay ;p). It makes this point more generally about how General Computation is fundamentally different from a lot of other aspects of regulation but politicians do not understand this so well >.<
As usual, Stallman was right. A fucking modern Cassandra, that guy is.
Why should a book store not be allowed to sell certain books? Tf? There's nothing we can't find online if we wanted to. Why would anyone want allow some self righteous asshat to determine which books you can and can't read. Dangerous shit.
Because knowledge is bad for you! Books are the gateway to Satan, and the internet is the devils web!
You should burn your books and smash your computer!
You can trust me, I have a rectangular mustache and paint pictures of doggies!
So educate them?
here's the proposed bill btw https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/dossierlegislatif/JORFDOLE000047533100/
Relevant language from the bill in question, machine translated to English, and formatting cleaned up:
Article 1, section 1:
I. – Article 10 of Law No. 2004-575 of June 21, 2004 on confidence in the digital economy is worded as follows:
Art. 10 . – I. – The Audiovisual and Digital Communication Regulatory Authority ensures that pornographic content made available to the public by an online public communication service cannot be accessible to minors and, consequently, to that the persons whose activity is to publish such a service of communication to the public online verify beforehand the age of their users.
It establishes and publishes for this purpose, after consulting the National Commission for Data Processing and Liberties, a reference system determining the technical characteristics applicable to the age verification systems put in place for access to communication services at the online audiences that make pornographic content available to the public, with regard to the reliability of verifying the age of users and respecting their privacy.
II. – (Deleted) ”
II (new) . – The Audiovisual and Digital Communication Regulatory Authority establishes and publishes the reference system mentioned in article 10 of the aforementioned law no. six months after the promulgation of this law.
Article 4a, section 6:
➆ II. – When the person whose activity is to publish the online public communication service in question has not made available the information mentioned in article 1-1 of this law, when this does not allow not to contact him or when at the end of the period mentioned in the first paragraph of I of this article, if necessary after this person has submitted his observations, it appears that the report mentioned in the same first paragraph is still valid, the administrative authority may, by reasoned decision, order Internet browser providers within the meaning of 11 of Article 2 of Regulation (EU) 2022/1925 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 September 2022 on contestable and fair markets in the digital sector and amending Directives (EU) 2019/1937 and (EU) 2020/1828, Internet access service providers or domain name resolution system providers to immediately take any useful measure intended to prevent access to the address of this service for a maximum period of three months. The decision of the administrative authority designates which provider is responsible for preventing access to the address of this service, depending on the injunction issued and the nature of the measure envisaged.
Aside this being extremely fucked up. Why do they even feel the need? I've been online most my life and have never been defrauded. Are there a shit ton of people in France getting scammed by stupid websites? Did they look at China and go, yes plz? Some authoritarian shit and extremely dangerous. Who's going to be the fuck that decides which sites to block?
Why do they even feel the need?
Because the idea that the masses can freely disseminate information amongst themselves without needing the clergy or the state or "big media" to control it for them is like a splinter in the upper class's minds.
People might go online and find out that it's not normal to have your country burn down every few months. They mights start getting angry at the people in power.
Just kidding, this is probably about protecting corporate profits from the evils of BitTorrent or some shit.
Instead of guessing, you could just... Google it. It's about making harmful content unavailable to minors. I'm all for Internet freedom, but something makes me uncomfortable about protesting against protecting children from porn. It's probably something to do with me seeing porn when I was young and it fucking me up for a long time.
They want to hunt down the leaders of alt movement who organize strikes or interventions vs government projects. For exemples eco warriors, "yellow jackets" etc.
Sorry for my bad English.
Your English is fine. Though if im understanding correctly activist would be a better word than alt.
And yeah I agree this seems like the French government trying to track folks down so they can retaliate against them.
How is this different to saying "No meetings of groups of people in person to share thoughts, views, agree trades or have an argument"? Happens in the pubs every night.
How would they enforce this on open source projects without companies behind them?
Going after GitHub doesn't seem viable given that they stood up for YouTube-dl
No country is fighting as hard against poverty as they are against piracy.
That's not the case on South America, our countries may not be the best, sometimes governments try to improve a few things and fail, but the good thing is, no one cares about piracy, so at least here governments are not even fighting piracy it seems
that is bizarre. like they goin to take down any fork they dont? and who among the french will be able to read all the english github pages?
Sacrebleu!
What happened to parental responsibility?
Even if firefox complies, I am sure a fork will be made that will disable the in-browser censorship. That is the good thing about FOSS.
Or that might end up as some boolean value in about:config like "SetMoronicBaguetteCensorship" that even a gonk can remove in 2 minutes with a tutorial.
What is a fork? Pkease explain like I'm 5.
FOSS stands for "free open source software. Open source means the code for the software publically available for anyone to see. A fork is when someone take a project like firefox and clones it (copying the source code), make any chsnges they want (such as removing the in-browser block list) and re-releasing the app.
Is Mozilla 100% forced to comply with this? What's to stop them from dropping their French presence and keep serving the browser unaltered on the public web? Do they also then get added to the ban list?
The thought behind this is alarming and worrying, but the mechanism of action seems shoddy and not thought out at all.
Institutions are becoming irrelevant due to the power of tech and this one of their reactions.
Irrelevant in some ways. We still need infrastructure and regulatory oversight bodies.
This kind of shit is what regulatory oversight bodies do. There are no people in government because they're trying to fix anything, they're just trying to control something.
I wish this were the case. But while they can't really control the software you run on your devices (yet) they control the infrastructure.
What's needed is a cultural sea change towards privacy and personal liberty and a dismantling of most of the security state. And I don't see that happening in our lifetimes. The attitude is very much "If it stops one single child being abused we will take everyone's right to privacy away!"
What's a petition going to do? Is there any evidence that a bunch of people signing a petition is any more effective than a bunch of people just asking?
Petitions try to show how many people actually care.
If 10.000 people signed the petition it shows that there's more concern than when there's just 3 people who actually take the effort to say something
I wouldn't set expectations too high though: for the retirement bill, there were many protests, millions of people in the streets, all surveys showing a very strong reject by the people, and the reaction was basically: "I got elected, I do whatever the f**k I want!".
Short of a revolution, nothing can change their mind. I'd rather push other parties to include this in their program for the next elections: repel this absurdity.
On the other hand, it often seems like the online kind of petition is just a away to dissipate the anger and need to do something of people, before they actually do something with significant effect (such as demonstrations and strikes) - they sign the petition and feel they've "done something" lowering their want to do something about it, when they really haven't done amything with the least bit of effectiveness, since a few tens of thousands signing an online petition in a country of 65 million people is something the authorities can simply ignore with zero concern.
How many times did internet petitions actually changed something
Same thought train like people claiming a protest march does nothing. You couldn't be more wrong. Making your opinion heard and showcasing how many people are with you has impact.
In fact, I'll turn your logic upside down: if your protest didn't get the result you wanted, you just didn't mobilize enough people (or not enough people cared for your cause)
A lot, actually
In Russia change org was one of very few channels to bring change into politics.
For some reason our politicians actually listened to those. So it was a very useful tool.
Unfortunately, I don't have much idea how effective it is since Feb of 2022. Imagine our gov as an armodillo. It has a sturdy shell, so it is very hard to get good changes through it's head. Now that armodillo closed up in a ball, it lives in it's own bubble, its being fed by it's own lies. Nothing good can come out of that head. And it doesn't.
Petitions have weight providing they're coming from the right places. There's a difference between the random internet petitions that random users make, and petitions coming from bodies such as unions or regulatory bodies.
This is a petition being put forward from a well known organisation, so I would gather it actually has some weight.
In this case they can create an indication of popular support that opposition politicians may be motivated to use.
Doesn’t firefox have the option to not officially be supported in france? Why are they asserting that they would automatically obey?
It's much more productive to take part in steering the conversation instead of taking a position like the one you describe. After all, Firefox doesn't have a huge market share to leverage. And assuming their goal of a safer, more secure and open internet are sincere, they would be playing into the hands of the competition.
Alright, maybe you guys starting a sixth republic is not that bad of an idea.
Chromium browsers: “this is fine, stock market is best market”
How long till other countries try to implement it?
3, 2, 1...
Dear France, wake tf up.
Common French government L. You guys seem to not be able to catch a break. :(
This government is getting dumber every day. Goddammit.
Can't wait for the next government to get even dumber.
So the french govt is too lazy to censor on its own.
What websites and for what purpose does gov want to be censored?
The article mentions the current idea is to censor phishing websites.
If i was a hacker, i would penetrate their system ( shouldn't be that hard as most if their operating system are old, and supervised by even older persons and methods), deface their website to inform the population, and ask to take back their ideas as a ransom for not divulging some weird shit they must have on their computers.
Don't let your dreams be dreams
Unfortunately i think i'm too old for this. All i can do is try to spread the word to younger people, try to make them change how they think. But it's harder now that they have tools to mass influence them. They are efficient and they use them on people younger and younger, and most of our society is built around it. I'm still glad to still have dreams and hope that someday, some people will make it a reality.
What you are describing is a serious crime, and for good reasons. It might be true that finding a way to do this is possible, but if exploited, that action could have very serious consequences.
Sometimes you got to do what you got to do. Time ago people fought and die for our rights and our liberty. It's even in our national motto. Now seeing all of these stripped little by little, seeing some far right ideologies become more and more common when other people also fought and die for not so long ago, is simply disgusting and unbearable. If what i talk about is a crime, it's still a lesser crime than what they are doing, they're the real criminals. And they shouldn't forget what even ancient people did when they got sick of the governing peoples' shit. They cut their heads off. That was a serious crime, but if it wasn't done, the current republic (and surely also myself) won't be here today.
Implying any revolution is legal or needs to be
Hacking for sure isn't hard at all. I regularly hack into everything and it's true that everyone is so old that they are napping at their desk so I just inject my new binary data (which goes right past their really old binary data because it's so old) and get all the data I need which I send to as many young people as I can
Does a r/master hacker community exist on Lemmy? Because your comment sounds like it fits there.
The result of this should be all of these businesses abandoning France as a market.
More and more it looks like we would be better off of we restricted American companies from operating overseas at all.
manu
nice
Makes sense
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplatforming/
Mozilla wants to control the censorship so can't let any other do it
After reading the post I don't see how it gives any indication that Mozilla is trying to censor anyone. Mostly it argues for more transparency. It's certainly worth reading.
Hate speech isnt valid speech.
Saying we should burn all red heads because they have no soul is still acceptable tho. /jk
What a stupid comment. If you don't like this, then you could move to a new country, learn a new language, find a new job, new home, but don't even think about trying to make change, right?