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.
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.
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
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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?
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.
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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. 👍
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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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?
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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how to get all browsers to remove access for france
the good ending? no more French?
But then, no more good eating :-[
#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.
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 most stupid part of this idea is that is requires a list of banned sites to be served to every user.
Even if they would use hashing to obfuscate the banned domains, you can download a list of all registered domains and just test every one of them.
So the average internet user will lose freedom while a cheese pizza enjoyer with some computer knowledge will gain a list of every banned CP site.
Please tell me this is a joke and you aren’t actually a pizzagate nutter
No, I thought “Cheese Pizza” ist just an acronym for inappropriate pictures and videos of children. Tell me if I’m mistaken (English is not my first language).
Nah you are good. Cheese pizza as an acronym for you know what has been around longer than pizza gate.
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I guess it’s a joke on the fact that the US have a passion for acronyms: that inappropriate material is referred to as CP, nowadays even as CSAM.
Maybe you weren’t around long enough to appreciate the war on terror during which the George W. Bush administration and the very right wing Congress and SCOTUS all had fantasies about locking down the internet and making sure no one could think terror thoughts without the DHS knowing.
And while we’re at it, kill that porn bugbear, for the children, of course.
Then they realized qucikly enough that the only thing netizens love more than porn is cat pics (seriously. We measured.) and all we’d do by criminalizing unregulated internet traffic is make criminals of everyone in the US.
And who would be right there to teach everyone about net privacy and how to keep all your transactions hidden? Terrorists. Child porn enthusiasts. Communists. Also the whole black market where you can buy children and bomb parts. Also thr encryption / privacy community that occupies every LUG across the world.
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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.
Browsers are open source
Just comment out the “download list of sites to block” part and recompile
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
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.
It’s astonishing how much liberty they are being able to remove from us in sake of “security”.
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.
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.
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 :-)
Guess I was a criminal at 5 years old lmao. I definitely took a photo of the eiffel tower.
How would this even be enforced?
![[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}