[HN] Will Browsers Be Required by Law to Stop You from Visiting Infringing Sites?
[HN] Will Browsers Be Required by Law to Stop You from Visiting Infringing Sites?
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 ]
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.'
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
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.
websites like github?
That could very easily be all websites. It would never be feasible to stop.
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
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.
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.
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
Browsers are open source
Just comment out the "download list of sites to block" part and recompile
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.
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.
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.
Finland also had this for years but the ISPs started quietly to stop the blocking at some point. And you could bypass the blocking by using another DNS server anyways.
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.
spoiler
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It wouldn't make it too SCOTUS, they'd decline the appeal after lower courts ruled it unconstitutional.
Hope the french revolt about this too. Maybe throw a bunch of pc's on the prime ministers bathroom.
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
Good luck trying to enforce that.
And what happens when I remove that & compile my browser from source?
