Will Browsers Be Required By Law To Stop You From Visiting Infringing Sites?
from the i-can't-open-that-page,-dave dept
Mozilla’s Open Policy & Advocacy blog has news about a worrying proposal from the French government:
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.
The post explains why this is an extremely dangerous approach:
A world in which browsers can be forced to incorporate a list of banned websites at the software-level that simply do not open, either in a region or globally, is a worrying prospect that raises serious concerns around freedom of expression. If it successfully passes into law, the precedent this would set would make it much harder for browsers to reject such requests from other governments.
If a capability to block any site on a government blacklist were required by law to be built in to all browsers, then repressive governments would be given an enormously powerful tool. There would be no way around that censorship, short of hacking the browser code. That might be an option for open source coders, but it certainly won’t be for the vast majority of ordinary users. As the Mozilla post points out:
Such a move will overturn decades of established content moderation norms and provide a playbook for authoritarian governments that will easily negate the existence of censorship circumvention tools.
It is even worse than that. If such a capability to block any site were built in to browsers, it’s not just authoritarian governments that would be rubbing their hands with glee: the copyright industry would doubtless push for allegedly infringing sites to be included on the block list too. We know this, because it has already done it in the past, as discussed in Walled Culture the book (free digital versions).
Not many people now remember, but in 2004, BT (British Telecom) caused something of a storm when it created CleanFeed:
British Telecom has taken the unprecedented step of blocking all illegal child pornography websites in a crackdown on abuse online. The decision by Britain’s largest high-speed internet provider will lead to the first mass censorship of the web attempted in a Western democracy.
Here’s how it worked:
Subscribers to British Telecom’s internet services such as BTYahoo and BTInternet who attempt to access illegal sites will receive an error message as if the page was unavailable. BT will register the number of attempts but will not be able to record details of those accessing the sites.
The key justification for what the Guardian called “the first mass censorship of the web attempted in a Western democracy” was that it only blocked illegal child sexual abuse material Web sites. It was therefore an extreme situation requiring an exceptional solution. But seven years later, the copyright industry were able to convince a High Court judge to ignore that justification, and to take advantage of CleanFeed to block a site, Newzbin 2, that had nothing to do with child sexual abuse material, and therefore did not require exceptional solutions:
Justice Arnold ruled that BT must use its blocking technology CleanFeed – which is currently used to prevent access to websites featuring child sexual abuse – to block Newzbin 2.
Exactly the logic used by copyright companies to subvert CleanFeed could be used to co-opt the censorship capabilities of browsers with built-in Web blocking lists. As with CleanFeed, the copyright industry would doubtless argue that since the technology already exists, why not to apply it to tackling copyright infringement too?
That very real threat is another reason to fight this pernicious, misguided French proposal. Because if it is implemented, it will be very hard to stop it becoming yet another technology that the copyright world demands should be bent to its own selfish purposes.
Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon. Originally published to Walled Culture.
Filed Under: blocklist, browsers, cleanfeed, copyright, france, sren, websites
Comments on “Will Browsers Be Required By Law To Stop You From Visiting Infringing Sites?”
Camels, tents.
'I'm not saying we WILL use it like that, merely that we CAN...'
Does it count as abusing the law if it’s being used as intended, even if that intent was never made explicitly clear at the time?
Re:
It’s abusing The Law, writ large, even if it isn’t abusing the law in the eyes of those who intended exactly those sorts of uses when crafting or supporting a particular law.
I’m legit surprised it’s not on the ISP level.
Once is happenstance.
Twice is coincidence.
Three times is enemy action.
Revolver Ocelot was right.
If browsers don’t stop us, who will? Yeah, that’s what I thought. See we need browser censors. Even better, browsers should tell us what to think, so we think properly.
Re:
Well remember if browsers (but only some of them) were telling French politicians what to think, they wouldn’t be quite as stupid.
Yowsers!
Does this mean wowsers will control our browsers?
#JustDemocracyThings
As with DNS blocks and other such nonsense, it would be trivially easy for any motivated person to sidestep this kind of control. As long as someone – anyone – is out there offering a browser without these restrictions, all the user needs to do is download and install it. It wouldn’t require a great degree of technical skill, time, or effort.
Whenever a scheme like this is proposed, we obviously have to balance the benefits against the drawbacks. This article (and Mozilla’s statement) make the drawbacks very clear, and they seem significant enough to me on their own. But given the above fact of easy circumvention, I would question whether the supposed benefits really exist in the first place, or if it’s just ignorance and wishful thinking (at best).
I think what’s so unfortunate about the problems that this bill is attempting to address (reducing scams, cyber-bullying, CSAM distribution, etc.) is that they are complex problems, and like most complex problems they require complex solutions.
But politicians don’t like complex solutions because they’re harder to sell to voters, and easier for political opponents to pick apart. It’s tempting to say that bills like this are based purely on ignorance, but while that almost certainly plays a part in how these bills keep getting proposed, I don’t think it’s the full story.
We frequently have experts and other community stakeholders (Mozilla in this case) advising governments on the problems with their proposed bills, and frustratingly, that advice seems to be ignored more often than not. Despite being given the facts, they push forward with unhelpful or even dangerous legislation because, I suspect, they are more interested in scoring political points than they are at actually solving problems.
Sadly, I think this problem of politics is itself a complex one and without any simple solutions, either.
I think the best we can do is voice our opposition to bad ideas loudly enough that the voting public is convinced. Trying to convince the legislators themselves that their own proposed legislation is problematic often seems like a fool’s errand to me. SOPA (just for example) wasn’t scrapped because politicians suddenly started listening to experts, but rather because Google et. al. shone a massive spotlight on it and turned voters against it.
Re:
As long as someone – anyone – is out there offering a browser without these restrictions, all the user needs to do is download and install it.
What makes you believe that your browser would allow you to access providers of illegal browsers?
You can pooh-pooh people who aren’t looped into illegal software distribution channels as much as you want, but dismissing them all as too stupid to care about is rather pathetic for someone who uses democracy hashtags.
Re: Re:
Well firstly, these blocks are never 100% effective to begin with. Preventing the distribution of browser forks (which would only be illegal in France) would be a constantly moving target (just like so many other things governments try to block).
Secondly, there are numerous ways a person could get a different browser that didn’t have these restrictions built in. People could share them via popular services like Discord for example, and I don’t see a simple way you could prevent that. Hell, if your device is not up to date, the restrictions may not even be enabled yet in your current browser before you’d even need to go looking elsewhere.
I made no such judgment, and I’m unsure how you’ve inferred otherwise from my comment, but let me try and make my position more clear:
I think this bill is bad and will make the internet worse for everyone, but particularly French users and users living in authoritarian states, precisely because many users will not know or care that it is in place, and it will be open to abuse and false positives.
My point about easy circumvention was that if the intention here is not just scam prevention but to prevent users from doing Bad Things™ (for example future copyright enforcement, as the above article speculates), it would not take a lot of effort on behalf of those users to sidestep these rules if they are sufficiently motivated to do so, and so that raises the question for me as to whether this proposed legislation would actually accomplish its goals (irrespective of the very obvious drawbacks).
The answer I find myself arriving at is “no”, and that seems like a strong reason to ditch the bill in addition to the drawbacks already raised.
Re:
Except Apple and Increasingly Microsoft are controlling what software a user can, (/s) for the users protection of courses.
Re:
The next step might be a law requiring ISPs to block web sites hosting non-compliant browsers. Then they would have to ban VPNs…
Re: Re:
What, and sidestep more effective means of banning a site, ie, infrastructure-level bans, then outlawing VPNs that aren’t registered with the government?
(Please don’t actually do this, because all you’ll do is piss off the stock exchanges, and even CHINA, the country with the armed forces to force compliance to any MNC stupid enough to make the profit line go up work with an authcap hellstate, hasn’t actually tried to enforce the VPN law onto the stock exchanges)
Re: Re: Re:
Wouldn’t that be “requiring ISPs to block web sites hosting non-compliant browsers”?
Re: Re: Re:2
No, what you’re thinking is still just a scratch across the surface. What would really do the trick is to:
a) force all servers, of absolutely every stripe, to respond with a 404 to any non-compliant browser;
and
b) force content distributors such as Akamai, Cloudflare and others to adhere to a) above.
Item b) takes care of vpn’s located in any and all countries.
Somewhere in there a new protocol will have to be implemented, and with no fallback to the old protocols – client and server alike. I’m envisioning more than just REQ, ACK, SYN, etc. No, it will be more like “REQ”, “Are you a qualified browser?”, “Yes”, “Prove it – what’s the 4th line of the BlackList?”…. all before we even get to the 200 response.
Where this solution breaks down is that it relies on honesty. A nefarious country, say like Putin’s current version of Russia and their “Screw Copyright” schema, would obviously be non-compliant. Any server set up in that country would have a hay-day serving infringing material to non-Russian visitors. Figure out how to solve that one, and the web as we’ve known it for 3 decades goes away.
tl;dr
ANY client-side solution is doomed before it can get started. Even tech-hating users will act like the internet itself – they’ll route around damage. Proof of that? Just visit any tech site’s support forum. Gauge the savvy of requestors, and you’ll see that a pretty large majority of them are beginners. IOW, they know how to use Bingle to query for answers to their tech questions. That alone should scare off the Parlement Français… but I’m not holding my breath.
Re: Re: Re:3
Of course, that would only work for servers in France.
Re: Re: Re:2
Semantics aside..
China already has laws blocking the use of of unauthorized VPNs, despite the law being loosely enforced because the state stock exchanges use unauthorized VPNs for day-to-day business.
Forcing that sort of compliance on people is, sadly, not out of the question. And blocking sites will only make it easier. Especially when both Dems and insurrectionists want to emulate China.
Does it count?
That they let us KEEP our guns, but take all the ammo? Like over the past 20 years?
(wow, has it been that long?)
For the sake of understanding..
Is it NOW time to create our OWN home based LIST of Internet sites, insted of using Google and your ISP?
Yes we can do that..ITS a big DNS list, and you can have MORE then 1. AND ITS A way to bypass Any sites your G or Local DNS does not have.
Literally this is conscripting tool makers so that their tools cannot be misused and this is govware.
I would say, hands off my browser.
It’s like to use a computer (even if you own it) or a knife you must have a policeman watch over your shoulder, in your personal property.
EU to regulate the use of people’s own stuff isn’t new:
https://www.techdirt.com/2021/06/04/google-facebook-chaos-computer-club-join-to-fight-new-german-law-allowing-government-spies-police-to-use-trojans-against/
Something like this happened with the 996 controversy in china: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system#Browser_blacklist
Not once have I seen the US attempt to regulate a tool or a product that is either owned by the device owner or open-source licensed to allow the user to use the software however he/she wishes provided that the agreement has been met.
There are also reasons why law enforcement should not have control on people’s devices either, because there are malware on the internet, and there are also scammers who can abuse it to confuse people. Here is an example: https://www.zdnet.com/article/new-malware-poses-as-wga-validation-and-notification/
Re: Saw this on torrentfreak
https://torrentfreak.com/french-govt-wants-to-inject-domain-blocking-lists-directly-into-web-browsers-230630/
wget? curl?
I could generate a qr code with a curl or wget command that would bypass any browser restriction, say to download an unrestricted browser. I could even use an ip address to bypass DNS issues.
There, restriction implementation defeated.
Re:
Laws could classify curl and wget as “browsers”, and then maybe you’d have to blank out /usr/share/browser-blocklist. Or use libcurl, or Python’s HTTP library, but maybe anything meant to speak HTTP would also be a “browser”. Anyway, as someone else wrote, none of that helps on locked-down platforms such as iPhones or Windows ARM tablets.
Remember when Debian had a non-US repository, because cryptography couldn’t be exported from the USA? Users could still get all that stuff; it just couldn’t come from American servers or be worked on by American maintainers. Between this and the crypto-war resurgence, I won’t be surprised if such things reappear.
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Good luck trying to display the 3d graphics my website offers https://meshpage.org/418
curl and wget can fetch the html stuff, but can it properly run the javascript, do all the webassembly stuff, render 3d graphics and pass it to web canvas. If yes, you have nothing to worry about. Internet is not about images/videos/3d graphics that you cannot open, but instead internet’s main ability is to open those content items properly.
Re: Re:
Your ought to be asking yourself whether you can afford the costs and time if this DRM takes hold on the Internet? Failure to adopt such a technology could, in the view of those who like it, make meshpages an unsafe pirate site.
Re: Re: Re:
I think they would need to ground their accusations more to the legal statues. Rejecting some proprietary technology is so common operation that you cannot base legal status of different websites on that.
The operations that make site illegal must be so extraordinary that only criminals will attempt to do it. Fraud, blackmail or extortion does not happen accidentally or automatically. You need active participation in the criminal operation.
Re: Re: Re:2
We are talking about an industry that is known to sue if they can make it look like they possibly have a case, and drive small legal operations into bankruptcy into bankruptcy.
Re: Re: Re:3
Whatever the industry is, it cannot overtake the legal mechanism and rewrite laws to their pleasing. The rules that govern copyrights are well established and they will have significant problems declaring meshpage as a pirate site. This is because we’re attached to the centre of legal area and not try to stretch the legal statues. This means they need to travel very far from current meshpage implementation before they can find anything to complain about. And courts are very sensitive to these attempts to move technology implementations from its original legal position towards the illegal borders. Thus there is nothing to worry about and I can confidently offer my services to the wider internet ecosystem.
Re: Re: Re:4
Except for all the times they did. Like the time they took out Megaupload without SOPA, or the time they took out Backpage without SESTA. Hell, the entire point of them demanding new laws is precisely rewriting laws based on what powers they want.
None of this prevents someone from dragging you to court and wasting your money and time with a frivolous case.
It’s likely the main reason why no one has harassed you is because you keep claiming you only made $58 in 10 years.
The courts were once asked to provide information on users because of comments regarding piracy they made 10 years ago.
Your infringement of Scott Cawthon’s 3D model was in the last five years. By stricter copyright rules, you’re still liable for that infringement.
And let’s be honest here, if you had any kind of legal “team” at all, they’d be busy stopping you from spouting your nonsense like Putin’s admiration for your copyright to the extent that he started a war.
But the truth is, you don’t have a “team” because you can’t stand other humans.
Re: Re: Re:5
Yes, they have evaluated the copyright status of meshpage and decided that it does not cause copyright damage to other products. Thus when damage does not exist, and $58 is the maximum they’re going to receive from any lawsuit, they had no other choice than not sue meshpage for copyrights.
When RIAA/MPAA and all other copyright owners on the planet have decided not to sue, their collective decision is so powerful as to prove that no illegal activity is happening. If it had happened, someone would call the bluff and meshpage would be sued out of existence. But when the world as a whole decides not to sue, our confidence to the legal practices being used to protect other copyright owners gets strong validation.
Re: Re:
TP, TP, TP [For My Bunghole!].
Two days ago, on Bandcamp Friday, two people paid US$25.35 for my entire discography, and I license all my original music, covers of public domain songs, and Jonathan Coulton covers with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license. If © was so essential to making money, why are people paying me for stuff that I upload to the internet archive?
I don’t think I’m that good or popular, but maybe they actually think I make a product worth paying for. Meshpage, however, is not one of those products.
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Re: Re: Re:
Good luck to your career. I don’t think you have any chance of getting your money back after purchasing gadgets needed for creating the audio content.
This is because noone in the world has seen how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Re: Re: Re:2
Bwahahahaha! I already have the gear! They’re the old video game systems! And modern-day computers! And they can be used for more than just making music!
And once again, I’m not successful, but I am more successful than you are!
So you made a product so hardcore that nobody would use it? I’d say “Good Luck”, but you hadn’t had any of that…
Re: Re: Re:3
TempleOS?
Inochi2D?
Some crazy Linux Distro I’m not aware of?
…some insane unknown fork of Unity, Cryengine or a FOSS game engine that uses Brainfuck as a scripting language?
You gotta give Tero some examples, man. His tiny, clearly non-functioning reptilian brain needs something to activate those neurons. After all, the man couldn’t detach his self-importance enough to make functioning software.
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Re: Re: Re:4
Aaah, the software is not functioning -argument.
too bad techdirt’s experts have yet to find one error from the material, even though i have offered several urls for your pleasure:
https://meshpage.org
https://meshpage.org/view.php
https://meshpage.org/gltf_to_zip.php
you shouldn’t complain about functionality that you’re not interested enough to try it out.
Re: Re: Re:5
You yourself made claims over the years of memory leaks, the need for high-performance hardware to even start running your tech, and all sorts of admissions you made regarding Meshpage’s functioning errors only after repeated questioning.
Why should anyone destroy their own hardware to prove something doesn’t work, when the creator himself admits that current builds aren’t intended to run on most machines?
Ah, you mean the material that was posted to Github once and you swiftly took down because you didn’t like what others were saying about it.
Re: Re: Re:6
Our position on this subject is that if hardware gets destroyed by running some software on it, the hardware was designed wrong. There’s nothing wrong with software trying to take advantage of all the hardware features available, but if the said hw gets destroyed in the process, it’s clearly hardware design problem and you should bring your amiga to the hw doctor. They will open the hw, not knowing what is the problem. When you ask for your computer back (after 2 days), the doctor will tell that it’s not possible since half of the parts are not there any longer. Asking for refund and replacement computer will result in awful computer without 1Mb chip ram.
Re: Re: Re:6
Yes. Misusing open source practices like source availability is more dangerous than you think. Any time internet misuses the freedoms that copyright owners make available to users, copyright owner is required to remove that feature from circulation. Misuse is simply so evil practice that open source, free software and creative commons simply cannot survive under the pressure. Thus when the features are actively being misused, the world will lose access to open source, free software and creative commons. The more you misuse, the more world will lose.
When you encounter clear misuse of open source, how will you fix the problem and make the misuse impossible?
Re: Re: Re:3
Too bad your customer base will recognize immediately if you try to bring your 8 bit audio equipment to a modern party. The 1980’s sounds are terrifying more than allowing customers to hand over their hard earned cash to the musician. Even 16 bit times the amiga sound hardware is no match to the power of this death star. You need actual skills to get past the ticket goon with your outdated audio hardware.
Re: Re: Re:4
Mr Abraham actually earns money from his music. If we compare his earnings with yours we can only conclude you have no skill.
Re: Re: Re:5
here your argument goes well beyond normal internet wisdom.
Are you actually claiming that RIAA is paying real money to the authors? Or which channel is the money coming from?
If RIAA is the source of this awesome money flow. you have no longer bits to complain about RIAA sueing pirates.
Re: Re: Re:6
I didn’t think anyone could be this stupid, but you have proven me wrong. Bravo.
Can anyone try to explain to this idiot why RIAA doesn’t pay money to artists and how artists can actually make money on the internet, I can’t be fucking bothered wrestling with this particular pig.
Re: Re: Re:7
I would expect artists make money the same way as any other copyright owner. They go to music/film/demo/e-sports/game party and wait for publisher to find out about your awesome product worthy of publisher’s time. Then you sign exclusive contract and reject other publishing channels and start waiting for your money…
Re: Re: Re:8
And what coding parties have you attended, just to give your claim of how things work in the real world the benefit of the doubt?
Who’s lining up to give you exclusive deals? Who’s working with you to build Meshpage-produced games instead of Unity, Blender or Unreal? Where’s all the Meshpage products?
It’s almost as if you’ve done absolutely nothing to promote your own software except to accuse everyone of pirates and threaten legal action unless they start using your software, then get angry because people don’t like being ordered to do things at theoretical gunpoint.
Re: Re: Re:9
Assembly 1994 had nice party where I sold my Mega Motion amiga game to Black Legend.
Some guy called Richard Holmes.
This was long time before meshpage existed.
https://meshpage.org/view.php
https://meshpage.org/gltf_to_zip-php
https://meshpage.org
But I still mention its existence every time I talk in techdirt? You don’t think techdirt is the breeding ground for wannabe software publishers?
If the world is going to that direction, more accusations are needed to make it whole again.
Re: Re: Re:
must be some legal requirement that we do not know about. itch.io did the same when i first uploaded builder tool to the itch.io. But the money dried up even though i kept updating the software regularly and users always had the bleeding edge version available.
but your idea that copyright isn’t the source of the money is slightly mistaken. Its because of copyright that you receive the money.
Re: Re: Re:2
You get money when people use your product. When people don’t use your product… you don’t get the money. Copyright law would not stop this from happening. You keep desperately want to believe this, to the point where you claim that anyone not using Meshpage is committing an act of copyright infringement, but that’s not how the law works.
If this was how the law works, your supposed “legal team” would already be filing lawsuits and making tons of money from the settlement money alone. But it turns out, nobody in Finland even cares that you exist.
Re: Re: Re:3
This doesn’t seem to be true in today’s world. People just opt to use the open source version where no money is exchanged. I have 541 downloads of my builder tool in itch.io, but only $6.00 as transactions where money is exchanged. So it does not seem to be true that you get money when people use your product.
Re: Re: Re:4
Depends on what you have and where.
All of my work has been released as IDGAF and is nearly completely part of other projects.
In a rare occasion someone will read a readme or manpage, and shoot me a cup of coffee.
I willingly pay for Microsoft Office and keep a dedicated windows box just for that. Because word on windows remains the best for both reflowing PDF work and HTML WYSIWYG work.
Though Textmaker is catching up on the PDF front.
With the death of Frontpage and most other WP/DP based HTML design there aren’t many choices left for tweaking non-interactive content easily.
And with the feed world now down to two outputable programs, calibre and sea monkey, portability advocates keep pouring money into sea monkey to keep it alive.
And I pay “donate” for multiple open source products on a monthly basis.
Re: Re: Re:5
so, how does your ms word handle embedding gltf animations to the document? For example, this tool https://meshpage.org/gltf_to_zip.php allows you to convert the files to html5, but does your ms word workflow allow you to insert those allimportant embed tags to the document?
So I will be illegal to learn about illegal toast.
Sounds reasonable[1].
This also sounds like an attempt to deputize unrelated (and likely out of “jurisdiction”) software developers.
Also what happens when the French government is too stupid to make their “banned list” work (or too stupid keep their own sites off the list). Do the browser block everything? Or Nothing? And does the browser enforce the blocking when it fetches the list (meaning will it block itself if the site/url/etc that it would fetch from is on the list)?
[1] But only where “reasonable” is defined as “bat shit crazy totalitarian drivel”
Abolish copyright
The obvious response to horror stories like these is: we should abolish copyright. Such policies and outcomes are a natural consequence of copyright law itself. The problem is not this particular law which is just an extension of the copyright mentality–it’s copyright law itself. The only way to stop such outrages is to understand their root cause and to oppose them. The root case us copyright law. The solution is to abolish all copyright law. Unless one favors copyright abolition, whining about the consequences of copyright law is pointless.
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Re:
I strongly disagree with this. If anything, copyright needs to be extended.
Re: Re:
…said nobody mentally competent, ever.
Re: Re:
Hear hear, infinity or bust, if copyright doesn’t literally last forever and only effectively lasts forever then what use is it?!
Re: Re:
How’s that Paul Hansmeier defense fund coming along bro?
if that were to happen, it would be so much for a free and open Internet. however, it could easily occur first of all in the USA. you have to consider how corrupt Congress is, how corrupt any USA government is and how quickly and easily the majority of those just mentioned will take ‘campaign contributions’ from the very organisations and people who want to make the Internet their own! it’s the best media distribution platform invented to date and is as successful as it has been, is and will continue to be as long as it is NOT controlled by an industry or industries that want to use for it’s own desires and devices while fucking it up totally for everyone else! just remember you two faced fuckers in government, you will be just as screwed as the rest of us! it may take a bit longer to get to that point than it will for the rest of us but you will be taken to the same screwed up point as everyone else! and dont forget, if you hand this over to anyone, whether a person, a company, and industry or a government, it will never be free again and the untold damage that will be inflicted on everyone will be absolute!! and all because an industry cannot bear to NOT be in control or desire to share anything without making an absolute fortune from it!! we will definitely be sorry beyond words!!
"Then only criminals will have guns"
I think we’ve followed this logic before. In the aughts, a notable benchmark occurred when cat-pics exceeded porn content in the most frequent use of the internet. (Disclosure: I don’t know what exactly what was being measured).
People want their porn as well as their ability to speak critically of the current regime and conduct legitimate — and sometimes less legitimate — transactions. So much so that they’ll actually strive to become computer literate enough to get what they want without alerting law enforcement.
If they restrict the internet to only things that state governments like, then only criminals will use the internet.
Re:
I believe you’re thinking of Ethan Zuckerman’s “cute cat theory of digital activism“.
ftp://foo.bar/unfuckedbrowser.zip/tar.gz/snap/appimage
It’s how we used to get Netscape.
Re:
CLI still works last I checked seconds ago.
That users don’t know that isn’t my problem anymore.
Re: Re:
What, are you still using Lynx and Pine?!
Really?
Wonder how they’re gonna stop open source, decentralized browsers?
Re:
How will those browsers convince a web site to serve them pages? If a web site you need to use, hello gov sites, and online shopping sites, want a secured browser, that is what you will to use, or fake.
Re: Re:
“How will those browsers convince a web site to serve them pages? ”
User agent spoofing doesn’t exist?
Which is exactly the argument that the commercial companies will use to tell the French gov’t to GTFO.
Google is pushing this WEI crap with Chrome, and it isn’t heading anywhere I wanna go.
Re:
Google jack up the French so Crome WEI can get a toe in the door. /dumb joke
Short and links to the project :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6r6GhwD4iQ
The call to get state level Anti-trust involved is made by the host. Above my pay-grade.
Malwarebytes type enforcement?
The malwarebytes software also does this but it is not compulsory. Chrome has also started rolling out similar.
Vpn software looking more necessary all the time.
I could be wrong…?
How this law if passed would still fail.
None of the major browser providers are offices in France. Thus implementing the law does nothing to the browsers. Unless France creates its own browser and mandates its use there is no way they would be able to enforce this. Even if that is exactly what the country does, and default blocks any other browser main page and download page… they still wouldn’t be able to scrub every mirror and backup of other browsers.
What could France possibly do to threaten Mozilla (google has harder issues to deal with, with Android phones and all)??
Firefox and chromium are both open source. Even Safari can be built from source, with difficulty.
France going to employ a team of thousands to search the web and block every instance of the source. Even if the browsers made the pointless and unnecessary decision to actually agree to a foreign law that does not legally cover them… you can still grab the source code. Remove the blacklist, and build. I’m fairly sure millions of pre-builds will be available within days of implementation.
The internet simply routes around censorship. Just look how fast Reddit protests were rendered pointless. When some 9:10 large user base threads went private, they were forked near immediately… taking most of the dark threads users with them.
Blackouts and blocklists simply won’t work. Never have. Never will.