What makes you believe that your browser would allow you to access providers of illegal browsers?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Which leaves a big question open: why are the Democrats supporting it at all?
Well, presumably because opposing a bill entitled "Kids Online Safety Act" would be met with cries of "Do you not support the safety of children? What are you, a pedophile?", among other (bad) reasons.
Bills entitled to suggest they do one thing when they actually do another continues to be a common phenomenon because it works. Not reading past the headline is as much a thing with politicians and voters as it is with readers of the press.
I actually thought that scene from the Matrix Reloaded where Trinity is hacking the local network of a power station to be pretty damn realistic especially compared to most other depictions of hacking (or just general computer use >_>) in film and television.
And what I really like about it is not just that it makes sense, but that she just does it; she doesn't sit around spewing unecessary (and poorly written) exposition for the audience's sake.
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#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: Re: A CLASSIC!
I actually prefer Ender's Shadow.
I actually thought that scene from the Matrix Reloaded where Trinity is hacking the local network of a power station to be pretty damn realistic especially compared to most other depictions of hacking (or just general computer use >_>) in film and television.
And what I really like about it is not just that it makes sense, but that she just does it; she doesn't sit around spewing unecessary (and poorly written) exposition for the audience's sake.