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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 ]

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[-] rockSlayer@lemmy.world 122 points 1 year ago

I'm imagining Firefox creating a clientside file called government-blocklist.txt, with the understanding of "don't touch this file, you scamp 😉"

[-] zkfcfbzr@lemmy.world 44 points 1 year ago

Or putting the option to disable the blocking in about:config... Or even just the settings page

[-] 50gp@kbin.social 16 points 1 year ago

dump the .txt file to the desktop for easy removal by user

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[-] BastingChemina@slrpnk.net 116 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] figaro@lemdro.id 52 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.'

[-] uriel238 26 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[-] figaro@lemdro.id 9 points 1 year ago

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.

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[-] Flatworm7591@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 points 1 year ago

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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[-] acastcandream@beehaw.org 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

spoilerasdfasdfsadfasfasdf

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[-] Peruvian_Skies@kbin.social 84 points 1 year ago

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?

[-] Scrollone@feddit.it 50 points 1 year ago

I have an even simpler example: should cars be required not go over the speed limit?

[-] bobs_monkey@lemm.ee 30 points 1 year ago

No because they'd lose the ticket revenue

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[-] bappity@lemmy.world 72 points 1 year ago

how to get all browsers to remove access for france

[-] 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 1 year ago

Browsers can have different releases per default language, so just have the fr-fr distribution have the blockers and others not

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[-] jayandp@sh.itjust.works 69 points 1 year ago

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.

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[-] ThetaDev@lemmy.fmhy.net 64 points 1 year ago

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.

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[-] DarkDarkHouse@lemmy.sdf.org 51 points 1 year ago

The laws already require you to not infringe copyright. This is a new front in the same old war.

[-] Flatworm7591@lemmy.dbzer0.com 29 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] natecox@programming.dev 16 points 1 year ago

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.

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[-] Silverseren@kbin.social 39 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

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[-] Pulp@lemmy.dbzer0.com 35 points 1 year ago
[-] Johanno@lemmy.fmhy.net 21 points 1 year ago

Just comment out the "download list of sites to block" part and recompile

[-] DarkThoughts@kbin.social 33 points 1 year ago

There's literally no way to enforce this.

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[-] traveler01@lemdro.id 33 points 1 year ago

It’s astonishing how much liberty they are being able to remove from us in sake of “security”.

[-] tlit341569@lemmy.world 29 points 1 year ago

why govts love to censor the public internet?

[-] iso@lemmy.dbzer0.com 25 points 1 year ago

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.

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[-] HurlingDurling@lemm.ee 22 points 1 year ago

If google implements is drm technology they are actively implementing already now, the answer is an absolute yes.

Download firefox now.

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[-] sndrtj@feddit.nl 22 points 1 year ago

France and dystopian copyright laws, name a more typical duo.

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[-] Fylkir@lemmy.sdf.org 18 points 1 year ago

How would this even be enforced?

[-] skookumasfrig@sopuli.xyz 18 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] OutlierBlue@lemmy.ca 21 points 1 year ago

"The internet treats censorship as a fault and reroutes around it."

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[-] coheedcollapse@lemmy.world 16 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] roofuskit@kbin.social 13 points 1 year ago

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.

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[-] Jaysyn@kbin.social 12 points 1 year ago

And what happens when I remove that & compile my browser from source?

[-] AzzyDev@beehaw.org 15 points 1 year ago

you’re a terrorist :’|

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[-] omeara4pheonix@lemmy.zip 10 points 1 year ago

Eh, it's unenforceable. Just theater from a bunch of politicians that don't understand the technology. I wouldn't worry about it.

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[-] dunning_cougar@waveform.social 8 points 1 year ago
[-] zkfcfbzr@lemmy.world 17 points 1 year ago

Or older versions of browsers, or browsers that don't comply, or browsers compiled for literally any other country

[-] Meltbox@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago
[-] DestroyMegacorps@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 year ago

me on my way to prison after i use an outdated browser (it didnt have the blocklist)

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this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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