What is with everyone's obsession, government or company, to moderate the web. It's seriously depressing and exhausting.
Authoritarian tendencies since the web is a bit too close to providing its users with freedom of speech.
for real. it’s been extremely disconcerting watching both companies and nations erode and distort privacy norms so blatantly in the past few years. i’ve never really been a paranoid person, but it’s starting to feel like a coordinated effort to cut the metaphorical brakes so that when we approach the next digital privacy rights crossroad, we are completely unable to exert any control over the direction that society moves.
it used to be that i would hear about an attack on digital privacy once every year. now it seems to happen almost daily. it’s exhausting and worrying all at once.
I think the exhaustion is kind of the point. They want to desensitize us so that they can implement these changes with little pushback.
Ironically, the French figured out a cure for that around 240 years ago.
I feel like France in general has more of a history of its people being more politically active compared to other countries.
When the majority of your population also lives in the same metro area as your seat of government, it really helps.
facisim is on the rise again, that's all.
The Internet’s been ubiquitous for more than two decades now, and the people writing laws to regulate it in most democracies still lack even a high-level understanding about how it and the software they use to access it works. They also seem to go out of their way to avoid working with anyone who actually does know how to implement safety measures in less dangerous or exploitable ways. It’s inexcusable.
They ignore experts/scientists because they're a liability when all you care about is personal financial gain and fulfilling the role your oligarch/corporate handlers bankrolled you to fulfil.
Come on, do your thing french people! We know you want to!
This is too technical to incite the mass. Chances rely on parliament opposition and anti-constitutionality.
How do they propose to enforce this, when browsers are free and open-source and can easily be downloaded from hosts outside of France?
People that propose this kind of stuff always know exactly nothing about how the internet, or technology in general, works.
this is like preventing your car from driving you to the bank so you cant rob it
Senile boomers try to do impossible things in tech because stupid. Censorship is stupid, Google and French goverment hand in hand trying to destroy the free and open internet.
WTF?! „… force browser providers to create the means to mandatorily block websites present on a government provided list.“
Today it’s some terrorist / pedophile / fraudulent site, tomorrow it could be some opposition, news or whatever could be disliked site on that list.
Do they have this saying in France: "Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater" ? These days, everyone seems so intent on breaking what we have that at the end I'm not sure what we're going to have left.
Or how about "if it ain't broke, don't fix it?" It's not like the internet has suddenly changed. It's basically been the same for decades in terms of ease of access to content. They say it's to combat fraud, harassment and protect children. Who was doing that in the 90s? Who was doing that in the 2010s? No one. Society didn't collapse. Children didn't turn into depraved fiends when they grew up. What changed?
Just block it at the ISP who puts this feature into the actual browser has this country even used the web before???
Brother, you don't know how fucking tech illiterate our government is (with a nice topping of being wannabe autocrats)
whipped up a quick meme
I could see Mozilla being forced to comply and then letting it be known that if you delete a certain part of the firefox source and recompile, it goes away.
I hate that these articles are always couched in excusatory language like, "While motivated by a legitimate concern..."
These people are not your friends, they're your enemies. Don't accept their frame in the argument.
They indicted 7 people for Terrorism last year because they encrypted their disks, used tail as their OS and signal for communication.
I guess from the perspective of lawmakers, it's no different requiring browsers to not display certain sites than requiring book stores to not sell certain books.
I can even see the "logic" in that to a degree, especially if the people talking about it are rather tech averse.
here's the proposed bill btw https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/dossierlegislatif/JORFDOLE000047533100/
Relevant language from the bill in question, machine translated to English, and formatting cleaned up:
Article 1, section 1:
I. – Article 10 of Law No. 2004-575 of June 21, 2004 on confidence in the digital economy is worded as follows:
Art. 10 . – I. – The Audiovisual and Digital Communication Regulatory Authority ensures that pornographic content made available to the public by an online public communication service cannot be accessible to minors and, consequently, to that the persons whose activity is to publish such a service of communication to the public online verify beforehand the age of their users.
It establishes and publishes for this purpose, after consulting the National Commission for Data Processing and Liberties, a reference system determining the technical characteristics applicable to the age verification systems put in place for access to communication services at the online audiences that make pornographic content available to the public, with regard to the reliability of verifying the age of users and respecting their privacy.
II. – (Deleted) ”
II (new) . – The Audiovisual and Digital Communication Regulatory Authority establishes and publishes the reference system mentioned in article 10 of the aforementioned law no. six months after the promulgation of this law.
Article 4a, section 6:
➆ II. – When the person whose activity is to publish the online public communication service in question has not made available the information mentioned in article 1-1 of this law, when this does not allow not to contact him or when at the end of the period mentioned in the first paragraph of I of this article, if necessary after this person has submitted his observations, it appears that the report mentioned in the same first paragraph is still valid, the administrative authority may, by reasoned decision, order Internet browser providers within the meaning of 11 of Article 2 of Regulation (EU) 2022/1925 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 September 2022 on contestable and fair markets in the digital sector and amending Directives (EU) 2019/1937 and (EU) 2020/1828, Internet access service providers or domain name resolution system providers to immediately take any useful measure intended to prevent access to the address of this service for a maximum period of three months. The decision of the administrative authority designates which provider is responsible for preventing access to the address of this service, depending on the injunction issued and the nature of the measure envisaged.
Aside this being extremely fucked up. Why do they even feel the need? I've been online most my life and have never been defrauded. Are there a shit ton of people in France getting scammed by stupid websites? Did they look at China and go, yes plz? Some authoritarian shit and extremely dangerous. Who's going to be the fuck that decides which sites to block?
Why do they even feel the need?
Because the idea that the masses can freely disseminate information amongst themselves without needing the clergy or the state or "big media" to control it for them is like a splinter in the upper class's minds.
People might go online and find out that it's not normal to have your country burn down every few months. They mights start getting angry at the people in power.
Just kidding, this is probably about protecting corporate profits from the evils of BitTorrent or some shit.
How is this different to saying "No meetings of groups of people in person to share thoughts, views, agree trades or have an argument"? Happens in the pubs every night.
How would they enforce this on open source projects without companies behind them?
Fuck you France
No country is fighting as hard against poverty as they are against piracy.
What happened to parental responsibility?
that is bizarre. like they goin to take down any fork they dont? and who among the french will be able to read all the english github pages?
Even if firefox complies, I am sure a fork will be made that will disable the in-browser censorship. That is the good thing about FOSS.
Or that might end up as some boolean value in about:config like "SetMoronicBaguetteCensorship" that even a gonk can remove in 2 minutes with a tutorial.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
