The French government is considering a law that would require web browsers – like Mozilla’s Firefox – to block websites chosen by the government.
As always I am reminded that governments are run by the tech illiterate.
If they were run by techies, they’d do even more damage. Authoritarianism is the issue, not tech literacy.
For real - look at the damage “tech literate” corporate leaders are doing to the internet in particular, and society in general. The issue is less about knowledge and aptitude, and more about morals and ethics, and how those principles interact with the desire for profitability driven by investors and owners.
Can’t they just put a metal box with a guard around the entire internet?
It is just a black box with a blinking light anyway.
Although the guard might get tired from climbing the stairs of the Elizabeth tower every day.
It crowd 🤣
Elizabeth tower every day.
because the internet has the best reception up there?
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I always thought the derision of that was overblown. You can tell what he meant. It’s not a completely flawed analogy.
Put a sock in that tube there or I’ll fine you.
Firefox being free software, it wouldn’t make much sense for them to try and do something like this. So obviously we know that Mozilla would never go along with such an absurd law and start doing censorship on behalf of France. … right, Mozilla? Slightly strange that you didn’t say so?
True… How would governments enforce dumb laws like that on open source software anyway?
Firefox is open source but it’s controlled by the Mozilla Foundation.
The steps would be
- Pass the law
- Tell Mozilla they’re breaking the law
- Do things to them as they’re breaking the law
It could be fines, it could be banning firefox in France. The good/bad roles are flipped, but anything anyone has tried to do to meta can be done to Mozilla, too. The only alternative Mozilla would have would be purposefully pulling Firefox from France.
Ultimately, Mozilla would have a vote of some kind, deciding to capitulate or pull firefox (or just keep paying fees, potentially, but they’re not made of money).
They could still charge the leadership, fine them, and cause life to be a bit more difficult. Even if I don’t live in a country, I wouldn’t want that hanging over my head.
It’s hard not living in a country
I guess it cannot be completely enforced. What they can do, however, is to say that Firefox is illegal in France unless it complies with their unjust laws.
Mozilla could either choose to comply and release a French version of Firefox with government mandated fixes, or decide not to comply and probably block firefox.com from being accessible from France. This would make it harder for French users to find an alternative browser, making even more people will stick to the pre-installed Chromium based one.
In general it’s just not a good thing when open source software becomes illegal, no matter how hard the laws might be to implement.
The software can be open source, the product is branded and published.
I hope that it would only be the “Frensh Version” of Firefox that implements this and that at least everone outside of France would get a version without this crap. This would then of course, be available to Frensh people to. Hopefully crap laws like this get stoped… lets see
It would work for 95% of browser users, who will not know that they can use a fork of Firefox because they have no idea what that means.
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Why forcing the browsers? Couldn’t they just make a law for ISPs to block specific domains?
This is already possible (and is actively used, mainly for piracy related websites) with the current laws.
Aand it’s never enough
Too easy to bypass that with a VPN, proxy, or alternative DNS.
Either way it’s still a software restriction that can be bypassed with other software.
Librewolf is going to get very popular…
Never heard of that one, I was telling somebody the other day about IceWeasel. So there definitely are FF clones. Or I guess you could just compile Firefox yourself and remove the denylist portion of the code. Would be extra funny if they compiled a version specific for France (because why block sites for everybody else?) and put it next to the regular one on their website with text that said oh BTW if you’re in France definitely only download this version, wink wink.
Meanwhile Linux distros will just package the non-blocklist version and French citizens will end up bypassing the restriction by accident!
Librewolf is designed to be private and secure and is basicly hardened Firefox without telemetry
It’s not basically Firefox, it’s a fork with the settings already configured for privacy.
Eh there’s really only 2 players in the browser game right now
and the source code for both of them is available.
Could just compile yourself without the filtering
But like, can’t they just download the non France version of Firefox? Isn’t it open source? People can just build their own, right?
Yeah.
Yes but 90% of the people using Firefox won’t bother or notice. I already struggle trying to make all my relatives switch to Firefox, I can’t imagine getting them to download a specific version or build it themselves…
But the same applies for the other workarounds mentioned doesn’t it?
Did you know: Using adblockers is considered terrorist activity in france?
Is a “No soliciting” sign on my house also terrorism then? Wtf
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/1q1hjmwLqe4
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Why do right wingers hate freedom so much?
Its nothing to do with the right wing and everythiny to do with authoratarianism. Left wing authoratarians hate freedom just as much. They just usually attafk different targets.
Why do right wingers hate freedom so much?
What? Am I on crazy pills? This has nothing to do with polticial leaning. Its man VS big gov.
what political leaning do you thing this “big gov” has?
A globalist leaning. Macron if I recall comes from big money in the financial world. The do not have a leaning poltically, they are amoral, dark triad.
Because they see the freedom of people who aren’t like them as an abridgement of their freedom to force everyone to be like them.
“Do you not know my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?” 🤷♂️
Ok, it’s a freedom and free speech nightmare, but are they stupid or something? They are aiming for the browsers instead of ISPs (and DNSes?)?
They tried this in the UK and the ISPs is just ignored them. So the government declared its success anyway, despite the fact that essentially nothing had happened, and then stopped talking about it.
These laws always come up by people whose grasp of technology is basically, make magic box do thing x. They don’t understand that people smarter than them (school kids) will find workarounds in about 10 seconds.
And the thing is, there are open source internet browsers that can be written to avoid any browser checks that a law might require.
However, if Google’s browser DRM gets widely implemented, a browser-side content blocker would be effective, because all those open source browsers would be unable to access the wider web.
I think if Big Brother Browser with Google DRM is our future, we’re going to see people using 2 browsers as standard. They’ll have one “corporate” internet browser, for Instagram, Amazon, whatever. And one “free” browser for all the grey area stuff.
Yes, but we need to fight them politically as it’s our money being wasted and they do cause some harms. One is, it keeps the population uninformed about what is with and against the grain of technology. But we also want them to not be trying to do wrong things, even if they are probably unworkable.
Because DNS will do little and browsers will do straight up nothing. Especially for the good open source browsers.
I “think” I remember them trying something like this before with the ISPs and it got smacked down.
So things like curl or lynx would be illegal eh? Good luck enforcing those.
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I guess you could argue that a simple http client is not a browser, so these would be excluded. But if you write code yourself to use an http client to make a browser, then you would have to implement Frances’s bullshit to be legal in France.
But that depends on how you legally distinguish between a simple http client and a browser…
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Can we sign it even it we don’t live in France?
Yes
I do not like france
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I like the french government even less
I am French and I state that in fact I do not like France
Whelp, I signed in the dumbest way possible. Signed under the name Lupine Arsène. Only thing I regret is not putting the country as France to complete the dumb joke.
Now imagine if something like this would happen after Google manages to DRM the internet? You won’t even be able to fork the browser…
If worse comes to worst, someone can fork Firefox and remove the in-browser censorship. That is the beauty of FOSS.
Unfortunately the 99% that don’t know about less popular options will still be affected
True, however it will require some grassroots movement/discussion to make it known.
Somehow, I don’t think ruthless authoritarians are going to care about what the little people think.
Maybe a decentralized encrypted takedownsafe and possibly anonymous internet protocol won’t care what they think?
I mean we have to try IMO.
Good luck with that. The only such protocol I know of that people actually use is Tor, and it’s a US government honey pot.
If tor was a hobeypot they’d have a much easyer tine catching criminals using it
And now it allied with cryptocoins
I mean, illegal online transactions are like the one place where crypto really shines.
Signed. Enough with this kind of bullshit in the EU.
