French Gov Wants to Inject Domain Blocking Lists Directly into Web Browsers

BrikoX@vlemmy.net to World News@lemmy.ml – 57 points –
torrentfreak.com
18

And thanks to open source software, we will just remove it if they do. Politicians really don't understand how this all works do they?

Yep, that was my thought. Even without OS. It would only work for compiled browsers built within the legal jurisdiction of France. Anyone else would have 0 motive to obey them. And French people would just download non-French browsers.

Makes it very clear the proposer knows less than 0 about how the Internet works. And has spent even less effort thinking about it. Has he somehow not thought china would have done this, if it was in any way effective?

Not just remove, use it as reference

They could have the list stored in a way that would be hard to retrieve.

But who am I kidding, the fact that they are considering to do it that way it is also guarantee it would be in plain text.

Politicians really don’t understand how this all works do they?

For tech-savvy people, not really. And if they do they don't want to make us mad. We're InNovAtoRS, after all! (I mean we often are, but it's still hard not to roll one's eyes at such a buzzwordy thing)

For the average Joe who just uses the Chrome browser a device ships with, this could have an effect.

In order to prevent porn and fraud sites from being accessed, they're uploading exhaustive lists of those sites to everyone's computer? Somehow this seems like it won't work out.

As far as I know, there are ways to do that without revealing the websites blocked (for example bloom filter, with a note that it can have false positives, or just the hashes of the domains)

False positives seem bad when you're trying to justify your censorship as necessary and not arbitrary

I think the catch is more that it will be hard to keep an exhaustive list.

I'd like to add the whole government misuse angle too. People roll their eyes sometimes but It Could Happen Here. History has not ended, that's just a comforting delusion at this point.

Kind of odd article saying this sort of legislation is bad because it adds features that would be susceptible to scope creep - we already have content blocking in browsers

Ad-blocker-blockers are already coming up in Chromium. Surely they could make a stronger argument otger than bloatware in modern software.

We're all turning into China but in an undesirable way.

Free the porn.

Sure there's a better way that can't be easily bypassed... Idk allowlist maybe of all known safe domains, any new sites, must register for dns at the government instead of through a private org.

Another solution allowlist all know webhost who will regularly perform audits of the sites they host for illegal content and remove + report to french authorities. At least these would be better than this easily bypassed "solution"..

I recently bought a domain. But it's for a year, it might take the government all of a year to approve it, and by that time the domain name renewal would be more expensive.

ISPs also don't necessarily host sites