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.
oh i’m sure it is, and that’s what i think is so insidious about it. the tactics we’re seeing emerge appear to be carefully engineered so as to disproportionately exhaust those who care the most about preserving privacy so we just pack up and leave the platforms for them to ravage.
the average person who hears about proposed “web integrity” protections is going to think nothing of it and do nothing about it, then paint you as a conspiracy theorist for being as concerned as you are. i remember preaching to people about SOPA years ago, and was met with a resounding “meh”. they want the watchdogs specifically to leave their platforms, so that there is no one left to sound the alarms for everyone else.
Removed by mod
Sucks that it’s so effective (in my eyes, at least). Sometimes I just have to make assumptions against the parties that stand to gain money because there’s so much disinformation.
Haven’t given up by any means, and I’m not only supporting my own interests - but dang. Find a hobby, Lindsey Grahams of the world.
Less democracy is what the ruling class wants; it gives them more control over their customers.
Don’t be exhausted. We can fight back
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 could be that you’ve become more informed lately.
I feel like the situation has been deteriorating at a relatively steady pace for at least a decade, if not two.
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.
If browsers are forced to build this system to comply with French laws, it’s only a small step for other governments to leverage this new infrastructure and mandate bans on any website they don’t like.
thatsthepoint.jpeg
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.
The Internet is a series of tubes, not a dump truck.
YouTube links without context or a description are horrible.
Spend the extra 10 seconds to tell people why you feel they fit into the conversation.
Assume its rickroll
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/R8XSo0etBC4
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Whoever owns this account should change the server used to show piped links because this server doesn’t work anymore.
In this case Mozilla likely has staff and contributors working out of France. Chances are they make money from there too. Mozilla would either need to forfeit the above or comply if the law is implemented.
Enforcement from decent sized economies can often be as simple as having too much economic power to ignore, which often isn’t that high of a threshold.
Sure, but again, it’s open-source - couldn’t somebody not legally affiliated with Mozilla offer a version of it from a server outside France with the blocking code removed?
Yes - but the vast majority of people are not going to be downloading forks or modified versions of software, they will always get it directly from the source.
The “default”, so to speak, has a lot of power.
They can probably enforce it on the major ones and that will be enough to censor 95% of the population.
The French government also recently proposed to force pornographic websites to ask their identity card or passport to french users before letting them access the content, to prevent minors from viewing it. Really stupid, ineffective and authoritarian. Children should not see pornographic content, but this won’t solve the problem. (the linked article is in french).
I don’t know what France is like these days, but as I see the US and my country flirting with conservative homophobic politicians, I absolutely refuse to tie the porn I browse to my government ID.
The far right is practically guaranteed to win the next presidential elections, a literal Nazi party has 90 MPs, moderate leftist politicians are being ostracized as “outside of the republican way”.
So, not very well.
Geez! Why is this shit happening everywhere? It’s like fascists got a direct connection to a lot of people’s brains.
Billionaires buying newspapers and TV channels in order to propagate their ideas. They like fascism better than socialism.
So, out of random reason, I read into Hitler’s wiki entry on Wikipedia. Basically, he had no skills or anything of merit. But, he had a strong way of wording through his speeches and pressing the right buttons of the people in the most opportunistic of times. That was all he had and he excelled in it.
The same exact practice is happening with people like Trump, people like DeSantis, people like Putin .etc
They’re getting as far as they are, because while they are seemingly preaching the choir, they’re using deceitful layers while doing so. Those layers being their own self-appeasing agendas.
Hot, but probably not too hot take: Other factors aside, people got dumber due to covid. They got literal brain damage. So when a reasonably intelligent person would be able to tell fascism as insustainable, they wouldn’t after their second or so infection.
The timing is wrong. The pandemic happened, at least in part, because fascism was already here before it started.
Trump clearly is fascist (and so is Bolsonaro, for the sake of argument), but that’s just two samples. Whereas e.g. france got rid of that Napoleon dude (you know who I mean) in favor of Macron.
I was making a much more narrow argument that the pandemic might have been averted entirely if not for the specific Trump policy I linked.
Using “Moderate leftist politicians” to depict Melenchon and its party is a very dubious take. And I won’t ho into the use of “nazi” for convenience, refardless of the truth of the matter.
Melenchon is a normal leftist, not far left. He is a social-democrat. I wish he was as extremist as the right wing says he is.
RN is definitely a Nazi party. It was founded by collaborators. They cannot erase their history, and they are still close to violent neo-Nazis groups.
No. You could reasonably argue that the LFI program is social-democrat, but their internal democracy is a joke, and JLM himself consider the Venezuelian political system to be a model while being remarkably tolerant of Russia’s imperialistic moves. This guy’s a crypto-tankie.
As for the RN, there are a fair number of fascists in the party (and nazis too, but that’s different), but they mostly seems there because there are no legal political formation further right. The voting base don’t particularly support them, and even the high management is annoyed by their presence/visibility… Even is their tolerance of it is far too much for my taste.
All this will do is make people change which site they go to for their masterbatory needs.
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.
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.
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.
Why would they risk getting sued over helping the 0.0001% of their user base that’ll actually do this?
I wonder if it’d be more productive for them to just retreat from France. Show a different download page to French users that says it’s no longer available, but don’t geoblock the installer URLs.
I don’t think they can be forced to comply. Even if they have a local office they can just leave and tell Macron to fuck off. The government will probably force ISPs to block Mozilla’s website (at DNS level because politicians/idiots) and nothing will actually change.
The real shit would be if the EU wanted this…
An ‘unrelated third party’ would do it
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.
https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Coming_War_on_General_Computation
This seems like a relevant read (I’m a big fan of this speech/essay ;p). It makes this point more generally about how General Computation is fundamentally different from a lot of other aspects of regulation but politicians do not understand this so well >.<
As usual, Stallman was right. A fucking modern Cassandra, that guy is.
So educate them?
Why should a book store not be allowed to sell certain books? Tf? There’s nothing we can’t find online if we wanted to. Why would anyone want allow some self righteous asshat to determine which books you can and can’t read. Dangerous shit.
I knew those Fr*nch were up to something 😡
Our president. We’re for nothing ._. And yeah, he’s loved by no one
I don’t understand how he’s still the president with how y’all protest sometimes
Becuse cops are cracking skulls, gouging eyes and blowing hands when they aren’t straight up murdering someone who doesn’t comply with them.
If nobody likes him, them why do people vote for him?
I don’t know about French politics in particular, but in all democracies pretty much, sometimes there’s just not a better option.
if we let him do it then we are for something. We voted for him and we knew. When I write (“we” it’s the French not me)
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.
Fuck you France
No, fuck this mf government. As if french would want that crap.
Knowing how Frensh people just like to be disruptive and annoying i can see at least some liking it for exactly that reason.
But yes fuck the French government.
“Disruptive and annoying” is a tad vague.
Macron didn’t listen to 2 months of strikes and protests ; I’m not sure he will listen to an online petition. This is really depressing.
Lets throw a dishwasher through the capital building maybe that’ll change their mind
Left + some tech aware right + extreme right who just like to oppose anything that is not xenophobic enough can block it at the parliament.
Im counting on the ECJ.
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.
Is Mozilla 100% forced to comply with this? What’s to stop them from dropping their French presence and keep serving the browser unaltered on the public web? Do they also then get added to the ban list?
The thought behind this is alarming and worrying, but the mechanism of action seems shoddy and not thought out at all.
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.
Meanwhile, Google’s DRM for the web be like:
It was indeed three pawns to introduce it. Nice eye for detail.
There is Brave and forked chromium browsers, but yeah hahahahaha.
DO YOU HAVE A SLIP FROM DADDY MACRON ALLOWING YOU TO BYPASS THE CENSHORSHIP WE HAVE FORCED UPON YOU FOR YOUR PROTECTION?
Nope, but FOSS is ungovernable.
