AccidentalLemmingFrance wants your browser to censor the web, and Mozilla is petitioning against it
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
What the fuck 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.
JaysynIronically, 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.
Or maybe the average person is right by not overreacting?
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.
TwoGemsDon’t be exhausted. We can fight back
But how?
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 couple of decade, if not two.
facisim is on the rise again, that’s all.
Companies it’s because they want to be the ones serving you all the information and data and all the privileges that comes with like add profits, etc.
Governments because a huge global tool for information sharing, economics, etc grew under their noses for the last three decades and they ignored it until it was almost out of their control and are now panicking to try and grasp some back.
How do they propose to enforce this, when browsers are free and open-source and can easily be downloaded from hosts outside of France?
NoRodentPeople that propose this kind of stuff always know 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.
AopenAssume its rickroll
Not taking their side, but politicians who say that a nuclear plant shouldn’t be built next to a nature preserve don’t have to know the exact physics going on inside it.
Awesome! That way, the next time a minority starts connecting and coordinating using the internet, conservatives can silence them by doxxing them and threatening their families!
True, that’s a drawback but one with less severe consequences for humankind than if we just let this rise of fascism continue.
If the silencing and persecution of minorities is not part of your definition of “the rise of fascism”, you should really gain a better definition of the “fascism” actually is.
Fascism is very well defined and it’s not what you wrote. Just look it up.
And while you’re at it, look up “paradox of tolerance”, too.
When a plane with 20 people on board is bound to crash into a full football stadium with 70.000 people, you’d be the guy who decides to not shoot down the plane because the 20 people shouldn’t be weighed against possibly thousands dying if it crashed into the stadium.
The moral codex in Western countries is to cause as little loss as possible, so the 20 people on board will count less than the thousands on the ground.
Accordingly there oppressed minorities using the Internet to communicate won’t be weighed against the millions of people who’d die in a new Holocaust, which is the final goal of the new fascists.
Fascism is well-defined? With all due respect, this is the kind of statement that betrays a lack of knowledge of the field. Fascism is notorious in political science for being poorly defined both as a system of government and as an ideology.
What constitutes as a definition of fascism and fascist governments has been a complicated and highly disputed subject concerning the exact nature of fascism and its core tenets debated amongst historians, political scientists, and other scholars ever since Benito Mussolini first used the term in 1915. Historian Ian Kershaw once wrote that “trying to define ‘fascism’ is like trying to nail jelly to the wall”.
For convenience, we can use the Wikipedia definition, which clearly signposts the oppression of political and social minorities as key parts of the definition of fascism.
Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement,[1][2][3] characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation and race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.
“Paradox of tolerance” does not justify literally any oppressive act.
And yeah, if a plane with 20 people on board is on a glide path towards a stadium, I’m going to be pretty skeptical of anybody who’s just champing at the bit to shoot it down. If we’ve got the time to talk about it, we can evacuate the stadium, or get in contact with the pilot, or scramble a jet to take a look inside and confirm if the occupants are incapacitated, or nudge a wingtip so that it glides into a less populated area. All of which have a better chance of success and are less disruptive than firing an armed missile within civilian airspace. Your unwillingness to consider less extreme options will inadvertently end up empowering authoritarians and enabling the very abuses you nominally wish to prevent.
It’s a thought experiment. It’s not meant to inspire you to look for better options, but to illustrate the moral dilemma of sacrificing a fewer number of lives for a greater one.
I mean you don’t seem to have a good grasp on complex matters so apologies for bamboozling you, but you need to learn a lot more about real life before discussing these things.
You have a perfect example on why politician decision should be based on technical knowledge.
In this case having a nuclear plant close to a close to a nature reserve could be a good idea.
A nuclear plant has a much lower impact on biodiversity than an agricultural field for exemple.
I didn’t.
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?
MattYes - 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.
oce 🐆They can probably enforce it on the major ones and that will be enough to censor 95% of the population. Which more than enough.
They don’t have to. Because 90% of the population are either too lazy or too uniformed to do anything but download it from the first link that Google shows them, and the other 10% who care aren’t important enough to warrant enforcement.
👍Maximum Derek👍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.
An ‘unrelated third party’ would do it
StizzahI 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…
CookieJarObserverFuck you France
Nero RecursiveNo, 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.
Im counting on the ECJ.
mistrgaminLets 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.
The result of this should be all of these businesses abandoning France as a market.
More and more it looks like we would be better off of we restricted American companies from operating overseas at all.
I assume that Edge, Safari and Chrome will happily comply (sadly)
Then they’ll make utilizing them illegal since it “circumvents national security”
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.
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 motive behind this is alarming and worrying, but the mechanism of action seems shoddy and not thought out at all.
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.
If they can, they will.
LoafyLemonCommon French government L. You guys seem to not be able to catch a break. :(
So the french govt is too lazy to censor on its own.