The French government is considering a law that would require web browsers – like Mozilla’s Firefox – to block websites chosen by the government.

    • Lafuma300@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      If they were run by techies, they’d do even more damage. Authoritarianism is the issue, not tech literacy.

      • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • Squids@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      On one hand, yeah

      On the other hand, I’m scared about the day when someone who is tech literate gets into government and tries to push stuff like this

    • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • jsdz@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    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?

    • unscholarly_source
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      1 year ago

      True… How would governments enforce dumb laws like that on open source software anyway?

      • Khanzarate@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Firefox is open source but it’s controlled by the Mozilla Foundation.

        The steps would be

        1. Pass the law
        2. Tell Mozilla they’re breaking the law
        3. 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).

        • webghost0101@sopuli.xyz
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          1 year ago

          What stops them from putting a blanket statement on their website stating “this software does not adhere to specific internet laws in france and therefor we do not support the use of firefox as a browser within french borders. French people can still download firefox to study the software and use it for local/offline purposes.

          Firefox isn’t quite the same as facebook in that its a piece of downloadable software instead of a service website. You don’t need an account. A foreigner can travel while having firefox as the only browser on their laptop and people can still share the program between eachother.

          France might create requirements for their isps to not service not adhering browsers but in any way mozzila can keep their hands clean.

          • Khanzarate@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Making something available when it’s not legal to do so is still a crime. Mozilla can’t put the burden of “Is this illegal?” on the downloader. On top of that, with the specific nature of this law, they’ll likely get added to this blocked list.

            “For research” changes nothing, there isn’t an exception for research in the French law (as far as I know, at least).

            Nothing would stop a French person from taking extra steps to circumvent the law, so it’s true that it could be gotten around with a VPN or peer-to-peer sharing of the installer, and Mozilla isn’t liable for that, but also that would still dramatically reduce Firefox installs in France. It isn’t really a good solution for Firefox to need the same steps as piracy for people to access it.

            Firefox not needing user accounts isn’t that relevant, because it’s the distribution of illegal software that will be acted upon.

            While it’s true that they wouldn’t necessarily have to pay a French fine, most large companies have assets in a lot of nations. For Mozilla, this could be people that translate the browser to French, who may have office space or supplies, and the French government could seize Mozilla’s French assets, which also impacts their other projects like Thunderbird.

            A search tells me they do have such an office in Paris which would be threatened by their noncompliance, which does include just telling French people it’s illegal but letting them do it anyway.

            • webghost0101@sopuli.xyz
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              1 year ago

              Its gonna depend on specifics in the law. Is it about

              • a software component that allows viewing a web page.

              • software that is marketed as an internet browser

              • software that is being used to connect to the web

              Many software is or can technically be used to browse the web. Thunderbird as a notable example is a mail client but is a capable of displaying any weburl. Some of the software i use on my job is capable of doing the same. Visual studio can do this. It used to be a very common feature.

              The ad window when you start steam works like this and the inbuild steam Browser aside the entire steam store also functions as a locked down browser. It even shows a url bar but at least here you cant enter any url.

              Depending on the law these softwares need to either comply or be excempt.

              With self hosting getting popular and the trend of webapps (many of the self hosted ai apps) you dont need to be online to have a valid usecase.

              If i go on holiday to France, never connect to any french internet but use a self developed browser to acces a local run webbapp am I suddenly a criminal?

              If i am an open source developer workin on any of the plenty of github repos that rely or build on mozzilas open source code am i a criminal? Should GitHub be blocked because it provided acces to those repos to the french?

              I do agree if mozilla has a registered company in french that those could indeed be targeted by the government but if there not surely they cant be blamed by simply ignoring foreign laws.

              Piracy and porn can have wildly different laws around the world i only ever heard of countries blocking providing domains trough isps and never that far away foreign companies are supposed to take notice of local Law.

              The account thing matters because this establishes a relation of client and service provider. Facebook services millions of european customers and businesses of which it actively manages data. Mozilla in contrast mostly just build a tool that any anonymous internet person can use for themselves.

              • Khanzarate@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                Mozilla still has terms and conditions, so there’s still a relationship, and still a liability for them letting a customer misuse their browser, even if they don’t keep data on everyone.

                While I absolutely agree it’s ridiculous, as I read it, it would also apply to self-hosted software and things like thunderbird that are technically a browser.

                Still, I expect enforcement to really only care about “real” browsers, not one user and their own thing or someone using Thunderbird to browse the web. France (and most other governments) have shown multiple times that they don’t really look into the how they’d do these things before they try to make it law and it’d be a mess.

                As per the article this post linked, this would definitely be a new precedent, browsers have never been responsible for this content, and whatever actually happens is up in the air. I’m mostly talking worst-case scenario. It’s entirely possible some other business or consumer protection law makes this unenforceable, or any number of other situations, but since the French government decides how unreasonable they’re gonna be, that’s all up to them. Maybe they crusade against Firefox, maybe they give up when they realize there’s only so much to do without drafting even more, and maybe they do go after everyone, including thunderbird or any other app that opens a webpage. Probably just ones that navigate to the illegal webpages though.

                Still, a measure that’s completely defeated by a VPN, unless they add all of them to their illegal pages.

      • roguetrick@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • sab@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • webghost0101@sopuli.xyz
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          Why would it be mozzilas responsibility to make their website unaccesible in france rather then that being the responsibility of french isp?

          If north Korea puts up an obscure law that says all sites are banned from using english does that give them grounds to sue any sites that didn’t think of blocking them specifically?

        • eterps@sopuli.xyz
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          1 year ago

          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.

          Sad as it is, I think this is the optimal solution when it goes through. A lot of EU countries are against monopolies (France is not an exception), this way they would realize they are enforcing a monopoly and singular dependency.

          • Meltbox@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Unless every browser ignores them. Then what they’re going to fine Microsoft, Google, and Mozilla and declare the internet illegal in France?

            It just seems so absurd I can’t take it seriously. There’s zero way to make this actually work. If they want to ban websites they’d have to go full China on it.

          • sab@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            I agree. If you give in to laws like these you have already lost; people will just accept their freedom being stripped away piece by piece, and government control of software will be the new normal. If on the other hand we reach a point where Firefox is illegal in France, it should be obvious to anyone and especially those involved in competition law that something is not right.

            France is on a bad spree lately, and honestly they need all the bad publicity they can get. I hope this backfires for them.

          • BubblyMango@lemmy.wtf
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            1 year ago

            They dont consider chromium based browsere a monopoly because there are over 10 different ones from different companies. The fact they are all chromium behind the scenes and all comply with google’s bullshit standards doesnt matter to them.

      • hansl@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        The software can be open source, the product is branded and published.

    • BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.deOP
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      1 year ago

      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

    • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • kool_newt@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Right, these type of solutions are akin to changing your SSH port number. It works >90% of the time, but anyone skilled or determined can easily bypass these restrictions for given targets.

  • benpo@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Why forcing the browsers? Couldn’t they just make a law for ISPs to block specific domains?

    • Vendetta9076@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • Cam@lemmy.world
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      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.

        • Cam@lemmy.world
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          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.

    • Alien Nathan Edward@lemm.ee
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      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.

  • bahmanm@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    “Do you not know my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?” 🤷‍♂️

  • feecoomeeq@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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?)?

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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      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.

      • TechnoBabble@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • jabjoe@feddit.uk
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • Crashumbc@lemmy.world
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      I “think” I remember them trying something like this before with the ISPs and it got smacked down.

    • cooopsspace@infosec.pub
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      Because DNS will do little and browsers will do straight up nothing. Especially for the good open source browsers.

    • kool_newt@lemm.ee
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      What about HTTP client libraries for every computer language? Even if they went as far as to ban curl and lynx, with many languages you could whip up an HTTP client to pull whatever content you need in five minutes. This might be totally unenforceable at that level as people could modify the library or write code themselves.

      • Trail@lemmy.world
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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…

        • kool_newt@lemm.ee
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          Ah I’m not talking about being legal or producing a product for others. I’m talking about how one might procure data authorities are trying to make unavailable.

  • pinkdrunkenelephants@sopuli.xyz
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    How the fuck could a law like that possibly be enforceable? Mozilla should just tell them to go fuck themselves, offer alternative IPs so people can get around country-wide DNS blocks, and then go about their day. Who cares what some spineless country wants?

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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      That’s what’s happened in other countries that have tried to implement this. Unless you want to basically go the Chinese route and ban all exterior access it’s an utterly unenforceable law. Which I am sure they would have been told if they had bothered to consult anybody with domain knowledge.

  • AeonFelis@lemmy.world
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    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…

  • Cam@lemmy.world
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    If worse comes to worst, someone can fork Firefox and remove the in-browser censorship. That is the beauty of FOSS.

    • beeb@lemm.ee
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      Unfortunately the 99% that don’t know about less popular options will still be affected

      • Cam@lemmy.world
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        True, however it will require some grassroots movement/discussion to make it known.

  • Dizzy Devil Ducky@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.com
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      Maybe a decentralized encrypted takedownsafe and possibly anonymous internet protocol won’t care what they think?

      I mean we have to try IMO.

      • argv_minus_one@beehaw.org
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        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.

            • pinkdrunkenelephants@sopuli.xyz
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              And if you bothered to invest a fifth of a third of a quarter of the energy you’re putting into being defensive into helping solve the problem, we wouldn’t be here.

                • pinkdrunkenelephants@sopuli.xyz
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                  And I took your comment as immature negativity only to find out it’s jealous whining at best and concern trolling and forum sliding at worst.

                  You’re not going to win the argument. All you’re going to do is make things worse. You’re not going to stop us from supporting Firefox in their time of need, or France’s, or the Internet. It’s just not gonna happen.

                  So go find something better to do with your free time and let the adults talk.