This is just plain stupid.
Forcing browser to block certain sites is like making car manufacturers make the car shutdown if you are trying to smuggle foreign cheese in to France.
Tech illiterates making the decision here.
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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Don't give France any ideas.
As an Englishman I feel it’s my calling to smuggle cheddar and Wensleydale into Normandy.
Liberté, égalité, fromagé ou la mort!
Could companies just refuse, and place a "this product is not available in your country" on the download page
If people download the incompatible browser anyways then ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Theoretically yes, but I'd think that would just result in users switching to browsers which do comply with the law (Chrome, probably)
...you do not understand users.
Do you genuinely believe an average computer user, when presented with a block page, would attempt to circumvent it?
Maybe a small minority would, but overall I find it extremely unlikely. It takes a lot less effort to just download an alternative.
The average computer user is terrified of change so if they couldn't dl chrome they'd mass google 'how to download chrome when blocked ', then land on a reddit thread of people complaining they can't dl chrome where someone posts the exe or msi and leap on it.
We've already seen this play out in several countries where web blocking is widely implemented (eg Russia, China.) People (generally) flock to state-endorsed alternatives rather than going through the effort of finding bypasses.
(As an aside, Chrome would probably comply with it. It'd be a lot more damaging for them than smaller browsers to block the entirety of France.)
China's a bit of a bad example as it's got extremely heavy cultural indoctrination that reinforces the tactic - and even then it's not entirely successful.
Russia is notoriously the home of lip service while violating the letter of the law in every way imaginable
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What in the ever loving hell is up with France's current government right now? It's like Macron has said fuck it, lets give the fascists a way to sneak in
It's not just right now : this president has been here since 2017 and most of the core ministers are the same since then.
They have been cracking down on civil liberties from the start, but they make it more and more obvious since 2022 (because there is no re-election possible after 2 terms). Using anti-terrorist special legislatilns against environmental and himan rights activists, making demonstrations repression ever more violent...
At the same time, to guarantee that pseudo-centrist (actually right wing) keep getting elected, they have worked to make the far right more powerful. This way, in every election, they can end up being the "rational" choice.
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Current government right now? I don't remember any time when French politicians were friendly to the free and open Internet. Used to be that copyright was the main concern, nowadays not anymore.
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This Macron guy is really trying to make people hate him isn't he. At this point it feels like he actually wants the French to burn shit.
Macron is a malodorous shit stain fascist mother fucker. I'm ashamed of my fellow citizens who voted twice for this human error.
Disclaimer, I'm not French. But it seemed like the alternative was Le Pen and from what I've read she would certainly be more of a shitstain fascist, just with a populist tinge.
Yup. We voted for him in the second turn of the elections because, it was either that or facism... and we got facism-lite (less and less lite, with each passing day) laying the ground work and colluding with Le Pen and her cronies. Fucking wonderful.
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While I could see maybe the larger companies operating in France agreeing to implement this, I don't think they would be able to legally force a smaller foreign open source browser developer into the same practice? Take qutebrowser for instance, the developer is from Switzerland. Unless their website is hosted in France, I don't see how French law applies to him, nor the site he is hosting the browser on? They would have to use ISPs to block the website, but even then, you could still get it through GitHub. Maybe GitHub could be forced into removing the browser as Microsoft probably have a French office, but it still seems like a legal and practical nightmare to actually enforce this through the browser. As someone else mentioned, pushing rules on ISPs seems like a more doable thing if you WANT to oppress people (which I am also against of course).
While they may not be able to force small developers, they can force the users by deeming all browsers that do not implement this feature illegal. This possibly will not work on the tech savvy, but standard users (the majority) will be affected.
That's true, I was just so baffled by how inconvenient and inefficient this suggestion was. I'm reminded of one of these photos, which I think have been used for many internet proposals/legislations in the past: 
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Wouldn't it end up implemented somewhere inside Chromium?
Probably, but in theory you would be able to take out in a fork. Inconvenient, but doable hopefully.
Why does my country keeps doing shit like this! I wasn't even aware of that one, what the hell! ;-;
France is a fallen democracy. It became law after law more authoritarian in an Orban/Poland style. The last move of the government give some ints if the politics are still in power or if it become a police state. For those who aren't aware of this last move in the country, after nearly killing someone, a cop was preventively put in jail according to the law. Nothing wrong here. But, the police unions voiced this was not acceptable and made proposal so cops could not jailed preventively. The gov just said "we are going to look at the proposal" without rejecting them even if these proposal are against the rule of law and Principe of democracy.
France is a fallen democracy.
Both of the things you complain about are in discussion, not coded into law. Obviously, we want to oppose such proposals, more dangerous though is the "Child Sexual Abuse Regulation" (Chatkontrolle), a proposed EU law that would bring filters to all of Europe.
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Why target the browser for fraud prevention? How about targeting banks? They are the middle man for almost all the online fraud that is happening and would have an relatively easy time to shut it off. Make them liable for all the money that leaves the bank account without the users expressed consent and it wouldn't take long until they introduce security measures that actually work.
Ex-banker president targets banks... Now that'd be quite an unexpecred headline! Shame it'll never be.
I have to disagree here. Disclaimer: I work for a bank but not super into the core financial stuff. Firstly, banks are already super heavily regulated; anti money laundering, terrorism financing, know your customer, etc. The reason crypto takes minutes for international transfers and banks can take days isn't because of technology, it's all of those checks on fraud happening. All the money leaving a bank account is, barring very advanced fraud, with the user's consent, but in fraud cases this is often done via social engineering (calling someone to get their codes from their bank card reader, or pretending to be a family member in need).
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Interesting share. Thanks.
I live in France and we are more interested in the part of this law that wants to put age restrictions on pornographic websites, so this is the first I've heard of it.
Jean-Noël Barrot, a business school graduate, is Minister for Digital Transition and Telecommunications. He is the leader on this project.
As noted by Mozilla, it comes down to 2 paragraphs, but I've included the paragraphs before and after below. This law overlaps with European regulation too:
Article 6
Article 12 of the aforementioned law no. 2004-575 of June 21, 2004 reads as follows:
"Art. 12 - I. - When one of its specially designated and empowered agents observes that an online public communication service is clearly carrying out operations constituting the offences referred to in articles 226-4-1, 226-18 and 323-1 of the French Penal Code and article L. 163-4 of the Monetary and Financial Code, the administrative authority shall give formal notice to the person whose activity is to publish the online public communication service in question, provided that it has made available the information referred to in article 1-1 of the present law, to cease the operations constituting the offence observed. It also informs the offender of the precautionary measure referred to in the second paragraph of paragraph I of this article, and invites the offender to submit his or her observations within five days.
"At the same time, the administrative authority notifies the electronic address of the service concerned to Internet browser providers within the meaning of Article 2, paragraph 11 of Regulation (EU) 2022/1925 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 September 2022 on fair and competitive contracts in the digital sector and amending Directives (EU) 2019/1937 and (EU) 2020/1828, for the purposes of implementing precautionary measures.
"As a precautionary measure, the recipient of a notification shall immediately take all necessary steps to display a message warning the user of the risk of prejudice incurred in the event of access to this address. This message is clear, legible, unique and comprehensible, and enables users to access the official website of the public interest grouping for the national system to assist victims of cyber-malicious acts.
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I vote sites block France.
On that note, how would one go about blocking all visitors from a geographic region?
GeoIP lookup. Pornhub did it recently to protest certain states' laws that would require them to check IDs of visitors.
It isn't very accurate. I live in Idaho, and my phone's geoip shows up all over the United States. Currently it says Utah, last time I checked.
Well, short of trusting the users themselves to volunteer their location, it's the best we've got.
Think of us poor French citizens stuck with this shitty government
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I'm philosophically against this idea. But on the other hand why is this being implemented in the browser? Why isn't France asking it's ISPs to block the hosting address of the sites. Or the DNS. Going after the endpoints it seems silly. Because now every single browser in the country is going to have a list of the " good websites ".
I'd imagine it's easier being the bad guy to a bunch of american browser companies rather then to all your local ISPs.
France already does DNS blocking. It honestly has near to no impact, since targeted websites (usually digital piracy related stuff) just change the domain.
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This is how you end up with no browsers except Opera and Edge.
I'm just glad it isn't the UK proposing something this dumb. We're doing enough stupid shit as it is.
Hell no, what a fucking stupid idea
If they don't want browsers to access the site, why keeping the site open in the first place? And if only regulated people have to access it, they can just share a ssh key or something to grant access, I don't see big problems here. Am I missing something?
It can be used by the state as a tool for oppression. Not necessarily to be used as proposed originally, like what the US did during their war on terror.
The article is not very clear about what exactly the proposal mandate. Create the means for browser to block websites, or forces browser to block certain websites by the geolocation they are operating in?
Because I don't understand how the later would work.
From the wording it seems like they are only asking browser developers to provide a function to block websites. (maybe byimporting a block list?)
I think they do not know this themselves. France had already implemented a black list on DNS level. F.i. library genesis links cannot be reached through standard DNS.
I figure they think that that's not oppressive enough.
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