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Comment by gorgoiler | Hacker News Reader

Websites that don’t follow the new AV laws will have to sanctioned. If the website is local, you can go ‘round to their office and arrest the owners. Lock ‘em up and throw away the key, it being the only language they understand etc.

However, if the website is not local then it must be blocked, either by statute, by the courts, or by a regulator.

This may require a National Firewall to block sites (eg The PRC.) As a bonus, your blocking infra can also be used for monitoring and logging.

If you’re lucky though the nation state will implement its Great Firewall using a borked DNS infra (eg The UK) that isn’t even mandatory for ISPs with a small enough userbase.

Exciting times, er, temps fantastiques, even. What tech does En Marche intend to mandate for blocking hairy armpits? Hopefully nothing too competent.

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Websites may already be blocked in France upon order from the Government, based on anti-terror laws.

Basically, the Ministry of the Interior decides and orders all Internet access providers to block a site. Courts are not involved on the premise that this must sometimes be carried out as quickly as possible, though there is a right to contest a decision a posteriori.

There's no such thing as blocking a site. You can direct DNS providers to block DNS, which doesn't help for anyone using Firefox. You can direct ISPs to block an IP but then you have hard decisions when the site you want to block is hosted by a foreign cloud provider.

How does foreign cloud provider matters. As of now encrypted SNI is not there, so they can block simply based on SNI. If SNI info is not correct, they can ask the foreign cloud provider to block the website. Any cloud provider where SNI block won't work well is large enough to not deny requests from the french government.

Not sure why you got downvoted, this is totally a thing that happens [0]

[0] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/south-korea-i...

In the long term plaintext SNI is going away. I'm not convinced that France can implement such a system much faster than TLS WG can thwart it.

Also while some US cloud providers might cooperate I doubt that in particular Cloudflare would. It only takes one.

In the long term things are hard to predict. If we look from 2010, E2E encryption wasn't there, or atleast not in a form usable by the masses. E2E is now here, and is as easy as using Signal. However, you see countries making laws against it. I doubt they will let eSNI pass through. And eSNI will be much easier to block, since you don't need to block it for consumers, you just need to impose big fines on businesses using it, since any such business will need to earn money somehow from their customers in the country. Unlike E2E, you don't have to worry about some random person forking signal and running their own servers. And video on internet is expensive enough that only an entity with good bank balance can do it, thus easy to punish with economic fines.

Not that you're wrong, but passively sniffing SNI's is much more involved than DNS replying with an incorrect IP. Maybe countries highly invested in it like China can do it.

And courts in France can also order sites to be blocked, as was the case for Sci-hub and Libgen.

aaaaaaaaaand we went full on China.

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