Will browsers be required by law to stop you from visiting infringing sites?
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https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html ("The Right to Read" (1997))
It was a very short time ago when ideas in this concept-space were, like, "this is colorfully paranoid nonsense and RMS needs to cut back on the acid", and not, like, "well obviously governments are going to do something like this, that's expected and normal".
Too many people want a locked down future and it's scary.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
This is going to be invective, but creators who feel insecure are naturally going to lash out against anything that they perceive to affect their income and/or reputation/image.
Great creators, great creations benefit from open sharing, per Gabe Newell's well-known quote. There will always be piracy, but that doesn't impact the creator because people who like a work want to support the creator if they can afford to. Fear of piracy comes from insecure creators, and that insecurity comes from the lack of skill or perceived lack of skill.
To put it bluntly, content creation is extremely oversaturated and most people don't create things that justify their price. I wish they could do what they love and not worry about sustaining themselves, but economic reality is economic reality.
I don't know it.
>economic reality is economic reality.
Not if the FOMC had anything to say about it since '08. And they did.
That leads to a reality where creators earn money from charity based on celebrity status, instead of from a trade of goods. A reality where every creator needs to be a celebrity to make ends meet is a horrifying one.
> A reality where every creator needs to be a celebrity to make ends meet is a horrifying one.
More horrifying than a reality where every creator needs business skills to make ends meet?
I think the consensus among fiction writers is that attemps to create a utopia will always become a dystopia.
The talk can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg
When people have means to consume or produce content without control any governmental bureaucrat will try to control this activity. History supports this argument.
No printing press > no cheap books > illiterate population > easy to control what spreads as information and what do not.
Printing press arrived > cheap books > growing literacy > control over the presses. Lenin's first targets were the post/telegraph (communication), bridges and railways (movement of people) and all big printing houses (Lenin's Full Collected works - vol. 32, page 282)
Radio arrived > Fixed Frequencies Radio sets sold & Governmental Radio jamming stations
TV > Licence to broadcast
Internet > Big Firewall of China & etc...
And don't even think about moving money freely as experienced by requirement to show why are you paying someone and those nice people from bank compliance departments.
The cost of enforcement in digital economy is way cheaper than before. The tools are there or can be built cheaply and sadly they're only built one way, from the government to the people. Open governmental data and strong society control over governmental actions is almost non-existent. "Brave new world" is here.
There should be a way to support important open-source projects with fundraising drives for features and etc ... Open source is one of the very few ways to sustain important digital freedoms.
I'm much more worried about more control in the government's hands.
In theory at least, there can always be browser or search alternatives. And even if not widespread there will be options for motivated individuals who want a more permissive browser and internet experience.
But I can't escape the government - certainly not without the risk of imprisonment or other legal trouble.
I don't want to be controlled by either corporations or the government, but more and more they seem one-in-the-same. The government uses corporations to administer the control, with the force of law to back it up. As in this case - this is censorship that the government wants, but they force browser companies to administer that censorship under penalty of law.
In theory, you can also get a non-Apple/Google mobile phone, but in practice you cannot. In some cases these corporations have more power than the government. It's also very easy for these companies to work with the government to give them access to your data, so there's not really much of a delineation anyway.
1) using the id.me app that doesn't work on your phone
2) doing a video call after waiting in line for several hours, which your phone may not have the selfie camera to do
3) going to a physical kiosk that may be hours away
Having a smartphone is practically required in modern life. Commercial services assume them. Government services assume them. Social interactions assume them.
Turns out, dumb phones are not actually an option anymore.
Almost everything in that list, is not actually an impossibility for you to get around using. The first half is basically conveniences you're used to having. Buy a bicycle! Print your gym ID or provide name/phone number (this has worked at every gym I've been to)! Tell your job you need them to provide hardware if they want you to use the app. If your apartment really only opens with an app, I'd see if you can clone the RFID and toss it on a keychain.
Everything is an option, it's a decision of convenience. More and more I am thinking it's not worth the convenience.
The apartment is not RFID/NFC. It’s HTTPS. Yes, that’s as insane as it sounds.
Also, “you can just hack the HTTPS API to trigger via SMS over twilio” is not a convincing argument towards “people don’t need smartphones”. Arguments towards your thesis are kind of going off the rails there, if I’m being honest.
https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/cochran-v-schwans-home-ser...
Also re: the door situation, maybe carrying around a smartphone on airplane/powered down for this? Personally I also need a few apps, so I'd keep it around for that?
Hard agree, but it seems that in most places it's perfectly legal. Similar to telling W-2 car mechanics or property maintenance technicians that they must bring their own tools.
If people are easily influenced (on mass) and cost to influence them is low enough, the voting system can be gained and the only real mechanism to remove bad government would cease to exist.
I hope I'm wrong, but as Romans knew: “Two things only the people anxiously desire — bread and circuses.”
Now technologies can make this cheap and efficient and the system will change to a worse one, when you don't need so much cooperation from the govern, since you can control them much more efficiently.
Uygur digital control is a telling warning...
Downside?
That said, assuming human nature remains the same, I logically assume places with a larger degree of freedom will always thrive in comparison to places where there isn’t as much freedom (at least in the long run) simply because we know one central place dictating rules can’t account for all the trade offs and sooner or later will make a terrible decision no one can escape from, many times motivated by the flaws of the few people making those decisions. Meanwhile a larger degree of freedom allows people to choose what’s best for them at scale and trends happen more organically. This seems to be the idea defended in the book “Why Nations Fail” in general terms.
Also it seems to me that the governments don’t and can’t really control their populations as much as we fear it. To do that, it needs too much information, and even though we can process more and more information much cheaper today, I don’t think it makes the big picture any easier to understand. Any visualization of data is doomed to be reduced to simplifications that only tell a very narrow story of what is really happening, or gets locked in a machine learning black box that isn’t interested in helping you particularly. The more complex something is, the less likely it is for us to make sense of it, and I think all the subdivisions of human fields (politics, history, economics etc.) actually do more harm than good because when you isolate those things you lose perspective of how they’re interacting and a whole model of how something works can fall flat (see economists not being able to predict anything in practice).
The world or human behavior remains and I believe will remain unpredictable with all sorts of emergent behaviors in different scales, if that makes sense. Some even predict nation states are declining and will be replaced by smaller city-state governments that are closer to people’s needs or that different forms of organizations will be created to deal with different issues now that companies aren’t subject to one country in particular etc.
I agree that absolute control wouldn't be needed or enforced and freer societies would do better in the long run.
But the main algorithm of populace control over the government can be broken by mass influence/mass control over voting systems. This is the thing that worries me most. Incumbents and people in power both benefit from the tools of automated enforcement of the laws so these would be invested in and improved.
To paraphrase the Office "find the differences" meme, "it's the same picture".
Corporations are all too excited to do the bidding of the government and vice versa. There's just some token resistance for show.
The end game has nothing to do with limiting piracy or controlling political speech. Those are just a means to an end.
Ultimately, there will always be some people in power whose goals are illiteracy and weaponizing general purpose computation.
This phenomenon is not new. We produce more food than humanity needs, but warlords and first world governments routinely cause famines by weaponizing food distribution.
We have laws about driving properly, not because drivers are guilty of crimes.
"Chilling effects" is a better argument.
Infringing sites are already illegal, so blocking them is in realm of government purview. The objections are not about blocking these sites; they are about the ancillary risks of creating an abusable power.
Consequently there are a lot of gaps in this approach. For example, wahapedia is a mirror for Warhammer 40k rules. Games Workshop, the rule book authors, would be happy for the site to be inaccessible, but since the site is hosted in Russia, and they don’t respect western IP laws, it continues to stay up.
The less the government has to do, the lower your taxes in theory. Exporting government functions to private institutions is very common. For example, many legal agreements have forced arbitration clauses. It is perfectly acceptable for two consenting parties to agree to alternative dispute resolutions outside of court. Except one of those parties (the customer) has no ability to influence the wording of the contract and all vendors have the same arbitration clauses. Consumers pay for it in the form of lower value and higher prices.
Many municipalities require new construction to have homeowners associations. They don’t want to have to deal with all the resident disagreements. These HOAs charge a fee to residents for the upkeep of the services in the community (like a government), and have legal means to enforce transgressions such as foreclosure on your home (like a government). But there is also another government over it, they still charge you property taxes (which ostensibly pays for those services) and those taxes haven’t gone down.
So yes, not only is moving government functions to private entities inefficient, and there’s plenty of examples of to back it up, it just shifts responsibility around and ultimately costs regular people more.
When the ISP (or bank) becomes not only the service provider but also police and judge at the same time, they can simply block you and you’re left with no alternative
But that is why there is an effort to introduce drm in browsers: to make you unable to use unsigned/non-lcomplying browsers to use the web at all.
So the law works against the push to DRM, not for it. Oh glorious unintended consequences.
People will fight to access copyrighted works. Someone will package an access path in an easily accessible way, and hordes of kids will jump on it.
Netflix as easily accessible platform was the only working piracy solution with some chance, and corporate greed broke it.
Teenagers want porn. The “infringing sites” discussed in the linked article isn’t about porn. No one thinks that the French government is going to require that browsers block Pornhub, Reddit’s gone-wild subs, or Xvideos.
Your view of hordes of kids keen on pirating is rather dated. Sure, some people still pirate. But due to the rise in streaming and media-as-a-commodity, piracy is no longer even the same marginal cultural force that it was a decade ago.
Very wrong! France is currently deciding whether to ban five porn sites, including Pornhub, Xvideos, and XHamster.[0]
The new law mentioned in TFA has already passed one chamber of parliament unanimously, and will be passed later this year.[1] It won't just require phishing sites to be blocked by browsers. It'll also require porn sites to authenticate users through government websites (think OpenID but with the tax-filing website or national health insurance website, to check if age > 18), and block porn sites that don't comply (without needing a judge's permission).
It doesn't stop there. The new law requires sites that allow "foreign propaganda" (Russia Today, Sputnik) to be blocked. And though it's not directly relevant here, the law also criminalizes "online contempt" and hate speech, which includes "threats and intimidation against elected officials", and gives the government the right to legally require platforms to ban such people, and to legally punish these platforms if the person finds a way to circumvent the ban.[2][3]
Note that the French government can already block pirate sites (and does, including Sci-Hub and Libgen) without a judge's permission.[4] This isn't done in the browser itself, but all the above will be, and there's no doubt that this will be too eventually.
[0]: https://www.20minutes.fr/high-tech/by-the-web/4045390-202307...
[1]: https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2023/07/06/le-senat-vo...
[2]: https://www.vie-publique.fr/loi/289345-securiser-et-reguler-...
[3]: https://www.20minutes.fr/high-tech/by-the-web/4044754-202307...
[4]: https://www.lefigaro.fr/secteur/high-tech/piratage-sur-inter...
To them being no longer relevant as security of consoles increased.
>Piracy is unstoppable
L1 DRM is very expensive to break. As the industry's security gets better and better that price will continue to increase. People who can break L1 DRM will not find it worth it to dump a lot of content or share it with a lot of people because they don't want their key to be blacklisted.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36602193
What makes you think that they won't add a global website blocker too?
I say this as someone who uses Firefox. They changed when it stopped being just software developers and became a brand.
As long as the idea it "out there", and a country like France does a test drive, it wont be just in France.
Sure, you could also keep a free browser to browse the parts of the web that allow it, but those parts of the web will be starved of ad dollars and viewership, as sponsoring a “dark web” site (a term the proponents of WEI and governments would probably like to popularize for any non-WEI-enforcing site) may become inherently disreputable, and it may develop a reputation like KaZaA or LimeWire, as a hotbed of illegal activity and dangerous malware, scaring average people from “opening themselves up to” those risks by installing Firefox or whatever. Think of how few Apple users jailbreak, or turn off SIP.
Trying to force this in the browser is too difficult technically, and too easy to circumvent.
Sure, ordinary people already are heavily spied on and restricted. But the machines doing the spying and restricting have to run their own OSes as well. The inverse of the 'who watches the watchers' problem.
It's supposed to be monopoly on _legitimate_ violence.
Which is why organized crime and vigilantism are generally so much higher up on a government's priority list than single acts of violence. They represent legitimate threats to the government.
Violence is a choice that no government can take away. They can only threaten violence of their own. What validity does a government have when it claims it has the sole right to hurt others, including you? That is a fiction that led to the current state of things.
What right does sovereignty give a state to oppress its people?
None, I'm just telling you what will happen. The argument was not that people consented, but that first they'll outlaw circumvention and then hunt you down for continuing to try. The point is that there is no technological solution to oppression. Some people here have a certain naïveté that everything can be solved with technology but that view ignores actual power in the actual world.
> What right does sovereignty give a state to oppress its people?
Rights are given by states. Without states, you don't have rights, only capabilities. Rights come into existence when an alliance with a lot of capacity for violence imposes rules on the people within its reach that it allows itself to be bound by.
Governance is not a contest where you are awarded rule for being the best, or a trial where a wise man gives governance to those who deserve it. Governance doesn't care if you give it "credibility" or what "social contract" you have signed unless it decides itself that it cares about those things. The only credibility that a government needs is your belief that it will unleash violence upon you if you do not do what it says.
You have rights under government. Governments themselves don't need rights, unless they are subgovernments of more powerful governments that have granted them. Don't retreat into abstractions and fantasy. You can't defeat fascism by proving it wrong; it's not a Star Trek computer.
I also concede it takes more than an argument to fend off government, but playing along with "monopoly on violence" is so defeatist and pre-loads conversation with a guaranteed end result, when that end is not actually guaranteed. It can be fought.
People have a monopoly on casting votes.
The security services in my country, Romania (an EU and NATO member), are already doing that, or something similar to that. For example trying to access https://sputnikglobe.com/ sort of times out, either way, it doesn't work.
Can you clarify what you mean?
If this were the EU or US, and Google risked losing access to that market, they would comply. Way too much money on the table.
They don't employ (many) people here, don't pay a lot of taxes and generally don't do much cooperating on their own.
They can offer literal briefcases of money to politicians but, in General, that is not the way the EU works.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/12/eidas-20-sets-dangerou...
In Chrome, it's called "Safe Browsing", and it's currently optional, Standard, or Enhanced.
Occasionally, there are false positives and you hear people screaming about it on HN because their personal site is now a giant red malware warning in 99.9% of browsers.
Google AFAIK has not yet been compelled to use it to censor at the behest of the state. It has existed now for many years.
Easier to just get it adopted as a W3C standard as with past DRM lockdowns.
That way all the browser manufacturers are just following orders.
i'm certain that any website "suspected" of breaking the law will go through multiple bureaucratic hurdles where they need to prove their innocence to a committee, as opposed to someone else proving their guilt in a courtroom. in the mean time, sorry, your website is blocked because its election season and we don't want this information getting out right now.
It would just be easier for a government to block these sites at the ISPs as the article mentions and even that could be circumvented if the site is in another country.
The idea here is to make it harder for the public to access banned websites. Tech savvy people will be able to recompile their browser from source anyways, just like they can easily work around DNS-based blocking and pretty much every blocking attempt, even the "great firewall".
It is mostly a punishment for services that don't comply with the rest of the law. By blocking it in the majority of browsers, it will drive away a lot of traffic.
Anyways, I don't expect that part of the law to pass, and if it does, it will be very unlikely to be enforced, France is a major economy, but I don't think it has the international power to do that, call me back when the entire EU or the US is on it.
By no coherent definition, though. Just by professional convention.
I don't know of any online service that expects end users to use something like wget and curl, maybe in niche cases, or for personal use, but I don't think it can be considered a primary use case for these software.
[1] which I would absolutely do if legislators are stupid enough to pass this law. No one gets to control what I read.
Maybe they would stop Microsoft's ridiculous strategy to integrate their browser into the operating system.
For commercial entities the government can go for financial or operational penalties to encourage compliance, at least if they operate commercially in the country in question.
But for open-source web browsers, which might not have any commercial entities operating in the country, how could they even enforce that law?
There's nobody to punish, nobody to coerce.
They’ll put something like a WEI token outside of the encrypted payload and force ISPs to refuse transit for anything that’s not attested by the “good guys”.
Of course this law will pass, like all the authoritarian bullshit other laws that did the past few years. Remember the one about the government legally using your phone’s camera and mic? This was mere months ago.
Eg if absolutely no one fought for net neutrality, would we be in a world where we're all comfortable with IPSs dropping traffic "they don't like". I do realise this example probably isn't far enough in the past to truly have had a cultural impact like this, but you get the point.
Since that is impossible, this is not a wonderful idea.
It'd make more sense to have the ISP do it, as they actually could have a meaningful effect on what you can / cannot connect to.
I'm starting to suspect that secret police were always focused on illegal information, surveillance, and the prevention of communication between potential conspirators.