Petition to stop France from forcing browsers like Firefox to censor websites
foundation.mozilla.org
foundation.mozilla.org
That said, it’s freaking exhausting how these dumb actions keep being taken by governments all over the world.
It seems like every month there’s some new crap going on
It's slightly more worrisome that the law doesn't include any privacy protection measures, but the GDPR still applies and whoever runs the checking service has to comply with it since the browsing history is personal data.
It’s not about being effective, it’s about making things illegal. It’s trivially easy to break the speed limit, but that doesn’t stop local police using it to collect millions of dollars of fines every year
Of course, authortiarians will always pretend there's some mistake or some good intention, once they're exposed, and attack people with labels, when criticism is used against their policies.
Comparing stuff to the great firewall of china is ridiculous. It's like saying things are ok with police in the US because they're not north Korea.
Why do I have strong vibes that a better way of phrasing this is "a percentage of the people who thinks the fr gov's been acting against national interest (likely the people who think /their/ interest aligns with the national interest quite closely) knows it."
I mean, I don't know France and I'm no friend with "the government" and I oppose turning browsers into anything they are not supposed to be, but that "the government" can go against "national interest" for 20 year and "the people" know it is such a trite story that... uuuuugh. In short, you added no context at all.
Then don't try to put discredit to the saying of an insider. GP is 100% right. I've been back after about ~5 years living abroad and the country is in an astonishing decline on every plan (educational, moral, economical, political, diplomatic, security, judicial, medical, etc. the list goes one). And most of it is stemming from the policies enforced in the last decades.
The GP in question is a generic ramble about distaste for current government. You can apply that for each and every country - there's not one where citizens are happy with their leaders. And if this flies for 'insider knowledge' in France you really are f**d and, its not because of the government.
For the last 4 presidents and their ~15 governments (20 years), both "left" and "right".
But I agree said rambling remains quite generic nonetheless.
I was actually trying to show it does have some merit by pointing out that, despite being generic, said ramble targets all the governments we’ve had over the last 20 years, and thus shouldn’t be so easily dismissed.
The conclusion was me playing nice by finding some common ground with the person I was replying to.
That’s all.
That's what makes it sound like noise. If you took "france" out of the sentence I wouldn't be able to tell which country this is talking about. US, Canada, UK, China, Japan? It's like the fortune reading of government criticism.
I'm sure you perceive the decline, and you were so kind to mention in which fields. Let's take an example, i.e. economy and security. Immigration and illegal immigrants are often related to immigration, in public discourse. I'm sure the government in the last 20 years has done something about it (despite me not knowing France): either it tried to tighten it, or to make it happen more smoothly, or to integrate the immgrants, or to convince them to go back, or...
Now, I'm also pretty confident there's a sizable percentage of people that think that immigration is not a security problem nor an economic problem, but it's casted as such by the right; all these measures were a waste of time and money, which could have been used to improve other stuff in the public interest.
There's a decent amount of people that believe immigration should be helped and increased, and the efforts in controlling it have been wrong, and bad, and against the public interest.
There's people, likely on the right, thinking that there's way too many immigrants, and the previous government didn't do enough to address this; it is in the national interest to reduce immigrants, make sure they are all working, but without hijacking the possibilities for French citizens.
Did I guess correctly? Who is The People, and what is the correct National Interest now? Does it by any chance align with your views on immigration (which might or might not align with those of the OP, btw - we can't say much about those since there was no content)?
Which one is better? Because I don't see one.
The only recently released the Constitutional Council’s archives, 25 years later, and it’s been quite enlightening.
Our Supreme Court "equivalent" basically approved, enabled, contributed to and hid away blatant fraud, then lied about it for years, all under the guise of avoiding "political consequences".
https://www.francetvinfo.fr/politique/affaire/affaire-karach...
Don’t worry, we’ll be upset, we love getting upset, but we have to feel like we figured it out. Americans just prefer to bring our outrage from home, rather than have it supplied for us when we get there.
Why would this ever be done on a browser level? Any nation with internet censoring intentions can already do this by blocking it on an ISP level.
The governments cannot go and forbid browsers to do that if they don't have the law to back it.
Because government says so. Its signaling/actionism for political/power purposes.
Repressive government's don't do their blocking at the browser level because it is completely ineffective. Anyone who wants to access the forbidden websites will be able to do so anyway.
What could work is a local proxy server that translates the host name in the request.
It must MITM the https requests though.
Only if you configured it that way. Most http servers have a "default" website which they will happly serve from if the Host header has no match. I expect these sites will continue to work just fine in firefox using the host file hack or via alternative DNS domains.
Unless they just want a foot-in-the-door law to make certain browsers illegal (to then expand on it later), blocking content at the terminal is not the way to do it. So so many ways to get around it.
The French government censors websites by forcing ISPs to delist stuff from their DNS servers. It's trivial to bypass simply by setting alternative DNS providers like Cloudflare.
This seems to be false as the precedent already exists.
sources: Étude d'impact (PDF linked in https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/dossierlegislatif/JORFDOLE000...) says
>Par ses modalités, ce dispositif est à rapprocher du dispositif de filtrage prévu au 1° de l’article L. 521-3-1 du code de la consommation, permettant aux agents de la DGCCRF d’ordonner, selon des conditions et modalités particulières, aux opérateurs de plateformes en ligne, aux fournisseurs d’accès à internet ainsi qu’aux exploitants de navigateurs internet d’afficher un message avertissant les consommateurs du risque de préjudice encouru s’ils accèdent au contenu manifestement illicite, et au b du 2° du même article, qui leur permet d’ordonner à ces mêmes opérateurs et aux hébergeurs de prendre toute mesure utile destinée à limiter l’accès à ces contenus.
Article L. 521-3-1 du code de la consommation: https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/article_lc/LEGIARTI0000...
How is that even enforced?
Doesn't seem unreasonable that computer OS's and/or web browsers be required to support the same.
Emphasis on narrow.
It’s completely unreasonable to have a broad scope direct communication channel between the government and my browser or OS.
For example, recently the law changed so that pedestrians had priority at 't' road junctions without traffic lights.
Ideally, every citizen would be send a small infographic showing the new law on the day it became law. They would click "okay" and go on with their day.
Instead, the government bought up TV ads and billboards across the country (very expensive) to try to get the message across - and still, months later, you have people honking horns and getting angry at pedestrians and drivers who don't know about the change.
1. Not every citizen possesses an SMS-capable device.
2. Many smartphone-enabled citizens don't want to be nagged by the government.
> Instead, the government bought up TV ads and billboards across the country
I don't watch TV ads. I haven't seen any of these billboards. And I didn't know there was anything unusual about the law on T-junctions in particular.
Well, not really. I don't own a car, and I haven't driven one for years.
But that's to ignore your point, which is that I'm ignorant of the law. Thing is, that's far from the only law I'm ignorant of; if every little change in the law had to be notified to all citizens via SMS, that channel would become so clogged as to be useless (nobody would check their messages).
That's hardly a backwards-incompatible change that needs to be actioned immediately.
My attention has already been torn to shreds for years via smartphone usage (I'm in an on-and-off recovery). I don't need the government adding their two pence into what's already a bad situation.
If they care so much, mail me. Physically. That both gets my attention, lets the government constant me via a much less intrusive channel, and staves off the bankruptcy of Royal Mail.
Don't look at your phone in the next five minutes, because Russia's invaded France and your iPhone goes ding.
Both you and me have been legally volunteered for conscription "at random".
And I wonder who's sons and daughters are magically missing from the man-power database, certainly not the engineers and politicians who built it. could never suggest such a thing is likely...
Bring it on, I say.
That's not to say a regulation like this couldn't be done in a reasonable way, but it needs to be handled with care.
Things get way harder when you're talking about forcing the addition of user hostile features (like the bill described in the OP presumably is; blocking users from accessing a website that they want to access), because that creates a situation where vendors have to treat the device owner as a potentially hostile actor. I don't see any way you could enforce that without completely destroying users' freedom to run software of their choosing on their own device, no matter how the law is worded, and I wouldn't consider that "reasonable" under any circumstances.
Applying that to browsers does seem unreasonable to me. IANAL but to my knowledge mobile OSs aren’t legally required to support the emergency alert features of the radio because there’s no direct way to legally force them to. They do so because of popular demand and indirect requirements from large customers.
And you can "require" what you like; unless you have real control, then you won't get what you "require".
Why?
Web browsers were designed from the start to show you only content you expressly requested. Notification APIs are still opt-in. A browser is primarily pull-oriented, whereas a phone was always bi-directional. Inverting this expectation for the browser is very much unwelcome.
See, e.g. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Oddly enough, the French government has contributed quite substantially to free software.
https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/dossierlegislatif/JORFDOLE000...
The Minister for the Economy, Finance and Industrial and Digital Sovereignty and the Minister attached to the Minister for the Economy, Finance and Industrial and Digital Sovereignty, responsible for the Digital Transition and Telecommunications, have presented the bill to secure and regulate the digital space (SREN) in order to restore the confidence necessary for the success of the digital transition. With this bill, France is adopting a range of bold and unprecedented practical measures aimed at strengthening public order in the digital environment. The result of interministerial work led by Jean-Noël Barrot, the bill contains some twenty proposals aimed in particular at : - implement an anti-scam cybersecurity filter to protect the French against attempts to access their personal or bank details fraudulently for malicious purposes, which have increased in number in recent years; - strengthen penalties for people convicted of cyberbullying, a phenomenon that is spreading on social networks; - strengthen the system for enforcing online age limits for access to pornographic sites, to better protect our children; - penalise sites that fail to remove online child pornography content; - restore commercial fairness to the cloud market, which is currently concentrated in the hands of a handful of players.
It's like cars - you can driver faster than the speed limit, but if you get caught doing so, you may be punished.
Reminds how Okular by default obeys PDF DRM, but you can just simply untick it as an option in the settings if you want to.
In an ideal scenario, all software would have that tickbox.
If Mozilla came out and said "nah", what exactly would the french government do? ban that web browser? demand every website accessed via france check if someone is running a banned web browser?
the absurdity would spiral out of control on its own, it seems best to ignore this so that the europeans can take an official L on regulating web content.
* Arrest Mozilla officials if they travel to France
* Seize or prevent donations made in France
* Seize or prevent the Google-search-is-the-default for French portion of queries
* Use international venues like WTO to get a judgment enforceable in the US
If I was a browser vendor, I'd wait for this. The US will never allow it.
That’s not what the WTO does.
Even to the extent that if you had a windows NT server and changed the region to france, it would replace your hashed password with a plaintext version when you next logged in. So, there is a history of boneheaded tech laws.
Mozilla want transparency of how bad things are dealt with and France is giving a clear list and telling them how to do it. Exactly the same way as Mozilla celebrates by ensuring nobody can see the bad thing.
This may sound like I support what France is proposing. I don't. However I'm not French so I don't get a say. I thoroughly enjoy the hypocrisy of Mozilla's statements on these matters. "Stop Bad Things." "No not like that!"
Once again, everything we accuse china of, we are. China has a single party controlled media right? How is it that one day, every commercial and media suddenly became so 'diverse'? Not saying it's a good thing or a bad thing. Just asking who flipped the switch?
That's an entirely different issue tho, a private company regulating its own product has nothing to do with a gov trying to restrict internet access to its citizens.
That's my point. A private company regulating its own product is fine as long as it is private and independent. My point is that all 'private' companies appear to be following the same script which isn't something we'd expect from private independent companies. What's strange is that someone flipped a switch and all private companies, both political parties and government itself started behaving in the same manner. It's not just online censorship, it's the broad cultural campaign of chaos all under the banner of 'minority, lgbt and women's rights' mostly. Did every company in every industry from motorcycles to hollywood to news all magically decide to speak with one voice. Or is it that they were all directed to.
In china, it's obvious who is in charge. The communist party. They give orders, everyone follows. Who is giving orders to the our private companies, political parties and government?
If a sufficiently big block of customers likes the idea of 'minority, lgbt and women's rights as you put it, they you're gonna see a bunch of companies trying to present themselves in a way that if favorable to that block.
Is conspiracy theory-ish code for true or obvious? Strange how 'conspiracy theory' ad hominems became popular recently.
> If a sufficiently big block of customers likes the idea of 'minority, lgbt and women's rights as you put it, they you're gonna see a bunch of companies trying to present themselves in a way that if favorable to that block.
Playing dumb I see. The country is majority christian and white. Using your logic, all commercials should be christian themed and advocate for whites.
You guys literally say "one nation under god", in the pledge of allegiance you say in schools and at the start of congressional sessions (according to wikipeida) and your money says "in god we trust" on it.
the country, yes. The world demographic of people who use your product, no.
>all commercials should be christian themed and advocate for whites.
and many commercials aimed at an older audiience, e.g. cable TV, do focus on this. Are we also playing dumb on the generational gap in technology, demographics using online media, and their ideaology?
But the ads are target to the people in the country. Besides, the world at large is far more anti-lgbt, anti-women's rights and anti-woke than the bizarro world USA we've turned ourselves into. Are you seriously suggesting these companies are peddling pro-lgbt and women's rights propaganda advertisements to win over muslims, africans, indians, chinese, south americans, etc?
Crazy how when you refuse to accept reality, how you have to form insane contradictions after contradictions...
> and many commercials aimed at an older audiience, e.g. cable TV, do focus on this.
No they do not. That's the point.
> Are we also playing dumb on the generational gap in technology, demographics using online media, and their ideaology?
Who is talking about online media. Besides, even after insane brainwashing the younger generation isn't as 'woke' as you think they are. Sure, there are differences between generations, but people are ultimately people. But this has nothing to do with what we are talking about does it?
How dumb does one have to be to think that the american companies are creating lgbt ads for american audiences to win over saudis?
>Hate to say it, but once the tech elite ( or more like the money elite controlling tech ) started talking about minority, lgbt and women's 'rights', they all started censoring, deplatforming, oppressing.
There's nothing stopping you from creating yet another "free speech" website. They typically fail because what the "tech elite" realize, along with most people, is that "free speech" websites devolve into people spamming racial slurs. Most people don't want to be around that.
>Of course to fight 'hate speech' - whatever that means
There is huge amounts of discourse on hate speech and what it means. There is plenty to read on the subject if you truly don't understand what it means.
>It's like someone or some group flipped a switch and everyone from business to politics started singing a different tune.
There was no switch. As the internet grew and became more diverse, the people who are typically the targets of hateful speech on the internet grew in their ability to influence companies. Back in the early 2000s, women avoided using a microphone because if they did, they would receive abuse or unwanted sexual comments. As the amount of women in video games increased, corporations become focused on the needs of their audience and how to make them feel welcome and buy more games. It's the same story for pretty much every other aspect of tech.
What you're imagining as some conspiracy to "oppress" (lol) you because you can't spam racial slurs or spread race-based conspiracy theories is actually marketing executives realizing that catering to the extremely small "freeze peach" audience that wants to post odious content isn't an actual winning strategy for growing your business.
Yeah, sorry.
> if a trans woman is talking about how a cute guy she was talking to at a bar stalked her and tried to beat her after she mentioned that she is trans, and someone chooses that moment to say that it's not okay to hate cis white men
Right, and I've seen that kind of antagonistic use of otherwise fair statements before, too, i.e. with "all lives matter". That's not the kind of situation I'm describing, though. Rather, some people unapologetically bash white cis men with no other context for fun, and then pile on if someone speaks up. It's intentionally toxic trolling. As you point out, every group, oppressed or not, will have some gross behavior in its ranks.
With all due respect, there is a growing trend of loneliness among this generation of young men[0] and these topics are constantly dismissed and blamed on the men. I understand your intent, but empahty over the dating scene is probaly one of the worst examples to give to a male audience. It's expecting empathy from a subject they never give empathy from so what would you expect?
>Now this isn't to say that these communities don't take it too far on their own. There are some which engage in doxxing, death threats, and all sorts of terrible behavior, but those communities are not the whole majority, just as the racist, transphobic, misogynistic and homophobic groups aren't the whole of cis white men. In both cases, those groups simply are the loudest.
but you also just said that minority threats are more legitmate, so even you seem to have some semblance of believing the loud groups that oppress them.
[0]: https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/3868557-most-yo...
I don't really see how this relates to what I said
“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root” — Henry David Thoreau
Rather than building guardrails on the dangerous corners, we seem to revel in building hospitals at the bottoms of ravines. We treat symptoms and side effects, rather than origins.
If they insist on suppressing content, do so at the servers serving the content, not arbitrary viewers.
One disadvantage of globalization is that you get to see the dumb ideas of all politicians. Somehow, the good ideas don't cumulate the same way...
I don't have an answer to your question, but China seems to be successful with the internet censorship thing.
Domestically sure but I see stuff about the Tiananmen Square massacre and even whinny the pooh all the time. I don't even go out of my way to look for it.
- Then pay 10x fine
- Then appstore is banned
- Then 100x fine
- Then your employees in the country are arrested and held as hostages
As someone from a country that turned into totalitarian shithole in mere 10 years, that "pfft I don't care they won't enforce it" attitude looks dangerous and shortsighted.
If you believe tangling with state-sponsored legal machinery is no big deal, I feel sorry for you.
Building out censorship functionality doesn't really seem viable for Firefox's future worldwide.
No they can't and won't. Though they will grab you if you go to them.
And I don't think the US is extraditing anyone from Firefox over such a law.
Once again I have not fully checked this as the text is very long.
https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2023/07/06/le-senat-vo...
> To prevent multiple attempts at scams by e-mail or SMS, the bill must also allow the establishment of a free "anti-scam filter" sending a warning message to anyone who is about to to go to a site identified as malicious.
Stop computing this way people. Use and support FOSS software first, not last.
I predict that hackers will find a way to replace the government list with their own in 3, 2, 1...
The week after Guix-HPC users see their Hydras blocked, the goverment it's fucked over by a call from "a big boss" from corpos relying on reproducible scientific materials and the guy who did that "great idea" fired in the spot to save up some asses (and Euros).
Of course it's dumb. They should just say they won't do it. Presumably their desire to continue operating in France is a lot stronger than their dedication to the principles involved and that is why they are taking this approach.
Mozilla made a lot of stupid decisions in the past but if they do this, I'm finally dropping firefox when I test my sites.
Take a deeper look into e.G. cold war Eastern European countries to see what censorship is.
https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2023/06/26/france-browser...
This kind of meager understanding of tech in especially in Europe make me wonder how the life of those old politicians would be like. They are still living in pre tech-boom era, where rich people paid someone else to do the chores for them. They don't even need to know the latest tech advancements because they have so much "old-money" to live like in 90s, which means they were born rich european and will remain rich european for rest of their lives.
As with encryption bans, to stop this requires a political effort, not technological sneering and naysaying.
Quite evil.
In our society, a divide is forming between the "knowledge" and the "labor". Why should a laborer need unfiltered knowledge? And why does you and your family deserve to be in the "knowledge" group anyways?
The opposition in France are far from being angels, it's very similar to Democrats vs Republican situation in France (except Gauche vs Droite).
Checks and balances that get eroded during populist waves, stay that way when the monster comes.
Yup this one in France is really a big problem. The public sector spendings officially represents something like 58.1% of the french GDP (official "Insee" numbers from 2023, for 2022)... France is not far from a planned economy and, unsurprisingly, it's a particularly harsh environment for real small private SMEs (i.e. those without friends at the state) and for entrepreneurs, for they're getting trounced by taxes.
And that gigantic state (percentage wise of the GDP, not on the world stage) still cannot prevent days of riots and drug-dealers from ruling the streets (like in the city of Marseille).
A deeply corrupt state where public servants are planted so that taxes can grow and, in return, the people don't even get safe streets.
But all is fine and well for these corrupt politicians because soon they'll be able to prevent comments such as yours or mine from being read by anyone.
Ofcourse for the rest of Europe this is a good thing- French military ambitions have been consistently sabotaged by this oversight. Good military, brilliant engineers and capable bureaucrats but terrible merchants. And wars are won on the stock market.
For the kings sure… for the people much less.
Imagine england being defeated and india being free of colonialism.
But I understand that the anglosaxon history might be a bit biased and edited.
For one thing, France is and remains one of the richest countries in the world. For a second thing, I seem to remember that France is currently outperforming both Germany and the UK (I read this in both German and British newspapers, but I don't remember the details).
Is it perfect? Far from it. But French bashing feels pretty counter-productive.
The US has Detroid, LA gangs, SF with the streets filled with homeless people...
Marseille's worst neighborhoods are really chill compared to the bad parts of any American city.
The streets are pretty safe.
Your comment is kinda ridiculous, stop watching TV.
Yeah there are lot of taxes, but those taxes come in handy when you can get 2 years of unemployment benefits when starting a company. Or when you know, get a cancer that would cost a few millions to treat.
Of course, France is striving to import a more retarded and dangerous populace as quickly as possible, so who knows who will win that contest.
I have no knowledge of the worst American cities, but saying that Marseille's worst neighborhoods are "chill" and "The streets are pretty safe" is pure madness.
There are dozens of worst places around SF, LA, NYC, Chicago. There are no crackheads in Marseille. 100x less guns than in any American city.
And even with that, I would be safer if I kept a low profile with my head down and by not getting into troubles and by avoiding some taverns. Try that at the worst places of any big city in the US.
https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2023/08/17/a-marseill...
Same in Germany as well. The country long stopped caring for its people and mainly operates as a vehicle for german industrial interests to make money.
>There're a bunch of corrupted inviduals with no counter power to keep them in check.
The guillotine has proven this to be incorect. Separating their heads from their bodies helps keep rulers unable to perform further acts of corruption.
I suspect its more like "dudes who know nothing about computers (let alone the OSI model)" coming up with dumb ideas. These ideas are all approved and encouraged by advisors under the influence of Big Tech interests, which are more than happy to achieve regulatory capture [0] to protect their proprietary and closed consumer products from consumer-orientated FOSS projects, by making it harder (or even impossible) for these to even operate on a fully free capacity.
I appreciate their stance as well, but I don't think it should be surprising. There's a real cost to updating WhatsApp to meet those requirements, and I think Meta's belief is that MPs will cave instead of taking the heat for banning WhatsApp.
If users really cared about privacy they'd use open source software instead of WhatsApp anyway. I doubt the removal or compromised e2e encryption would make much of a dent in user numbers. One thing I've come to realise is most people want privacy for themselves, but not for others.
Is the UK government really caring about the children or do they just want more convenient power.
If the citizens really cared about the future of their children they would not have elected a government that is a stinking pile of poop.
One thing you should also have come to realise is that most politicians want surveillance power for themselves, but not for others.
As always, I find myself unsure how many actively voted for the Eton Mess vs how many voted to keep out Socialist Santaclaus and his Singing Elves.
Both have been (de facto) kicked out of their respective parties since the last election, which says something about the terrible state of UK politics.
I thought that by "Eton Mess", you meant to include Rishi Sunak and David Cameron. The former is the leader of the Tories, and I'm not aware that Csameron is (de facto) no longer a Tory.
What did you mean?
I think the UK government’s blind eye toward well-known and acknowledged instances of organized child molestation shows they don’t care. About that.
FPTP makes it more likely than with other democratic election methods that all your choices are different varieties of stinking pile of poop.
Meta and the like absolutely do not fundamentally support privacy. Their entire business model depends on users not having privacy.
But Meta and the like does support privacy protections from entities that aren't them.
If the blocking is done client-side, there's plenty of ways to bypass it, like just not updating your browser, duh. Or patching it, or installing extensions that neutralize the blocking mechanism, or fooling it into thinking you're in another country. Even if the blocking done via DNS, it's trivially bypassable by using a DNS provider that offers encryption. Russian approach, though, is to use deep packet inspection equipment (that doesn't implement the TCP spec, lol) to actively mess with people's connections to "forbidden" resources.
How to make this technically effective so that you really need a bit of criminal energy to bypass it is however questionable. At least in Germany I can actually as a user disregard any copyright for books etc if someone in the world offers content without any effective protection or obviously illegal (also resharing like in the BitTorrent case get you into trouble). So what are the alternatives? Pushing DRM ?
I would like to see a bit more constructive approach from mozilla. If you are the French and you see a problem. How would you solve it?
[0] https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2023/06/26/france-browser...
Isn't that the same law that understands and bans cloud providers egress fees? Seems they have a good understanding of current state of technology, citing credible sources like Cloudflare.
https://www-senat-fr.translate.goog/rap/l22-777/l22-77720.ht...
> providing a playbook for other governments to also turn browsers like Firefox into censorship tools.
Iran, China, Russia, didn't wait for France don't worry