In a well-intentioned yet dangerous move to fight online fraud, France is on the verge of forcing browsers to create a dystopian technical capability. Article 6 (para II and III) of the SREN Bill would force browser providers to create the means to mandatorily block websites present on a government provided list. Such a move will overturn decades of established content moderation norms and provide a playbook for authoritarian governments that will easily negate the existence of censorship circumvention tools.

While motivated by a legitimate concern, this move to block websites directly within the browser would be disastrous for the open internet and disproportionate to the goals of the legal proposal – fighting fraud. It will also set a worrying precedent and create technical capabilities that other regimes will leverage for far more nefarious purposes. Leveraging existing malware and phishing protection offerings rather than replacing them with government provided, device level block-lists is a far better route to achieve the goals of the legislation.

  • gabe [he/him]@literature.cafe
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    1 year ago

    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

    • gaael@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Magnor@lemmy.magnor.ovh
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        1 year ago

        Exactly. Besides, I really do believe they are stupid enough to believe their bullshit will allow them to keep winning at the polls. I’m not so sure anymore… The fascists are ready and our state is turning a blind eye.

    • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • jeanma@lemmy.ninja
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      1 year ago

      They have a president and government as US fanboys, importing the worse from this f’ed up country.