> government being able to mandate that a certain website not open at all on a browser/system is uncharted territory and even the most repressive regimes in the world prefer to block websites further up the network (ISPs, etc.) so far.
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.
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.
And not even all ISPs, only the few most popular ones. Even if that's probably 96% of internet users, that looks like the law does not treat all citizens equally.
I think simply modifying the hosts file on a machine to "rename" the domain of the site you want to visit would be sufficient to bypass a browser-level block.
> The browser must send a request with a Host header with the correct site name or the server will 404 it.
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.
Please just make the block-list a plain-text human-readable file. That way I can update the file when a new torrent website is convicted and black-listed.
> 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
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.
Here's the context: the fr gov's been acting against national interest for more than 20 years in a row. The people know it. The gov knows the people know. The gov wants to pretend it's not doing anything wrong.
It could keep pretending credibly, if only people would keep their trap shut on the web.
So now gov wants to control what people can see and say on the web.
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.
> Then don't try to put discredit to the saying of an insider.
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.
>But I agree said rambling remains quite generic nonetheless.
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.
The current président de la République managed to trigger protests and strikes that are only rivaled by the '86/87 student riots. The yellow vest protest almost had the potential to turn into another May '68 style event. It almost always begins with police killing a French citizen of Algerian origin or by messing up with the fuel prices. Hollande was a total disaster and Sarkozy is a 2x convict by now, no need to say more.
It wasn't the saying of an insider, it was empty rhetoric based on the perception of an insider, there's a big difference.
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)?
Could you try to explain it again, without the editorializing? Just a straight, facts only version of events, please.
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.
This is extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence! This looks more like a whack-a-mole "for the children" misguided initiative, not a great firewall of China... Do you have more context?
Government power grabs are the norm. You'd need extraordinary evidence to prove otherwise.
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.
hi, our nuclear park is jeopardized, our energy cost is above the roof, several scandals ; look up the macron leaks it's has widely made the news both in france and internationally.
Or Chirac and Balladur's 1995 presidential campaign accounts.
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".
Yes indeed! is this enforced DRM everywhere or you can't browse? is this a forced french MITM certificate chain you can't remove, is this something else? how does using Tor with a non-french exit node get impacted? If I ssh over port 80 or any other to a french-located box does something change?
It seems to be a version of safe browsing that is mandated by law to be a full block rather than a warning. It will be very easy to bypass, making this a very stupid law.
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 will be very easy to bypass, making this a very stupid law.
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