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.
Disclaimer, I’m not French. But it seemed like the alternative was Le Pen and from what I’ve read she would certainly be more of a shitstain fascist, just with a populist tinge.
Yup. We voted for him in the second turn of the elections because, it was either that or facism… and we got facism-lite (less and less lite, with each passing day) laying the ground work and colluding with Le Pen and her cronies. Fucking wonderful.
We basically had the choice between eating shit or eating a cheese pie with shit inside. Next time I’m afraid people are simply going to give up or eat the actual shit because “at least it’s honest”.
Fuck Macron and fuck fascists.