[HN Gopher] Will browsers be required by law to stop you from vi...
___________________________________________________________________
Will browsers be required by law to stop you from visiting
infringing sites?
Author : rntn
Score : 189 points
Date : 2023-08-05 12:27 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.techdirt.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.techdirt.com)
| javajosh wrote:
| Instead of passing a law, the French government should publish a
| blacklist and encourage their citizens to use it.
| freefaler wrote:
| Cory Doctorow has a prescient talk: "The coming war on general
| computation" from 2011 (12 years ago) in which he argues that all
| general computing platforms (OS, phone OS, browser) would face
| challenges by governments and corporations. This looks like
| another way to control content distribution and put more control
| in Google's hands. They've made a great strategic choice in
| building Chrome browser and effectively superseded Microsoft and
| Apple on desktops as a platform.
|
| 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.
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| "more control in Google's hands."
|
| 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.
| bluefishinit wrote:
| > In theory at least, there can always be browser or search
| alternatives.
|
| 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.
| beebeepka wrote:
| Just a reminder dumb phones exist, are still widely
| available, and very cheap. You may not see them much but
| you can buy them. It's far from theoretical
| runnerup wrote:
| Ah yes I love not being to use Uber , rent scooters, rent
| municipal bicycles, check in at my gym, use Duo app 2FA
| to use SSH at work, or open the doors at my apartment
| complex.
|
| Turns out, dumb phones are not actually an option
| anymore.
| sodality2 wrote:
| Carry a smartphone that you only use to do those things.
| Powered off all the way when not using it.
|
| 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.
| runnerup wrote:
| Yeah... I kinda need this job. They've told me it's a
| hard requirement. Maybe some day I won't be in such a
| desperate situation. Until then your suggestions sound
| untenable for my situation, but thanks.
|
| 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.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Imagine that you have a dumb phone that just makes calls
| and you have the unfortunate luck to be forced into using
| id.me while paying your taxes. Guess what your options
| are:
|
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Governments are encouraging monopolies and oligopolies in
| media, discouraging independent media, and even discouraging
| foreign media in general. They are leaning heavily on
| alliances with multi-billionaires in order to do things in
| partnership that governments have been explicitly prevented
| from doing themselves. It is in the interest of both the
| governments and the massive media corporations to eliminate
| smaller or foreign competition, making the relationship
| ideal.
| freefaler wrote:
| The more I read and think about where it will lead, the more
| I fear it'll go to some kind of digital control with varying
| degrees of freedom in different countries. Liberal
| democracies are not the norm in history and for the longest
| time freedom was achieved by high cost of enforcement. You
| can do what you want on your farm because no one can
| see/track what you do there. (The downside is that there are
| no centralized services available too...)
|
| 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...
| balder1991 wrote:
| History tells us that societies evolve very differently and
| it's a bit of a good intellectual exercise to think that
| maybe what you want now is not what people will want in the
| future.
|
| 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.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _The downside is that there are no centralized services
| available too..._
|
| Downside?
| freefaler wrote:
| Yes not all centralization is bad - roads, electricity
| and emergency services. Cities have economies of scale.
| Aerroon wrote:
| Unfortunately, I think a lot of government control happens
| because that's what the people _demand_. Whenever there 's a
| tragedy or major event politicians (the government) are asked
| to do _something_ regardless whether it 's effective or not.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _I 'm much more worried about more control in the
| government's hands._
|
| 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.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| And honestly, the separation has a lot of utility.
| Companies like Raytheon or Lockheed might as well be DOD
| entities, but by having this layer of public private
| separation you are able to not only firewall sensitive
| technologies from certain forms of inquiry if they were
| held in the public government, but also have the
| opportunity to profit off these public investments through
| the stock of the private company.
| hedora wrote:
| As much as I like Doctorow, Max Headroom's authors were a few
| steps ahead of current thinking way back in 1988. (S2E13:
| "Lessons")
|
| 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.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| If I was a browser developer and that law passes, I would just
| block France from downloading our browser. Solve that problem
| right there.
|
| Maybe they would stop Microsoft's ridiculous strategy to
| integrate their browser into the operating system.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| The French government has been covering itself in glory of late
| hasn't it?
| cabirum wrote:
| In theory, an easy workaround would be a clean fork stripped of
| blacklists etc.
|
| 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.
| ezfe wrote:
| A non compliant website wouldn't care about that though
| rolph wrote:
| A non compliant website wouldn't be indexed as well.
| izzydata wrote:
| Sounds like this would spawn an entire second internet.
| malermeister wrote:
| Tor already exists!
| izzydata wrote:
| That seems more encrypted then would be necessary. There
| would be the locked down DRM verified by Google internet
| then there would be the internet that just requires an
| open source browser and only works to get to all the non-
| DRM internet websites. Basically you would simply do
| nothing to DRM your site and you'd automatically become
| part of the open internet rather than the DRM internet.
| mattnewton wrote:
| Afraid to point this out, less people get the idea to enforce
| web integrity at the ISP level, like some of the efforts
| against music piracy / torrenting.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| Right now with how the attempts are structured everything
| happens at the TLS level, which means anyone wanting to
| enforce that would require access to the SSL private key.
| ISPs and other actors already have the toola via DNS and IP
| blocking to enforce what they want.
| Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote:
| Cloudflare already MITMs most of the internet so they
| will do it when the time comes.
| croes wrote:
| Next step, those browsers are declared illegal and users got to
| jail
| xcdzvyn wrote:
| Oh please..
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| But now that makes you a criminal and gives the government that
| control over you, should you come into their line of sight.
| Most likely you get away with it - as long as you otherwise
| keep your head down and don't make trouble for the rulers.
| zarzavat wrote:
| The law would actually push people towards freer browser.
| Browsers made by multinationals like Google, Apple and MS would
| have to obey, but other browsers could ignore it as long as
| they don't have a presence in France.
|
| So the law works against the push to DRM, not for it. Oh
| glorious unintended consequences.
| estebarb wrote:
| No, it won't. Sadly most people doesn't have that tech
| expertise. And how you would run an open source browser in a
| walled garden like iOS or similar?
| pokepim wrote:
| [dead]
| zarzavat wrote:
| Don't have the tech expertise to install Firefox? How did
| they install Chrome in the first place then? People are not
| stupid they are just lazy, Chrome works fine so they use
| that. The moment Chrome stops being "fine" they will
| switch.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| Firefox is adding functionality to disable extensions on
| websites.
|
| 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.
| hyperman1 wrote:
| You're now betting against the teenage sex drive of the
| whole planet We've seen mod chips in game consoles go from
| obscure to everyone-knows-someone-to-install-them, and
| thats with the brakes of cheater branding. Piracy is
| unstoppable. The pirate bay just won't die, and that's only
| 1 location and lost its importance long ago.
|
| 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.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >We've seen mod chips in game consoles go from obscure to
| everyone-knows-someone-to-install-them
|
| 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.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| > You're now betting against the teenage sex drive of the
| whole planet
|
| 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.
| hgsgm wrote:
| Why would no one think that? Here in US we have various
| legislative efforts to make porn harder to reach.
| Larrikin wrote:
| There are currently multiple states in the US that
| require invasive age verification for porn or the site
| needs to be blocked. Why is it such a leap that they
| won't just require the sites to be blocked completely to
| "protect the children"?
| concinds wrote:
| > No one thinks that the French government is going to
| require that browsers block Pornhub, Reddit's gone-wild
| subs, or Xvideos
|
| 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...
| concinds wrote:
| By the way, authenticating porn site visitors through
| government sites will be done through something extremely
| similar to Apple's Private Access Tokens (Privacy Pass)
| and Google's recent Web Environment Integrity (WEI)
| proposal.[0]
|
| [0]: https://broken-by-design.fr/posts/proto-authz-porn/
| hgsgm wrote:
| If the government mandates MiTM DRM , the next logical step
| is making non-DRM illegal.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _but other browsers could ignore it as long as they don't
| have a presence in France_
|
| As long as the idea it "out there", and a country like France
| does a test drive, it wont be just in France.
| notPlancha wrote:
| So is this a counter example to Betteridge's law of headlines
| sneak wrote:
| The browsers all already have a centralized, real-time censorship
| registry. It's called "Safe Browsing" and run by Google and is
| used to block "malicious software". Everyone (incl Safari and
| Mozilla) uses it. It's got something like five billion clients.
|
| 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.
| meindnoch wrote:
| Please do it, by all means! It's high time we go back to Gopher.
| zarzavat wrote:
| Ironically at the same time as the Digital Markets Act makes it
| legal to use third party browsers on the only platform this could
| affect: iOS. Missed the boat much?
| stainablesteel wrote:
| sounds like a censorship mechanism
|
| 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.
| im3w1l wrote:
| I'm sorry, but even that is too optimistic. Your website will
| be banned and they wont tell you why. They will provide an
| appeal button that says denied when you press it.
| xadhominemx wrote:
| This is easily achievable already and yet it is not
| happening. So consider that you are wrong?
| im3w1l wrote:
| That's because there isn't much legal pressure on browsers
| to censor. The pattern I described can be seen where there
| is such pressure.
| slim wrote:
| of course they will. keyword here is "infringing websites" which
| means there is such a thing as "illegal information" and that law
| enforcement must prevent you from accessing that information
| pessimizer wrote:
| There's absolutely no way that the West could go back to the
| long ago dark days of "illegal information" way back in [checks
| watch] _1995._ Of course, in 1995 I could download the
| Anarchist Cookbook; hell, I could buy it at the bookstore.
|
| I'm starting to suspect that secret police were always focused
| on illegal information, surveillance, and the prevention of
| communication between potential conspirators.
| perihelions wrote:
| - _" There were ways, of course, to get around the SPA and
| Central Licensing. They were themselves illegal. Dan had had a
| classmate in software, Frank Martucci, who had obtained an
| illicit debugging tool, and used it to skip over the copyright
| monitor code when reading books. But he had told too many friends
| about it, and one of them turned him in to the SPA for a reward
| (students deep in debt were easily tempted into betrayal). In
| 2047, Frank was in prison, not for pirate reading, but for
| possessing a debugger."_
|
| 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".
| [deleted]
| pixl97 wrote:
| The entire AI thing has lead to creators going full Right to
| Read mode recently asking for insane levels of copyright
| protection, which had they been under, would likely have had
| issues with their own stories.
|
| Too many people want a locked down future and it's scary.
| Ferret7446 wrote:
| People will always prioritize their own interests.
|
| "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.
| pkkm wrote:
| "Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these:
| Stallman was right again."
| SergeAx wrote:
| I am eager to see how they going to enforce these requirements on
| a locally built fork of Firefox.
| avidiax wrote:
| I doubt it. It's much easier to make the ISP's block DNS, and
| perform deep packet inspection. Require domestic TLS to chain to
| the government's root-CA, so you have to allow government MITM.
|
| Trying to force this in the browser is too difficult technically,
| and too easy to circumvent.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Also, corporations and governments should be careful what they
| wish for, because an iron fist may eventually convince a
| substantial number of people to either use alternative DNS
| servers or use Tor and [hopefully] I2P. Possibly not the
| majority, but enough that any overzealous IP-protection
| measures on the clearnet will be self-defeating.
| guerrilla wrote:
| And then they'll ban those. Don't forget that in the end the
| state has a monopoly on violence.
| zlg_codes wrote:
| Violence isn't a market, and continuing to parrot that
| nonsense gives a false credibility to forces which amount
| to efficient bullies that entrenched themselves by
| enslaving or genociding native populations. None of us
| signed actual social contracts, none of us signed forms
| agreeing to be governed.
|
| 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?
| pessimizer wrote:
| This is a silly objection. The reason the state has a
| monopoly on violence is because it _took_ a monopoly on
| violence, through the application of violence and threats
| of violence.
|
| > 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.
| zlg_codes wrote:
| I see where you're coming from, but some governments also
| recognize "natural" or "God-given" rights, recognizing
| there are powers higher than they are that grant
| privileges or capabilities considered _sacred_. Granted,
| this set of rights will be different shapes and sizes
| depending on culture, but it 's not so clear-cut that
| rights do not exist without government. There are moral
| rights that we can argue via philosophy. The state is
| truly only necessary to adjudicate conflicts between its
| subjects and maybe defend them.
|
| 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.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > 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 naivete that everything can be solved with
| technology but that view ignores actual power in the
| actual world.
| almostnormal wrote:
| > Don't forget that in the end the state has a monopoly on
| violence.
|
| People have a monopoly on casting votes.
| kibwen wrote:
| In the case of US users and Tor, the situation is more
| complicated. The US military encourages Tor use because it
| helps to mask their own traffic (Tor was developed by the
| US Navy for this purpose, after all). It's unclear who
| would prevail in a political struggle between the copyright
| cartels and the military.
| vinceguidry wrote:
| Yep, at the end of the day what prevents tyranny from
| taking over everywhere is the fact that the ruling class
| has to live in the same world and use the same economy as
| everyone else. You see this dynamic up and down the
| government. Big business needs to be able to access
| machines that don't have all this locked-down crap. I'm
| not super-worried about the copyright lobby's fervent
| wish to make it impossible to use a general purpose
| machine. They're going to eventually run right up against
| corporate America's full-throated embrace of open source.
|
| 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.
| hattmall wrote:
| With 20,000+ non-statw homicides in the US last year it's
| hardly a monopoly.
| Kamq wrote:
| Yeah, they misquoted the original phrase.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| pessimizer wrote:
| They represent subgovernments. All governments are
| overgrown street gangs. Royalty in Europe are the
| descendants of Roman generals who divided up the land
| between them after Rome fell.
| Retric wrote:
| I think that's optimistic, China etc also crack down on VPN's
| and related technology. You can also subtly discourage such
| things. Add a few random lag spikes to all encrypted traffic
| and see how people respond.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| When Kazakhstan tried to MITM with untrusted certificate,
| Google quickly blacklisted this certificate. Hopefully it'll do
| the same for any other government or company, so nobody would
| even think of it.
| paganel wrote:
| > Hopefully it'll do the same for any other government or
| company, so nobody would even think of it.
|
| 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.
| 8organicbits wrote:
| Looks normal to me: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze
| .html?d=sputnikglobe....
|
| Can you clarify what you mean?
| paganel wrote:
| That website (and others like it) is blocked in my
| country based on a political decision. Interesting that
| the guys from the Romanian secret services aren't doing
| that by messing with security certificates, but the
| website is blocked nonetheless.
| computerfriend wrote:
| Sounds like they're sniffing the SNI header and blocking
| based on its value. Completely unrelated to the Kazakhstan
| root CA fiasco.
| [deleted]
| sleevi wrote:
| The EU is currently proposing to mandate the inclusion of
| roots that have been government approved, and to limit
| browsers from removing/distrusting them without
| notice/approval.
|
| https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/12/eidas-20-sets-
| dangerou...
| leesalminen wrote:
| They could do that because Kazakhstan doesn't make them much,
| if any, money. This amounted to cheap good will marketing.
|
| 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.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| Google wouldn't comply before first lobbying heavily
| against it both in government and among their users. The
| proposed laws would quickly become a major topic of public
| discourse.
| callalex wrote:
| Remember how that went for net neutrality? It's
| apparently very easy to get many members of the public to
| argue against their own interests these days.
| Vespasian wrote:
| As with other laws ther lobbying position is pretty weak
| in the EU. They (and other US based big tech) lost the
| last few rounds of the regulation / lobby game.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| hotdogscout wrote:
| Or China. https://youtu.be/hhMAt3BluAU
| mdekkers wrote:
| *China has entered the chat
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| The browser _already_ has built-in controls to prevent the user
| from visiting "dangerous" sites, and to say that "browser or
| DNS or SPI" is mutually exclusive is to ignore the Defense in
| Depth strategy of using all methods in concert, to ensure that
| at least one will catch the bad requests.
|
| In Chrome, it's called "Safe Browsing", and it's currently
| optional, Standard, or Enhanced.
| Kapura wrote:
| Feels like this would be akin to requiring a car manufacturer
| stop the car if it detects you trespassing. Feels both intrusive
| & difficult to enforce, which is always a horrifying combo.
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| e-Scooters and eBikes are already geofenced in this way. For
| example, speed limited to 5mph if you're in the wrong place
| (happened to me on a 35mph road) or they'll stop altogether if
| you enter a college campus, or attempt to leave the service
| area.
| kortilla wrote:
| Rentals yeah, but not the ones you own.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| You don't own software, not even open source software. You
| just license it.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Nah, you own free software. The problem is that you don't
| own the bike if they don't let you swap out and edit the
| software at will. If somebody sells you a safe but
| doesn't allow you to open it, they haven't sold you a
| safe, they've let you hold theirs.
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/1150/
| jdjdjdhhd wrote:
| Hopefully no... But seeing government actions I would say yes...
| Fuck the way the web is going
| mkoryak wrote:
| Is wget and curl next? Seems like a really flawed approach.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Wget and curl mostly likely don't count. Browsers are
| explicitly defined as applications for end-users, which wget
| and curl are typically not.
|
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Browsers are explicitly defined as applications for end-
| users, which wget and curl are typically not.
|
| By no coherent definition, though. Just by professional
| convention.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| wget and curl give out html files, these are useless to the
| end user unless they are opened with other software,
| typically a browser.
|
| 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.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| The absurd thing about this is that a browser is just a single
| kind of IP client. If you want to stop that content you have to
| actually stop IP connections to the host IP address(es), and to
| all non-compliant IP addresses (vpn / tor servers) .
|
| 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.
| xyzzy4747 wrote:
| This law would inadvertently be a good thing for the open source
| movement.
| tuetuopay wrote:
| While I'm proud my country has made it to the HN frontpage, I'm
| ashamed that it's always for the wrong reasons :(
|
| 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.
| rdl wrote:
| This would cross a line in the US where there would be 1A
| challenges, although there have been other stupid things accepted
| which are even more obviously unconstitutional. If they do this,
| I hope they do it on a very broad basis so the vast majority of
| people evade and it feels "normal", followed by legal, electoral,
| or other action to address the underlying problem.
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| Usually corporations are used to side-step 1A protections,
| because corporations are not subject to the 1A. Corporations
| were routinely "encouraged" to censor information throughout
| the last election and covid, at least. It was likely going on
| before that, and continues today.
| MarkPNeyer wrote:
| Vivek Ramaswamy argues that these actions are still first
| amendment violations because the government pushed
| corporations to do this, under something called "state action
| in private enterprise."
| m-p-3 wrote:
| Laws are only as strong as the enforcement can be.
|
| 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.
| donmcronald wrote:
| > But for open-source web browsers, which might not have any
| commercial entities operating in the country, how could they
| even enforce that law?
|
| 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".
| the8472 wrote:
| Much simpler: They'll make WEI-verification mandatory for all
| government sites. And then banking. And then anyone doing
| commerce.
| chopin wrote:
| Which encrypted payload?
| donmcronald wrote:
| Web traffic (https). Think of an "anonymized" attestation
| token in the same place as SNI.
| dsign wrote:
| I've been writing some science fiction that interpolates where
| things are going with the Internet and online surveillance (ala
| 1984 v2), but reality always trumps fantasy; this one hadn't
| occurred to me.
| harha wrote:
| That's pretty bad - I don't think it's a good government pattern
| to move policing to corporations or the population. It messes
| quite badly with established principles such as innocent until
| proven guilty because corporations or individuals won't want to
| face the risk and it's also inefficient for each entity to figure
| out a process (and implement that badly).
| version_five wrote:
| See all the covid BS
| harha wrote:
| that and KYC
| croes wrote:
| Which one?
| lampshades wrote:
| I'm assuming he's referring to the constant attempts at
| suppression of information.
| croes wrote:
| Much of this information was also BS.
|
| The vaccinated are still pretty much alive and didn't die
| because of AIDS
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| 1. That is not the point. Truly liberal and progressive
| societies should tolerate and be immune to disinformation
| without censorship.
|
| 2. What is known to be false now may be true later (and
| vice-versa). No matter how big the govt. or a company
| gets, it won't be omniscient.
|
| 3. Remember the well documented flip flop about masks. At
| one point, CDC/Fauci were the ones spreading
| disinformation. During the flip-flop, real information
| was censored. Also, the lab leak theory was initially
| ruled out to be 100% impossible and heavily censored, now
| the same folks are saying that it might have been
| possible.
| yodawgz wrote:
| [dead]
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| Since the sibling comment has been flagged dead, I find
| it absolutely hilarious that the commenter who says "we
| should all touch grass" created a new account to just
| reply to this comment while sitting in a public park.
| Apparently, touching grass is not enough for them.
|
| > What's really happening is a bunch of armchair
| philosophers are engaged in prosaic armchair philosophy
| about how much of a police state the world is Meanwhile
| here I am at a public park launching Estes powered
| rockets You all should go touch grass. Sedentary exercise
| or language faculties is not healthy
| vegetablepotpie wrote:
| It's about _convenience_ for the government. To take a site
| down by other means requires contacting ISPs to not route
| packets from an IP address or contact the site owner with legal
| action. This requires labor on the governments part.
|
| 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.
| coldtea wrote:
| That train has long left the station. The modern state has
| outsourced all kinds of policing, surveillance, propaganda, and
| other functions to corporations.
| hgsgm wrote:
| That principle is about imprisonment.
|
| 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.
| _trampeltier wrote:
| So a list with all blocked sites is distributed to all browsers.
| Sounds like a good idea.
| forinti wrote:
| It does not make sense: you would need region-locked browsers.
| That's already an impossible target. But then how would you deal
| with people just using proxies, VPNs, ssh tunnels?
|
| 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.
| pmarreck wrote:
| A wonderful idea if we could always know that the government was
| always a good actor acting in good faith.
|
| Since that is impossible, this is not a wonderful idea.
| petermcneeley wrote:
| Are banned books good ideas? Maybe the ring of power is in of
| itself a bad thing.
| pessimizer wrote:
| You can ban books and censor websites however you want as
| long as you are a good person acting in good faith i.e. me.
| brudgers wrote:
| Passing a law would be too much work.
|
| 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encrypted_Media_Extensions
| zlg_codes wrote:
| This is precisely why I turn a skeptical eye to any standards
| efforts. Just like with law, if you control the spec, you
| control the ecosystem.
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