The French government is considering a law that would require web browsers – like Mozilla’s Firefox – to block websites chosen by the government.
The French government is considering a law that would require web browsers – like Mozilla’s Firefox – to block websites chosen by the government.
Ok, it’s a freedom and free speech nightmare, but are they stupid or something? They are aiming for the browsers instead of ISPs (and DNSes?)?
They tried this in the UK and the ISPs is just ignored them. So the government declared its success anyway, despite the fact that essentially nothing had happened, and then stopped talking about it.
These laws always come up by people whose grasp of technology is basically, make magic box do thing x. They don’t understand that people smarter than them (school kids) will find workarounds in about 10 seconds.
And the thing is, there are open source internet browsers that can be written to avoid any browser checks that a law might require.
However, if Google’s browser DRM gets widely implemented, a browser-side content blocker would be effective, because all those open source browsers would be unable to access the wider web.
I think if Big Brother Browser with Google DRM is our future, we’re going to see people using 2 browsers as standard. They’ll have one “corporate” internet browser, for Instagram, Amazon, whatever. And one “free” browser for all the grey area stuff.
Yes, but we need to fight them politically as it’s our money being wasted and they do cause some harms. One is, it keeps the population uninformed about what is with and against the grain of technology. But we also want them to not be trying to do wrong things, even if they are probably unworkable.
I “think” I remember them trying something like this before with the ISPs and it got smacked down.
Because DNS will do little and browsers will do straight up nothing. Especially for the good open source browsers.