French Govt Wants To Inject Domain Blocking Lists Directly Into Web Browsers - S...

"The road to Hell is paved with good intentions."

Heh. (Score:4, Insightful)

Only if you consider corporate interests well-intentioned. Also, how do they propose to enforce that?

The first thing pirates will do is turn off the blacklist in their browser.

If one can make antivirus software that blocks things, ad blockers, and firewalling software that blocks attacks, then a government can force software that would scan for suspected piracy tools (could even be something like SoftICE), and block or redirect stuff that the state doesn't want you to see (could be IP violations one day, could be Le Pen's opponents the next, could be any sites debunking propaganda the third day). Add to this something like a NAC where the router or upstream checks signatures on

It says, "...the administrative authority notifies the electronic address of the service concerned to the providers of internet browsers..."
The EU regulations do have a definition of "web browser", but no defintion of "provider" of a browser.
Whom do they envision notifying, and how?

After the first few drone strikes hit malware guys homes the rest will find other jobs.

Not only the French government wants to force browsers to have built-in ad blocking capabilities, they also intend to provide us an up to date list list of where we can download stuff for free.

Ok, I know about signatures and hashes, and also, considering it is the French government, the list won't be up to date, and it won't be done anyways.

As for blocking malware, all majors browsers do it, to varying degrees.

This would be the most easily circumvented anti-piracy "feature" ever conceived.

Well-intentioned my ass. Fuck you.

...all French government & intelligence websites, as I find those unsafe and delivering spam... right?

so repos will to have builds for each jurisdiction?

also the apple app store will be forced to allow non apple webkit use if needed to pull this off?

To block malware domains (Google SafeBrowsing, Firefox Phishing Protection). The reasoning of bureaucrats is along the lines "well, the feature is already there, might as well use it for whatever we consider malicious".

At least that is my stance here. I am sure many will agree.

Also, what the hell is "well intentioned" here?

Large companies with full control over their firewalls, internet lines and workstations already are in a constant battle to keep up with these types of actions, the idea of doing it on a national scale and at the browser level no less is not just technologically and culturally infeasible but speaks of assinine misunderstanding of how the internet works.

China is doing it the actual "right way" in that they have control over the border devices in and out of the country and even they barely seem to have contro

OK, Firefox and Chrome are probably browsers. Is curl? Or wget? How about if I hack something together in Perl using LWP? Will the LWP libraries need to include the blocklist? And a way to prevent me from disabling it?

Typical out-of-touch politicians. If they really wanted to do this, they'd mandate state-controlled DNS servers and block DNS traffic except from those servers... I'm sure that's how their fellow authoritarians like China, Cuba, etc. do it.