4 ms·

So the French government create a list of the sites you shouldn't visit. Isn't this going to be the Streisand effect at a national level.

jongjong 3y ago
It depends on the number of sites that are on this list. Probably too many for people to be able to focus on any specific one.
- flir 3y ago
  The list, once published, can be segmented, annotated, etc. Actually sounds quite handy (he said facetiously).
  - jongjong 3y ago
    The way that kind of censorship works is that they will block 1 legit site that they don't like for every 100 actual scam sites which 'deserve' to be blocked. You won't even be able to tell which is which. It will literally look like a long list of spam sites and everyone will thank the government for doing a great job protecting them as they always do. Whenever western governments do truly evil stuff, there is almost always a very good cover narrative.
LelouBil 3y ago
Look at my comment : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36533118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36533118 Basically for now the only thing that can put a site on this list is if the website is harming their visitors.
danogentili 3y ago
Such lists already exist, for example in Italy there's a number of official government blocklists that the ISPs are already obligated by law to apply using their DNS servers and soon at the IP level, once the latest law is implemented. In typical Italian style, the blocklists are actually published as a set of HTML articles on various government websites, that must be scraped and parsed by the ISPs using toolkits like https://github.com/mphilosopher/censura https://github.com/mphilosopher/censura. The latest proposal now additionally requires acknowledgement through PEC, i.e. domains to block will be sent by rightholders through certified emails to ISPs, and upon processing them ISPs *must* send an acknowledgment in the form of another certified email within 30 minutes, or else sanctions will follow. This latest proposal has rightfully caused an uproar of the ISPs in groups like itnog (https://t.me/IT_NOG/106605/106606 https://t.me/IT_NOG/106605/106606), considering that most PEC providers only offer a few GBs of space, there's already a high risk of ack emails being lost (with subsequent sanctions), not to mention that the concept of automating domain distribution and acknowledgment using email instead of a simple JSON-RPC API is ridiculous, but that's what you get when bureaucrats make technical proposals :)
- danogentili 3y ago
  By the way, the existing Italian lists are all already public (except for the CSAM lists which require a decryption key), that hasn't bothered anyone given that right now, blocks are only made at a DNS level, completely ignoring the existence of DoH :P (Well actually not completely ignoring DoH, there's another not-yet-applied Italian law that requires ISPs to completely ban DoH, but it has kind of gone under the radar since it's essentially inapplicable without DPI (and even then, the upcoming ECH standard will make it practically impossible to block DoH providers that use ECH))
hinata08 3y ago
You're not going to visit websites that promote terrorism or crimey sex just because the government told you that you shouldn't visit. And these are the kind of websites that are blocked so far. So no. If the government say you shouldn't visit because of <content you don't want to see>, then you don't visit.
- stirfish 3y ago
  I might. The US government released the contents of all the hard drives found in Osama Bin Laden's compound, and me and my friends spent a few days looking through it out of curiosity. A lot of knitting tutorials and old cartoons in there.

jongjong 3y ago

It depends on the number of sites that are on this list. Probably too many for people to be able to focus on any specific one.

flir 3y ago
The list, once published, can be segmented, annotated, etc. Actually sounds quite handy (he said facetiously).
- jongjong 3y ago
  The way that kind of censorship works is that they will block 1 legit site that they don't like for every 100 actual scam sites which 'deserve' to be blocked. You won't even be able to tell which is which. It will literally look like a long list of spam sites and everyone will thank the government for doing a great job protecting them as they always do. Whenever western governments do truly evil stuff, there is almost always a very good cover narrative.

LelouBil 3y ago

Look at my comment : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36533118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36533118 Basically for now the only thing that can put a site on this list is if the website is harming their visitors.

danogentili 3y ago

Such lists already exist, for example in Italy there's a number of official government blocklists that the ISPs are already obligated by law to apply using their DNS servers and soon at the IP level, once the latest law is implemented. In typical Italian style, the blocklists are actually published as a set of HTML articles on various government websites, that must be scraped and parsed by the ISPs using toolkits like https://github.com/mphilosopher/censura https://github.com/mphilosopher/censura. The latest proposal now additionally requires acknowledgement through PEC, i.e. domains to block will be sent by rightholders through certified emails to ISPs, and upon processing them ISPs *must* send an acknowledgment in the form of another certified email within 30 minutes, or else sanctions will follow. This latest proposal has rightfully caused an uproar of the ISPs in groups like itnog (https://t.me/IT_NOG/106605/106606 https://t.me/IT_NOG/106605/106606), considering that most PEC providers only offer a few GBs of space, there's already a high risk of ack emails being lost (with subsequent sanctions), not to mention that the concept of automating domain distribution and acknowledgment using email instead of a simple JSON-RPC API is ridiculous, but that's what you get when bureaucrats make technical proposals :)

danogentili 3y ago
By the way, the existing Italian lists are all already public (except for the CSAM lists which require a decryption key), that hasn't bothered anyone given that right now, blocks are only made at a DNS level, completely ignoring the existence of DoH :P (Well actually not completely ignoring DoH, there's another not-yet-applied Italian law that requires ISPs to completely ban DoH, but it has kind of gone under the radar since it's essentially inapplicable without DPI (and even then, the upcoming ECH standard will make it practically impossible to block DoH providers that use ECH))

hinata08 3y ago

You're not going to visit websites that promote terrorism or crimey sex just because the government told you that you shouldn't visit. And these are the kind of websites that are blocked so far. So no. If the government say you shouldn't visit because of <content you don't want to see>, then you don't visit.

stirfish 3y ago
I might. The US government released the contents of all the hard drives found in Osama Bin Laden's compound, and me and my friends spent a few days looking through it out of curiosity. A lot of knitting tutorials and old cartoons in there.