6 ms·

The French government's approach to modern tech is similar to the UK and Germany in some ways. They seem to be advised by a bunch of decrepit dudes who stopped

by mkl95 3y ago

The French government's approach to modern tech is similar to the UK and Germany in some ways. They seem to be advised by a bunch of decrepit dudes who stopped learning about computers before the OSI model was created.

tasogare 3y ago
There're a bunch of corrupted inviduals with no counter power to keep them in check. No decisions are made for the benefit of the French people since a long time, every law passed is either to augment their power, rise taxes (already world top 1 or 2 depending on the year) or to the benefit their friends owning private companies. Of course technology freedom will suffer from this as well.
- rvnx 3y ago
  Well if majority votes for them, it's important to respect the choice of the voters, even if you don't like their choice because you have other interests that you want to defend. The opposition in France are far from being angels, it's very similar to Democrats vs Republican situation in France (except Gauche vs Droite).
  - binary132 3y ago
    What limits are you willing to place on this? Majorities can and do vote for monsters.
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      Not only that, it's common to have a ballot that only presents a choice between two monsters. It's your fault if you vote for one and it's your fault if you stay home. Maybe the problem is systemic? Checks and balances that get eroded during populist waves, stay that way when the monster comes.
- TacticalCoder 3y ago
  > ... or to the benefit their friends owning private companies. Yup this one in France is really a big problem. The public sector spendings officially represents something like 58.1% of the french GDP (official "Insee" numbers from 2023, for 2022)... France is not far from a planned economy and, unsurprisingly, it's a particularly harsh environment for real small private SMEs (i.e. those without friends at the state) and for entrepreneurs, for they're getting trounced by taxes. And that gigantic state (percentage wise of the GDP, not on the world stage) still cannot prevent days of riots and drug-dealers from ruling the streets (like in the city of Marseille). A deeply corrupt state where public servants are planted so that taxes can grow and, in return, the people don't even get safe streets. But all is fine and well for these corrupt politicians because soon they'll be able to prevent comments such as yours or mine from being read by anyone.
  - WeylandYutani 3y ago
    France has always been pretty bad at running an economy. Ofcourse for the rest of Europe this is a good thing- French military ambitions have been consistently sabotaged by this oversight. Good military, brilliant engineers and capable bureaucrats but terrible merchants. And wars are won on the stock market.
    - bombolo 3y ago
      > Ofcourse for the rest of Europe this is a good thing For the kings sure… for the people much less. Imagine england being defeated and india being free of colonialism.
      - pmontra 3y ago
        Almost no part of the world was free from European colonialism. France was one of the largest colonial powers. If England lost to France maybe India would be speaking French instead of English now.
        bombolo 3y ago
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >No decisions are made for the benefit of the French people since a long time, every law passed is either to augment their power, rise taxes or to the benefit their friends owning private companies. Same in Germany as well. The country long stopped caring for its people and mainly operates as a vehicle for german industrial interests to make money. >There're a bunch of corrupted inviduals with no counter power to keep them in check. The guillotine has proven this to be incorect. Separating their heads from their bodies helps keep rulers unable to perform further acts of corruption.
akomtu 3y ago
The old Europe feels cornered by this tech and acts aggressively to defend itself.
- anthk 3y ago
  I'm from "the old Europe" and not French. Your point?
  - dylan604 3y ago
    I'm from across the pond so not "old" in any national sense, but I feel the same way. We have a lot of good tech, and then we have a lot of tech that's not "bad" but just doesn't serve any purpose other than feeding the ego of users. That's the tech from which we should be protected.
- StackOverlord 3y ago
  We're cornered by McKinsey
Mordisquitos 3y ago
> They seem to be advised by a bunch of decrepit dudes who stopped learning about computers before the OSI model was created. I suspect its more like "dudes who know nothing about computers (let alone the OSI model)" coming up with dumb ideas. These ideas are all approved and encouraged by advisors under the influence of Big Tech interests, which are more than happy to achieve regulatory capture [0] to protect their proprietary and closed consumer products from consumer-orientated FOSS projects, by making it harder (or even impossible) for these to even operate on a fully free capacity. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
- globular-toast 3y ago
  Actually the current anti-encryption laws going through in the UK are pretty anti-Big Tech. One of the main motivations is they don't think Big Tech is "thinking of the children" and it should be their responsibility to do that.
  - Mordisquitos 3y ago
    Good point. Much as I despise Meta, I have to admit I have been pleasantly surprised by their hardline stance in defending WhatsApp's e2e encryption.
    - i_am_jl 3y ago
      >I have to admit I have been pleasantly surprised by their hardline stance in defending WhatsApp's e2e encryption. I appreciate their stance as well, but I don't think it should be surprising. There's a real cost to updating WhatsApp to meet those requirements, and I think Meta's belief is that MPs will cave instead of taking the heat for banning WhatsApp.
    - globular-toast 3y ago
      Me too but after talking to my MP about it I do wonder how much of it is because they (Meta) fundamentally support privacy and everything that comes with that or if it's just a convenient way to deny having any responsibility towards safety on their platforms. It's possible to be right, but for the wrong reasons. I'd like to think it's for the right reasons, but I'm not sure. If users really cared about privacy they'd use open source software instead of WhatsApp anyway. I doubt the removal or compromised e2e encryption would make much of a dent in user numbers. One thing I've come to realise is most people want privacy for themselves, but not for others.
villgax 3y ago
Same club as the people who coin inspect element viewers as hackers
grishka 3y ago
This feels much better than the Russian government's approach to censorship and modern tech. The problem is that there are people in Russian government who actually have a clue about how this stuff works. If the blocking is done client-side, there's plenty of ways to bypass it, like just not updating your browser, duh. Or patching it, or installing extensions that neutralize the blocking mechanism, or fooling it into thinking you're in another country. Even if the blocking done via DNS, it's trivially bypassable by using a DNS provider that offers encryption. Russian approach, though, is to use deep packet inspection equipment (that doesn't implement the TCP spec, lol) to actively mess with people's connections to "forbidden" resources.
- riedel 3y ago
  I also do not quite get the GP comment. I see it also logical to block content on application layer from the OSI perspective. If you cannot do on the source do it at the sink if do not want to break e2e encryption. The DNS blocks have been taking down half of cloudflare in the past, so would IP blocks in many casesm How to make this technically effective so that you really need a bit of criminal energy to bypass it is however questionable. At least in Germany I can actually as a user disregard any copyright for books etc if someone in the world offers content without any effective protection or obviously illegal (also resharing like in the BitTorrent case get you into trouble). So what are the alternatives? Pushing DRM ? I would like to see a bit more constructive approach from mozilla. If you are the French and you see a problem. How would you solve it?
  - DexesTTP 3y ago
    Note about the more productive approach: Mozilla published a blog post[0] back in late June about what solutions are already available and advising for the law to reinforce these existing mechanisms instead of mandating a new browser-level blocking thing that can easily be abused. [0] https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2023/06/26/france-browser-website-blocking/ https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2023/06/26/france-browser...
    - riedel 3y ago
cubefox 3y ago
It's often "gals", not just "dudes", who are pro censorship, at least in Germany.
- chrischattin 3y ago
  "Dudes" is often used as an all inclusive term.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
sam0x17 3y ago
They never started learning more like.
borh375 3y ago
> They seem to be advised by a bunch of decrepit dudes who stopped learning about computers before the OSI model was created. Isn't that the same law that understands and bans cloud providers egress fees? Seems they have a good understanding of current state of technology, citing credible sources like Cloudflare. https://www-senat-fr.translate.goog/rap/l22-777/l22-77720.html?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://www-senat-fr.translate.goog/rap/l22-777/l22-77720.ht...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

by mkl95 3y ago

tasogare 3y ago

There're a bunch of corrupted inviduals with no counter power to keep them in check. No decisions are made for the benefit of the French people since a long time, every law passed is either to augment their power, rise taxes (already world top 1 or 2 depending on the year) or to the benefit their friends owning private companies. Of course technology freedom will suffer from this as well.

rvnx 3y ago
Well if majority votes for them, it's important to respect the choice of the voters, even if you don't like their choice because you have other interests that you want to defend. The opposition in France are far from being angels, it's very similar to Democrats vs Republican situation in France (except Gauche vs Droite).
- binary132 3y ago
  What limits are you willing to place on this? Majorities can and do vote for monsters.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    Not only that, it's common to have a ballot that only presents a choice between two monsters. It's your fault if you vote for one and it's your fault if you stay home. Maybe the problem is systemic? Checks and balances that get eroded during populist waves, stay that way when the monster comes.
TacticalCoder 3y ago
> ... or to the benefit their friends owning private companies. Yup this one in France is really a big problem. The public sector spendings officially represents something like 58.1% of the french GDP (official "Insee" numbers from 2023, for 2022)... France is not far from a planned economy and, unsurprisingly, it's a particularly harsh environment for real small private SMEs (i.e. those without friends at the state) and for entrepreneurs, for they're getting trounced by taxes. And that gigantic state (percentage wise of the GDP, not on the world stage) still cannot prevent days of riots and drug-dealers from ruling the streets (like in the city of Marseille). A deeply corrupt state where public servants are planted so that taxes can grow and, in return, the people don't even get safe streets. But all is fine and well for these corrupt politicians because soon they'll be able to prevent comments such as yours or mine from being read by anyone.
- WeylandYutani 3y ago
  France has always been pretty bad at running an economy. Ofcourse for the rest of Europe this is a good thing- French military ambitions have been consistently sabotaged by this oversight. Good military, brilliant engineers and capable bureaucrats but terrible merchants. And wars are won on the stock market.
  - bombolo 3y ago
    > Ofcourse for the rest of Europe this is a good thing For the kings sure… for the people much less. Imagine england being defeated and india being free of colonialism.
    - pmontra 3y ago
      Almost no part of the world was free from European colonialism. France was one of the largest colonial powers. If England lost to France maybe India would be speaking French instead of English now.
      - bombolo 3y ago
FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>No decisions are made for the benefit of the French people since a long time, every law passed is either to augment their power, rise taxes or to the benefit their friends owning private companies. Same in Germany as well. The country long stopped caring for its people and mainly operates as a vehicle for german industrial interests to make money. >There're a bunch of corrupted inviduals with no counter power to keep them in check. The guillotine has proven this to be incorect. Separating their heads from their bodies helps keep rulers unable to perform further acts of corruption.

akomtu 3y ago

The old Europe feels cornered by this tech and acts aggressively to defend itself.

anthk 3y ago
I'm from "the old Europe" and not French. Your point?
- dylan604 3y ago
  I'm from across the pond so not "old" in any national sense, but I feel the same way. We have a lot of good tech, and then we have a lot of tech that's not "bad" but just doesn't serve any purpose other than feeding the ego of users. That's the tech from which we should be protected.
StackOverlord 3y ago
We're cornered by McKinsey

Mordisquitos 3y ago

> They seem to be advised by a bunch of decrepit dudes who stopped learning about computers before the OSI model was created. I suspect its more like "dudes who know nothing about computers (let alone the OSI model)" coming up with dumb ideas. These ideas are all approved and encouraged by advisors under the influence of Big Tech interests, which are more than happy to achieve regulatory capture [0] to protect their proprietary and closed consumer products from consumer-orientated FOSS projects, by making it harder (or even impossible) for these to even operate on a fully free capacity. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

globular-toast 3y ago
Actually the current anti-encryption laws going through in the UK are pretty anti-Big Tech. One of the main motivations is they don't think Big Tech is "thinking of the children" and it should be their responsibility to do that.
- Mordisquitos 3y ago
  Good point. Much as I despise Meta, I have to admit I have been pleasantly surprised by their hardline stance in defending WhatsApp's e2e encryption.
  - i_am_jl 3y ago
    >I have to admit I have been pleasantly surprised by their hardline stance in defending WhatsApp's e2e encryption. I appreciate their stance as well, but I don't think it should be surprising. There's a real cost to updating WhatsApp to meet those requirements, and I think Meta's belief is that MPs will cave instead of taking the heat for banning WhatsApp.
  - globular-toast 3y ago
    Me too but after talking to my MP about it I do wonder how much of it is because they (Meta) fundamentally support privacy and everything that comes with that or if it's just a convenient way to deny having any responsibility towards safety on their platforms. It's possible to be right, but for the wrong reasons. I'd like to think it's for the right reasons, but I'm not sure. If users really cared about privacy they'd use open source software instead of WhatsApp anyway. I doubt the removal or compromised e2e encryption would make much of a dent in user numbers. One thing I've come to realise is most people want privacy for themselves, but not for others.

villgax 3y ago

Same club as the people who coin inspect element viewers as hackers

grishka 3y ago

This feels much better than the Russian government's approach to censorship and modern tech. The problem is that there are people in Russian government who actually have a clue about how this stuff works. If the blocking is done client-side, there's plenty of ways to bypass it, like just not updating your browser, duh. Or patching it, or installing extensions that neutralize the blocking mechanism, or fooling it into thinking you're in another country. Even if the blocking done via DNS, it's trivially bypassable by using a DNS provider that offers encryption. Russian approach, though, is to use deep packet inspection equipment (that doesn't implement the TCP spec, lol) to actively mess with people's connections to "forbidden" resources.

riedel 3y ago
I also do not quite get the GP comment. I see it also logical to block content on application layer from the OSI perspective. If you cannot do on the source do it at the sink if do not want to break e2e encryption. The DNS blocks have been taking down half of cloudflare in the past, so would IP blocks in many casesm How to make this technically effective so that you really need a bit of criminal energy to bypass it is however questionable. At least in Germany I can actually as a user disregard any copyright for books etc if someone in the world offers content without any effective protection or obviously illegal (also resharing like in the BitTorrent case get you into trouble). So what are the alternatives? Pushing DRM ? I would like to see a bit more constructive approach from mozilla. If you are the French and you see a problem. How would you solve it?
- DexesTTP 3y ago
  Note about the more productive approach: Mozilla published a blog post[0] back in late June about what solutions are already available and advising for the law to reinforce these existing mechanisms instead of mandating a new browser-level blocking thing that can easily be abused. [0] https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2023/06/26/france-browser-website-blocking/ https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2023/06/26/france-browser...
  - riedel 3y ago

cubefox 3y ago

It's often "gals", not just "dudes", who are pro censorship, at least in Germany.

chrischattin 3y ago
"Dudes" is often used as an all inclusive term.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

sam0x17 3y ago

They never started learning more like.

borh375 3y ago

> They seem to be advised by a bunch of decrepit dudes who stopped learning about computers before the OSI model was created. Isn't that the same law that understands and bans cloud providers egress fees? Seems they have a good understanding of current state of technology, citing credible sources like Cloudflare. https://www-senat-fr.translate.goog/rap/l22-777/l22-77720.html?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://www-senat-fr.translate.goog/rap/l22-777/l22-77720.ht...

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]