 The French government is setting a dangerous online censorship precedence in the so-called free world by trying to pass legislation that would require web browsers to implement browser-based website blocking. Think of it like some sort of blacklist that is built into the browser in order to prevent you from going to certain websites. Now from what I can find from French publications translated into English, this proposed baked-in blacklist requirement is being called a scam filter. The primary goal is supposed to be to prevent online fraud and to secure and regulate the digital space, but a browser-based blacklist handed down from a government body is really not the best way to go about preventing fraud and at the same time this kind of blacklist would do immense harm to the openness of the internet. And it would set a new censorship standard where it's normal for governments to block your access to websites at the browser level instead of at the network level. And that really matters because browser-level and especially device-level access restrictions are not something that you would normally be able to bypass with proxies or VPNs which at this point even average computer users have subscriptions for VPNs and they know how to use them. I personally know people in their 70s that use VPNs all the time just as advertised and they feel safer with it so whatever. But to undo browser-level blocking you would probably end up having to go into the configuration settings of your browser and change things around there or possibly even use a custom settings file like a custom user.js file and replace the default one with it and restart your browser like I've shown in the past with Firefox hardening guides. But even this setting change is something that could easily be taken away from the user especially in a proprietary web browser which would then leave end users that want to evade this website blacklist with the task of compiling their own open-source browsers themselves which I can tell you guys from my Gen2 adventures and you guys probably know firsthand as well it can take hours of time to compile Firefox or Chromium based browsers from source. So needless to say this is the kind of censorship where evasive maneuvers are going to be far outside the reach of your average tech user and this is part of the reason why I talk about the importance of digital literacy because you're going to need more of it to avoid this kind of censorship or modern tech dystopia but let's be real compiling all of your own packages basically installing Gen2 for the sake of freedom is asking too much from people who aren't Linux hobbyist or professionals. And speaking of professionals this proposal for government mandated blacklist in your browser is kind of an insult to the security professionals that develop existing tools to protect you online like Google safe browsing. So this is something that you might have seen before and not even known it when you're browsing the web and you click on a link to something some kind of you know sketchy link and then this big red screen that says deceptive site ahead click here to go back to safety and it also activates you know you might see a similar thing if you download files that appear to be malware. That's Google safe browsing at work trying to keep you safe. Now of course there's false positives that can activate on sites and there's gray areas like torrenting websites for example they might sometimes get viruses that are packed in with some of the crack software that's available on the site but safe browsing or something similar will flag the whole site for malware even though there's a very low chance of you getting malware if you're just downloading media from there and there's also false negatives like if a hacker is using a fresh domain for a brand new phishing site that just went live it's probably going to be some time before that gets added into the filter and some people might get scammed before it gets added to the blacklist. Same deal with newly developed Trojan malware that's acting with files it takes time for the virus scanner to be able to identify that at the time of download but even though safe browsing isn't perfect it's a hell of a lot better at actually protecting people from online scams and malware than some rinky dink block list from France or any other government for that matter I mean imagine these politicians who half the time they can't even figure out how to use email on their phones they can't figure out how to do almost anything with their technology thinking that they can tackle fraud and malware better than Google or even Microsoft you know Microsoft has their own version of safe browsing called smart screen and edge like despite the evils of these companies I think it's pretty obvious that they have a much better grip on online security than the French government both of these companies Google and Microsoft they operate search engines that have indexed billions of web pages and with the phishing protection built into their browsers you really are just getting a warning about the site right like if you think about how this blacklist works that the French are proposing and the block list the safe browsing protections that already exist safe browsing just warns you about the site but you can still check a box to say that you understand the risk and proceed to view the content on the website it's more of a soft block than a hard block it obviously is still going to hurt your website's traffic if it ends up on Google or Microsoft's block list but that censorship still isn't as difficult for an end user to bypass as what the French government is proposing and that's the whole point like it's one thing to warn people about websites but to block their access to the website altogether is going way too far and we've been seeing a lot of attempts from governments this year to restrict people's online freedoms you know it's really been going on for years and years now but the excuses the excuses that were given for why we need to have our online freedom taken away seems to be getting lammer and lammer like this bill here to secure and regulate digital space in order to fight online fraud by adding filters to your browser is an insult to the intelligence of not just the browser developers and the people that develop smart screen and all of these technologies but also the browser users how about before you try to secure online space especially secure online space for other people you first go ahead and index a hundred billion web pages and get a good idea of what's actually out there on the internet before you decide what people are allowed to visit and of course if online scams and fraud wasn't scary enough to get you to agree with this proposal from the French government they have to throw in towards the end of the bill that they're also going to protect the children online of course the classic excuse for relinquishing your freedoms for the protection of the children who are also probably more tech savvy than the boomers that are trying to pass this bill it's almost like the French are trying to copy the kids online safety act that was introduced into the American Senate earlier this year except instead of trying to get platforms that offer end to end encryption and other privacy services to stop offering those services the French bill is targeting the end users their devices and the end users software the browsers it sure looks like a collaborative effort by world powers to erode people's digital freedom under the guise of safety if you actually want to be safer online or you want to keep your kids safer online then seek greater understanding of your devices their devices and the online world build your own security model use your own block list for your kids devices and for your devices if you want and use free and open source software where control is only limited by your own technical knowledge instead of arbitrary limitations being placed on the software by some corporations one day this knowledge may be necessary in order to have any digital freedom at all