As someone who lived the first Internet block due to protests with similar demands. This feels refreshing and prove that regimes response to wide spread protests they don’t like is not that different.
Why not just allow genuinely peaceful protests and take stern police/legal action against all other forms of protest? I don't understand the logic behind cutting access to communications platforms. Seems like an indirect or roundabout way of solving the problem.
Social/IM platforms are literally where the violent ones organize. Nobody has issues with the peaceful protests, but in the past couple weeks it's become very clear that violent rioters use the excuse of the peaceful organized protest to infiltrate and wreak havoc, using the peaceful demonstrators as essentially meat shields. That needs to stop. And without readily available social/IM platforms, there's no way the violent ones can coordinate in the hundreds/thousands on a couple hours notice.
That's how it works. Until there's so much rioting the police can't deal with it. What should happen then? Cutting communications seems like a pretty good idea.
French riot police aren’t great at dealing with protests — and they protesters know this, so the protests escalate rapidly then throw in looting and you end up with a massive mess
The way France is overcomplicating things feels analogous to PG's story about how founders do the same:
> many of the conversations we have with founders begin with the founders saying a sentence that begins with "how do I.." and the partner answering with a sentence that begins with "just".
i.e. Often the most absurdly simple solution is the best one.
Because very often the "peaceful protest" provides cover to rioting/looting/property destruction, and it's a lot easier to say/enforce no assembling on the street at 11pm on a Friday as part of a curfew, than to leave a carveout for assembling on that street for a "peaceful protest".
It seems French society will soon embark on the path to total VPNization. Once the government gets a taste of blocking Internet resources, it won't stop.
Isn’t that sort of ironic, because BlackBerry was used disproportionately by government and corporate clients? Wouldn’t a ban basically cut off the very people who should have been favoured?
Has Mike Butcher expressed an alternative gender ID to you, or a desire to be addressed by bizarre neo-pronouns? Rather than "he/him" as written in his Wikipedia article? Or is this some idiotic affectation of your own devising?
Seems like he really wants to limit the spread of videos showcasing the behaviour of the protesters, and their backgrounds... This goes hand in hand with his pathetic speech about how it's all fake news and AI.
Real rioters will dive into no-DNS internet communication. Most internet protocols were designed with DNS independence in mind (read the email RFC, email addresses can have IP literals instead of DNS names which is of paramount importance, which I use BTW).
Namely, in the end, they will have to switch off telecommunication as a whole... well, if they are not interested in gathering intelligence about the rioters.
And then real rioters will have 'mesh communication devices', and then govs will need EM jammers too.
Sooo... govs should work on good and wide spread EM jammers instead of trying to to block DNS...
And yes, you can in theory install the same software used to punch through the Chinese firewall, but if it doesn't appear in the app store or google play, your new VPN is as good as dead.
There are no technical solutions to political and social problems.
France has been blocking a lot of websites, some quite popular, since at least the Nappster wars and has expanded and expanded and expanded. Recent victims are Z-library, Anna's archive, a lot of satellite TV viewing websites, illegal streaming websites, ...
Of course reasons to block websites has expanded dramatically, especially into the political realm. For political examples, websites collecting video evidence police actions during protests "Copwatch Nord Paris I-D-F", a lot of extreme-right websites (some arguably not very extreme, or should I say, every year that passes the bar of what means extreme-right for blocking purposes is lowered), VPNs, oh and "right-to-be-forgotten" stuff (blocking a number of groups who published details on important French and EU political figures, generally failing to achieve their goal. For a high profile example, ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy used internet censorship to hide evidence of fraud, but got convicted anyway. There's also the example of ... I don't like to agree with the extreme right on anything, BUT, it is sadly absolutely true that LFI (a far left political party, or whatever you want to call leftists that, while absolutely not tankies, are not particularly opposed to using violence to achieve their aims. I think that's fair to say about them) is using internet censorship laws for everything from protecting their members against the police to silencing even internal criticism. Of course it is ALSO true RN commits far more problematic violence)
(obviously the reason LFI wants its members protected from the police, and school administrations and ... is the organizing violence thing they do. A lot of people agree at least with the aims of the protests, and it's not like these people commit murder or anything. But they certainly do cause a lot of destruction of property)
Probably, since not many of us in Europe don't have lots of use cases for them, yet.
But things like our (Spain's) "internet shall not be 100% available during La Liga football matches" or our neighbors thinking of blocking DNS to stop political activism, surely will continue to make this number raise, albeit slowly.
I know there’s a subsection of the internet who for some reason believe VPNs are the solution to everything and better than sliced bread, but VPNs are absolutely unnecessary (and frankly overkill) for these types of blocks. All you have to do is change the DNS service on your machine, which is trivial even for non-technical users and unlike a VPN doesn’t disrupt anything about your computer usage.
You can install an app like 1.1.1.1 to use Cloudflare and there are many apps that will do it for generic DNS. Or manually but you will need to create DNS Profile and install it. It is not hard to generate one, but it is usually used for encrypted DNS which you should be using anyway.
When people are rioting for things that didn't happen, because they think they did, because of messages being sent to them by an enemy, then you stop that enemy.
Although the current riots precisely start because stuff that did not happen: having a stable teacher (or at all) for the courses they’re suppose to study.
Marcon got rid of the inheritance tax, cut worker's rights, and reduced the capital gains tax. He also tried to raise the retirement age but people protested so much, it was blocked eventually.
Both Melenchon and Le Pen have promised to increase spending and reduce taxes. That type of promise is a great vote winner, and people believe it. In 2022 Pecrese advocated reducing spending in 2022 and couldn't even manage 5% of the vote.
Macron couldn't even increase retirement age to 65 because France doesn't want it.
Next time will likely be a choice of two parties who both said retirement age will be reduced to 60.
It's because Canada and Denmark are less socialist than france. But generally speaking, what we are seeing is the end of socialism in the EU.
Yet again, socialism has failed to work, and it will always fail. When it fails, there are riots and violence.
We are seeing that EU companies are moving outside the EU, one recent example is that Volvo Cars are firing 2500 workers, and the EU laws and regulations will make this pattern repeat itself.
In the end, either EU will have to embrace capitalism, or it will break apart when nationalist parties promise that they have the easy solution, and do their own thing. I think actually breaking apart EU would be the best option.
Putting aside brainrot terms like socialism and capitalism, do you think the rich are too constrained in how they operate and that weakening labor will make us all better off?
Social media permits Broadcasting for Free. One to All messaging. For all other media - radio, satellite, tv, phones broadcasting requires licenses. Why?
Cuz Claude Shannon told us if everyone broadcasts on the same frequency noise increases and no one hears anything forcing them into broadcasting at higher and higher power or repeating their messages more and more. Which again increases noise. So Broadcasting has always been licensed and regulated. That solved the Noise problem because people were forced to coordinate use of broadcast spectrum.
Social media platforms act as if Shannon doesn't apply. So they do exactly what Shannon predicted. Everyone is broadcasting. No one can be heard clearly. People scream louder and louder. The loudest get locked into arms races. Repeat their messages more and more. At the end of it all Noise hasnt reduced and who gets attention from one day to the next is unpredicatble. And since Platforms dont want to talk about Shannon we are all stuck in some kind of red queen dynamic. People are expending lot of energy. Results are all temporary and unpredictable.
But please don’t call it European spring.
> many of the conversations we have with founders begin with the founders saying a sentence that begins with "how do I.." and the partner answering with a sentence that begins with "just".
i.e. Often the most absurdly simple solution is the best one.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ii1jcLg-eIQ&t=654s
Parfait.
Namely, in the end, they will have to switch off telecommunication as a whole... well, if they are not interested in gathering intelligence about the rioters.
And then real rioters will have 'mesh communication devices', and then govs will need EM jammers too.
Sooo... govs should work on good and wide spread EM jammers instead of trying to to block DNS...
Good luck France.
You'd think a 1st world country would know about VPNs but not this one
And yes, you can in theory install the same software used to punch through the Chinese firewall, but if it doesn't appear in the app store or google play, your new VPN is as good as dead.
There are no technical solutions to political and social problems.
Of course reasons to block websites has expanded dramatically, especially into the political realm. For political examples, websites collecting video evidence police actions during protests "Copwatch Nord Paris I-D-F", a lot of extreme-right websites (some arguably not very extreme, or should I say, every year that passes the bar of what means extreme-right for blocking purposes is lowered), VPNs, oh and "right-to-be-forgotten" stuff (blocking a number of groups who published details on important French and EU political figures, generally failing to achieve their goal. For a high profile example, ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy used internet censorship to hide evidence of fraud, but got convicted anyway. There's also the example of ... I don't like to agree with the extreme right on anything, BUT, it is sadly absolutely true that LFI (a far left political party, or whatever you want to call leftists that, while absolutely not tankies, are not particularly opposed to using violence to achieve their aims. I think that's fair to say about them) is using internet censorship laws for everything from protecting their members against the police to silencing even internal criticism. Of course it is ALSO true RN commits far more problematic violence)
(obviously the reason LFI wants its members protected from the police, and school administrations and ... is the organizing violence thing they do. A lot of people agree at least with the aims of the protests, and it's not like these people commit murder or anything. But they certainly do cause a lot of destruction of property)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_France
Probably, since not many of us in Europe don't have lots of use cases for them, yet.
But things like our (Spain's) "internet shall not be 100% available during La Liga football matches" or our neighbors thinking of blocking DNS to stop political activism, surely will continue to make this number raise, albeit slowly.
I am all for eliminating the antisocial media and the billionaires behind them as well, but I fail to see how censorship fixes anything.
https://www.panamericandispatch.org/p/meta-ignores-brazilian...
Want more stability? Shut down medias for a year before any elections to "smooth" the public debate.
How is this socialist policy?
More like that Macron does not stop spending too much. Countries such as Denmark or Canada show how to do better than Macron did.
Macron couldn't even increase retirement age to 65 because France doesn't want it.
Next time will likely be a choice of two parties who both said retirement age will be reduced to 60.
Yet again, socialism has failed to work, and it will always fail. When it fails, there are riots and violence.
We are seeing that EU companies are moving outside the EU, one recent example is that Volvo Cars are firing 2500 workers, and the EU laws and regulations will make this pattern repeat itself.
In the end, either EU will have to embrace capitalism, or it will break apart when nationalist parties promise that they have the easy solution, and do their own thing. I think actually breaking apart EU would be the best option.
Democratic socialist Europe was able to hold the line longer. Maybe it failes, but America failed faster.
Cuz Claude Shannon told us if everyone broadcasts on the same frequency noise increases and no one hears anything forcing them into broadcasting at higher and higher power or repeating their messages more and more. Which again increases noise. So Broadcasting has always been licensed and regulated. That solved the Noise problem because people were forced to coordinate use of broadcast spectrum.
Social media platforms act as if Shannon doesn't apply. So they do exactly what Shannon predicted. Everyone is broadcasting. No one can be heard clearly. People scream louder and louder. The loudest get locked into arms races. Repeat their messages more and more. At the end of it all Noise hasnt reduced and who gets attention from one day to the next is unpredicatble. And since Platforms dont want to talk about Shannon we are all stuck in some kind of red queen dynamic. People are expending lot of energy. Results are all temporary and unpredictable.