Hacker News Reader

Comment by mkoryak | Hacker News Reader

Is wget and curl next? Seems like a really flawed approach.

Wget and curl mostly likely don't count. Browsers are explicitly defined as applications for end-users, which wget and curl are typically not.

The idea here is to make it harder for the public to access banned websites. Tech savvy people will be able to recompile their browser from source anyways, just like they can easily work around DNS-based blocking and pretty much every blocking attempt, even the "great firewall".

It is mostly a punishment for services that don't comply with the rest of the law. By blocking it in the majority of browsers, it will drive away a lot of traffic.

Anyways, I don't expect that part of the law to pass, and if it does, it will be very unlikely to be enforced, France is a major economy, but I don't think it has the international power to do that, call me back when the entire EU or the US is on it.

> Browsers are explicitly defined as applications for end-users, which wget and curl are typically not.

By no coherent definition, though. Just by professional convention.

wget and curl give out html files, these are useless to the end user unless they are opened with other software, typically a browser.

I don't know of any online service that expects end users to use something like wget and curl, maybe in niche cases, or for personal use, but I don't think it can be considered a primary use case for these software.

What if I write a small proxy that uses wget in the backend[1] to fetch files and only use browsers to render the webpage/resources? Blocking at this level makes little sense. The French government is shooting itself in the foot (as usual).

[1] which I would absolutely do if legislators are stupid enough to pass this law. No one gets to control what I read.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com