Dingaling

Good take that they’re a business, but if they have no physical presence in France there is very little else the French Government can do, other than what they’ve just done.

Same way. Transfer money in once you’re on the website and is not being blocked at bank level. They also take crypto so it’s not like the bank can block it either even if France tried to block that.

BTW, I think the site and premis behind Polymarket is shit and nobody should use it, but blocking websites effectively has proven difficult at a technical level. (See PirateBay, still going strong despite everything entire governments and massive lobbying power can throw at it, and 4chan’s refusal to be blocked by the UK’s OSA) Most governments settle for the political win and blocking people with only a casual interest, which is fair enough. Most serious attempts at blocking specific sites tends just to make lawyers richer.

Depends, but immediately for either case.

A) Mostly likely. The ISP blocks DNS resolution for that domain, directing users to a placeholder site instead. User just uses a DNS resolver other than their ISPs such as Google’s or Cloudflare’s - easy, quick, free.

B) The ISP also has to block routing to IPs associated with the site. Unlikely, but easily circumvented by using a VPN so that your direct routing goes via elsewhere. Easy, quick, free or paid.

These blocks are common for sites a government deems illegal or undesirable. Nothing new here at a technical level.

I’ve been playing with computers and writing code since 1981, so have seen a few things change, and the past couple of years have been alarming from a world new stage, but that’s not so much about tech as global unrest.

It started with the cookie banners… “We value your privacy” == “Of course, it’s worth money to us” The internet has shifted a lot over the past couple of years particularly, and it was inevitable. Just as inevitable is the loss of the small internet (I speak as someone who runs several small websites that get scraped and stolen from constantly), and the attempts of governments to control it. That was all going to happen, and just as inevitable is the impossibility of complete control - it’ll just make life harder for the honest person.

We’ve seen some shitty changes to software too through global business. With hindsight, that was inevitable too - it took a long time for someone to realise just how locked in the likes of vmware’s customers were. How cloud and then AI additions were reasons to charge more for features we don’t like. There’s a lot of fear about global instability for obvious reasons, and that’s hard to shake.

But also… People haven’t changed. For every big name enshittification, there’s people sprouting two more things without such controls. Where we are now - founded largely because of shenanighans at Reddit. You mention Linux - again, most of it free and accessible and those are baked into it. (We’ll skip over Redhat here, I think, perhaps the exception that proves the rule). There’s a lot of free software projects that are born out of love for the free and open community. A place where respect is more common than rudeness.

So I’m certain there’s a balance. Yes, crappy things. But also good things. I’m constantly amazed at new inventions and how tech is genuinely improving life for many people. I grew up in England in the 70s and the quality of life today is better despite what we might think, but it’s also far more complicated, and makes us feel helpless and small. Back then, our world was small, we knew people. A disaster on the other side of the world took days to arrive on our newspapers, and we weren’t made to feel like we should do something about it.

Perception may be playing a big part in your view here, and you sound both burnt out and depressed. Not uncommon with the bombardment of badness in the news that we can do nothing about. Understanding that, and stepping outside of the doom cycle, definitely helps.

Ultimately, you’ve got to do what’s right for you. If tech is a hobby to you, then it’s the same as any other hobby. When it stops being fun, it’s time to find something else that you enjoy instead of, or as well as. Hope you find a better balance.