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In any case, the french hosting company altern.org has announced it is definitely moving to Norway.

Their CEO left this message on their main page, here it is translated:

Altern shuts its doors... again

Following the voting of the secret services law in the National Assembly yesterday #PJLRenseignement, the webhosting company Altern closes its services while moving abroad.

For twenty years Altern.org helped make free speech rights a reality for citizens and residents of this country. During these years political leaders, corporate representatives and assorted top brass of any kind never ceased their efforts at ending this happy period of liberty that the Internet had started.

We did get plenty of laughs as they scrambled around trying to roll back the sea with Maginot lines of the likes of the Hadopi.
But today they got the upper hand by forcing us, by law, to install at the heart of our infrastructures "black box" analysers under the sole control of secret services.
This grip on telecom services induces self-censorship of our public expression and annihilates our privacy on the Internet.

For us just one day under global surveillance is one day too many.
Altern.org refuses these secret services black boxes, shuts its doors immediately, and will reopen them in a few days from another country that is more respective of individual liberties.

not commercial, more of a personal side project for some friends. I've no experience configuring or administering a Linux server

Don't go it all on your own then. At the risk of sounding a bit like an advertisement, for the sake of brevity:
If you can read German, that's a host to be seen: fully documented configuration, minimal GUI, ssh account at one click without much of an appetite for personal information, avidly blogging webmaster, domains at just 5€ for registration and 50 cents extra/month.
They would appreciate a monthly 5-10€ contribution after the free trial month, but let you start as low as 1€ if you're on a budget.
Haven't found that kind of feature set lately (since hosting at French altern.org was lawyered out of existence more than a decade ago actually) at such a price point, let alone in English - is there any other host like this these days?

The French provider AlternB had to pay Estelle Halliday 40 000FF back in 1999 for a similar case (pics uploaded by a user of the free webhosting). It was called then "La Defaite de l'Internet" (the Lost of the Internet), and Altern has yet to reopen their free hosting service.

Typical french doublespeak: mygale.org have been closed because a member put nude picture of Estelle Halliday on line, but FT is not liable for anything that goes thought the minitel).

it's altern.org that closed (the free hosting part in fact)

Of course you'll get that problem, you're mixing two languages to where you've essentially got a third language. Here's a syntax file for JSP that I found linked off the vim pages:

http://altern.org/rgs/vim/syntax/jsp.vim

Put it in your vim syntax directory. I used to have a syntax file for ASP scripts too, but can't seem to find it anymore. It shouldn't be too hard to tweak the one I linked for ASP or embedded perl.

It must be noted in the case of gandi.net that their cost-only price of euro 12 is not a aggressive competitive measure. The four folks founders of Gandi were indeed trying to prove that the fee usually charged by the registrar was pure theft. As a matter of fact the point they were trying to make is that the selling of domain names by private companies is absurd. You should check http://altern.org/copains/voleur.html written by Laurent Chemla (it's in french, try babelfish)

What you are talking of would be really interesting to discuss if you had some hard, real facts to rely on. No, I do not think that your site is informative. It is a mixture of ramblings on elections results, quotes from legal texts whose status (proposed? voted? pending to be signed into law by the President) is not even clearly stated, and comments whose pertinence is not proved. In short, this site is very much akin to fringe political propaganda (say, communist leaflets): it surely alludes to something true, but is not convincing.

As far as I know, theoretically, nowadays Web sites are considered by law as akin to the written press. A paper publication (say, a magazine or daily newspaper) has to have a "director of publication" and to be declared to the authorities. The basic idea is to have a clear liability trace in case of libel or other publications prohibited by law (such as a call to murder or similar things).

However, in the case of WWW sites, this becomes very unwieldy and is not enforced: people that open a WWW page do not declare themselves as a proper publication. Therefore, some people in parliament found it a good idea to replace these requirements by something more modern. Of course, this attempt was a bit misguided, and surely the law will be repealed and/or amended a lot.

Apparently, they wish users to register with their real name to their ISP. That way, if a user posts, say, a public call to murder black people on his or her WWW site, the judiciary has a clearly defined person to prosecute. Of course, the lawmakers forgot that anyway users could simply ftp such contents to off-shore sites; perhaps showing them how the WWW actually works could make them a little more in touch with what is technically possible.

Members of parliament propose dozens of ill-designed laws each year. I think you overreacted. Posting a comment such as your on a site like Slashdot, where most of the audience is not too knowledgeable about European issues and is prone to knee-jerk libertarian comments, was irresponsible and useless. You had better collect actual facts and make a WWW site that reminds less of the anarchist propaganda leaflets dirty young men give to passers-by outside of universities! :-)

The 17 may 2000, the french will vote for the creation of a "Conseil Supérieur de l'Internet" : Where all french Webmasters need and ID and administrativ authorisation to publish any information on Internet (web, ftp, irc, ...)

French Risk to pay 1200$ and/or 6 month of prison. If they are not autorised to publish information on internet.

More info (in french) at
http://www.article11.net/
and http://altern.org/defense/vote/

-AC

That point being made, in good faith (having never received any cease and desist letter myself) and understanding the legal Yahoos' points, I've changed the parody site on the 2 points offensive to Yahoo!
And asked it to be included in Yahoo!'s "Website_Parodies/Yahoo_/" category :-)

Yahoo! is happy. We now return to our regular programming.

1) It's in English. Does anyone else see a problem sending an English letter from a Quebec law firm to the (supposedly) French-speaking author of a French language website in a French province?

2) Yahoo! seems to imply in its letter that they have a trademark on their website. Can this really be true?
"Your company's unauthorized use of the YAHOO! trade-mark and the design of its web sites"(emphasis mine)
"... our client must insist that you immediately ... permanently cease use of ... its well-known web page design."

So my question is, setting aside everything else about the site, would Yahoo! really have a case here if this was just an issue on page design? Or would this just be like they Etoys/etoy thing where they add in stuff to sway everyone's opinion in their favour, even if it's irrelevant?

Yahoo!? Overboard? Surely you jest. After all, the cessation of use of the trademark and design of the site (apparently the design of the Yahoo! Site can be copyrighted) should happen within two or three business days, and of course they would have to accompany that with written documentation to prove that they will never use the trademark again, and of course above all that the site must be pulled from the net forever. I mean, it just makes so much sense. Yahoo is right here. (For those of you who don't get the joke, read the letter again

If you follow the link at the bottom of the page, you arrive on the same site, v1.0. And (most) of the links on that page do indeed point to real-looking but non-existing Yahoo url's. So they just stole the real Yahoo front page and put it up on their site. That's just lame, IMHO. And the parody notice at the bottom is much more concise, and it points to pssss. So I think Yahoo's mistake in sending legal threats to the wrong people is understandable here. I bet Andover's lawyers would do the same if someone just stole Slashdot's frontpage to attract more hits.

I am not sure about the outcome of the case. Altern was down for quite a while, but is now back up. You now must provide an email address (that is confirmed) to open an account. There was a petition, and as the case was posted on Slashdot, quite a few people signed it. I do remember the ISP owner (it's a one-person operation, on a Linux server BTW) thanking everyone for the support.

\xygraph{
[]*++[o][F=]{\omega}
:^c[uurr]*++[o][F]{\omega,(c,aa)}:@(ur,ul)^a[rrr]* ++[o][F]{(a,ac),(ca,a)}:@(d,r)_a[dll]*++ [o][F]{(aa,c),\omega}:^c"\omega"
:^c[ddrr]*++[o][F]{(c,aa),\omega}:@(dr,dl)^a[rrr]* ++[o][F]{(ca,a),(a,ac)}:@(u,r)_a[ull]*++ [o][F]{\omega,(aa,c)}:^c"\omega"
:_b[ddll]*++[o][F]{\omega,(b,a)}:_a[ul]*++[o][F]{( a,b),\omega}:_b"\omega"
:_b[uull]*++[o][F]{(b,a),\omega}:_a[dl]*++[o][F]{\ omega,(a,b)}:_b"\omega"
}

It seems that the point here is to set up a censorship at the ISP level, that is, making the ISP 100% responsible for the contents it hosts.

Fortunately, this is exactly what has been deemed as impossible recently by French legislation.

There was quite a gossip in Frogland about this case : a free web-hoster (Valentin Lacambre, founder of the great altern.org, an anti-commercial web-hosting service) had been sued by top model Estelle Halliday because a website on his server featured intimate photographs of her.

This trial was taken very seriously by french internauts, and made its way through media coverage and government intervention (as usual in France). Premier Lionel Jospin and Minister of Justice (=~ Attorney General) Elisabeth Guigou expressed concern over the case.

Finally, a new law was voted by the parliament, wich carries more or less the following statement:

"All in all, the one who is accountable for an on-line publication is the one who authored it. The ISP is only held responsible if he deliberately refused to shut down access to this document, even after being told to do so by justice."

Now all of you Anglo-saxon libertarians will frown upon this : "This still gives censorship power to government, after justice decision." It may be so, but tell me : if someone ever puts a very private ( :o) ) photograph of you (or your girlfirend) on a website, won't you be happy to have a way to stop it ??

Moreover, the necessity of justice intervention for closing down a web site/page is much better than the Munich conference project, where "censorship" is decided from what the ISP sees as "dangerous" for his audience (ie his profits), and where any ISP that does not filter sexual/violence contents by default is exposed to serious trouble.

Freedom of expression is well-established in the EU. Most european countries (Britain and southern countries put aside, maybe) have well-balanced laws on the subject. The French jurisprudence over this case provides a much better model for law enforcement over the web than Bertelsmann & Co.'s project.

Oh, BTW... maybe I didn't read well, but I did not see France Telecom anywhere in the paper... I think wee little froggies may be reasonably optimistic over the Munich draft. :o)

Thomas Miconi
Karma Police - enforcing peace of mind by all possible means.

The issue of "product tying" is covered by article 85 of the Treaty on the European Union. However, its implementation is left to national governments. I inquired about the Belgian authorities position on that matter. Their reply (in French) states that a computer and OS form one "logical unit". Product tying prohibition covers only unrelated products (eg. a mortage and a life insurance).

Random Link o' Humor: BO2K Fun

This has generated some noise here and has had the effect is that a law is being passed right now in Parliament that basically states that a hosting service or ISP be held responsible only for content is has contributed to create or produce, or if it hasn't promptly removed access to the content when summoned by a court. The speaker then goes on to say that he specifically added this last clause to prevent undue preventive censorship by ISP's.

This law, if it makes it through the legislative process in those terms, is pretty good in that it not only protects hosting services, it also protects free speech by requiring that the ISP not censor any content unless summoned by court.

JPEG watermarks can be defeaated...
unZign
or
StirMark

We will also celebrate the 'defaite de l'internet' to protest against the french (un-)justice's actions against AlternB and Le Village.
Take a look at this site (in french, sorry).