Slashdot Mirror
Anonymous Web Hosting Banned In France
An anonymous reader writes,"French free Webhosting services are now not so free anymore (In French!). In fact the French National Assembly has decided that anyone wanting to host some Web pages on a server has to identify himself. If this is not done, it's the server administrator who is responsible for any contents of the pages ... The immediate consequence for this is that free Web hosting services in France, like altern.org or multimania.com, won't be able to continue.
"
www.zeroknowledge.com
Anonynimity for anyone who wants it.
You do realise, of course, that not every anonymous coward here is the same person...
ERROR 12601: Pronoun without antecedant. See page 5887 of English Compiler 1.0 manual.
*flip* *flip* Ah, here it is, page 5887. I shall read aloud. It says: "Suck on WHAT?"
... and they should not :-(
:-)
Let's just have a look at their "glorious" achievements:
- They exterminated the American Indians
- They built their nation from the blood of African slaves
- They are the only people on this planet who ever used nuclear weapons. And not on the battlefield, no, no! They nuked civilians! Twice.
- Their children are regularly shot to death in colleges and universities.
- They sentence kids to death
- They are going to elect a known cretin for president only because he's his father's son. Great! Back to monarchy, a system that everybody else abandoned 200 years ago. (ever played civilization? That might be a signal that the US are planning war
You might now have guessed that I'm French. While we're at it, let's talk about this "France owes the US" crap.
President Wilson managed to engage the US into WWI(1914-1918) only in 1917, after German subs sunk American ships killing US citizens. France lost 1,368,000 soldiers in WWI, the US 116,000. The whole North-East of France was devastated. I think we did most of the fighting on this time.
The US watched Germany invade most of Europe (including France) in 1939-1940 without any measurable reaction. They only declared war to Japan after the Pearl Harbor disaster in December, 1941. All evidence shows that the US entered the war because they felt threatened by the German-Japanese axis. Not out of some altruistic feeling toward France or any other nation. In the same vein, historical research hints that the Department of State knew about German extermination camps early in the war and chose to ignore that information. Later in the war, the US intensively bombed French cities, with no specific concern for civilians. My great grandfather was one of these "collateral casualties".
As for Viet-Nam war, if you are dumb enough to go and mess with the hornet's nest after we tell you: "Don't go there, we've done it before, it stings", then you can only blame yourself.
All of this "we saved you" stuff is ridiculous. Nations don't go to war to help friends, they do it to protect their interests. It is just cold politics. France didn't help the US independance war because we loved the US, it was just to piss the English off. Period.
Don't get me wrong. I, as a Frenchman, am grateful to the GIs who fought and died to free France in 1944. The fact that the US government had selfish motivations is irrelevant. The guys died to free my country. They are heros.
But that doesn't extent to the US government or any American. I'm not going to kneel before any nutty Yankee who thinks I owe him because my country happened to be on the road to Berlin.
No way
When people like you whine about how the Europeans "hate freedom and personal responsibility", they overlook that freedom, privacy, and personal responsibility in the US only exist for the elite, those with money and power. If you can't hire a laywer and are unlucky enough to be of an appearance that gets you stopped by the police with regularity, the US is pretty close to a police state.
Hé, attention, si t'écris en français ici, tu vas avoir le FBI au cul; la liberté à l'américaine, c'est quand tu fais partie des leurs, c'est pour ça qu'ils ont tant besoin d'anonymité, cette bande de cowards (est-ce que ça veux dire couillons en anglais?) Fichtre qu'on se bidonne sur barre oblique point!
FUCK THE FRENCH. THEY'RE JUST AS BAD AS CANADIANS. GRITS!
I think you're right. The world does evolve around France. Damn plodding fascists.
If only Adolf had not foolishly honored his alliance with Japan and declared war, we could have left the French to their own devices. Stupid Nazis.
What do you Euros do? Cower in a corner until the nazi coup ends, and then wait for the good ol' USA to come and liberate France.
You mean sit on the fence until it's almost too late, in both cases?
A 'Euro'.
They honestly don't know why everyone is not using Minitel; they think the internet is an Anglo-American conspiracy against the French.
"Accountability" is a euphemism for the power to harass, threaten, or simply silence anyone who dares to express an opinion that opposes your interests. It demands we all pretend to hold the same insipid ideals as our neighbors and coworkers. The unpopular ideas are the ones we need to hear; shooting the messenger literally ends the progress of civilization.
That's easy. The Web is the collection of all entities that have a URI. (Some people claim HTTP is defining, but they're wrong- TimBL's intent was to use URLs to make as many protocols as possible seamless).
The price of speaking my mind should not be ostracism by my neighbors or blacklisting by my current and potential employers. Then only the real fanatics are stupid enough to say anything important/unpopular.
French are way too lazy to learn English. Don't confuse this with Americans, who are just too stupid.
Bear in mind that the French government, until recently, took a rather dim view of the Internet because the prevalent language was English.
A bit of a ferkup if you consider e-commerce to have any bearing on the future of their economy...
They've changed tune since, but a 100% grasp on reality? I think not.....
Ohmydog, that's so funny! Please tell me it was a french poodle! I wonder if he french kissed it first, or just skipped the foreplay.
It's hard to tell with the information that has been presented so far, but I suspect that an act of sexual perversion may have taken place. Just for my own peace of mind on the perversion issue, please tell me one thing: was the dog male or female?
We payed you back ten times over with our support in WWI and WWII so shut your trap Frenchy.
The reason? Labor costs are so high that mechanization is much more attractive. I read an interview recently with the CEO of a major US restaurant chain who said that their restaurants in France used 30% fewer people because it was cheaper to use automatic dishwashers, whereas in the US it was cheaper to pay minimum wage to hand-dishwashers.
Already every year, in France and elsewhere, people are being thrown in jail for disagreements over the interpretation of events that occurred over 50 years ago.
Then there was the Gaurady (sp?) case, where we learned that it was illegal for a Frenchman to publish a book which pointed out some of the founding myths of the State of Isreal.
Obviously free speach is only for those who agree with the views of the powerful and influential.
>Joke of a country?! This from the country that was overrun in six weeks?! The country that built a line of turrets that the enemy marched around?!
Bullshit! The Maginot(sp?) Line would have been successfull if it wasn't for the fact that Belgium (situated somewhat between France and Germany) felt insulted that the French would have extended it along the French-Belguim border, thus insinuating that the Belgiums were enemies as well. The failure was that Belgium and France could, but didn't, have the Maginot(sp?) Line separate *both* France and Belgium from Germany. In effect, Germany was able to "marched around" it by crossing into Belguim and around the turrents. The situation is *very* much like how the US is currently trying to develop our missile defence system by including certain other nations as "watchout stations" (mind you, that they will be protected as well but they are more likely to be hit due to their close proximity to "the enemy"). And like the weakness mentioned above, the US has to "convince" (through favors, economic incentives, etc.) those included nations to allow such systems on their soil.
btw, I am an American.
a joke.
look it up.
bullcrap. The only form of military coup that could ever possibly happen here is maybe if the president and his immediate line of succession ever did something so douche-baggish to justify it, that they might arrest him and cronies, march them up the steps of the Capitol building and dump them at the feet of all the congresscritters and say "Your problem now. Take care of them. We're going back to the base."
They almost learned from the USA in the 19th century when they started imitating our invention of democratic government, but they've long since been back to their old tricks.
Never trust a European. They (especially the French) hate freedom and individual responsibility to an extent that Americans cannot even imagine.
You call this a troll, but then you don't even bother moderating the more blatantly bigoted ("humorous" or not) anti-france posts? What makes those more serious ones ok, but not this obvious attempt (ahem) at humour?
More and more I am convinced that the moderators are not human, but rather perl programs (slashdot crowd likes perl, right?) searching for words like "grits". This is just stupid. If you're going to do anything, at least get the real trolls by the real assholes, not these silly and harmless attempts at humour (and these grits posts are funny, if you've been reading
I used to work for an American subsidiary of a French company. Our French counterparts in the technology arena were always quite fun to work with. An honest to god dialogue follows:
.emails the bugs w/3 small patches)
Scenario:
We're looking at a subsystem containing 6 12000 line (not machine generated) C files with copious amounts of obviously cut'n'pasted duplicate code. Furthermore, American programmers aren't allowed to make code changes to C files (except for one in another subsystem).
Dialogue:
A: this code is filled with huge subroutines that have duplicate functionality everywhere
F: this is true
A: well, it'd be much easier to maintain and support if someone (remember: we're not allowed to make changes) went through the code and cleaned it up doncha think?
F: why would we want to do thees?
A: (flustered for the moment) because this particular subsystem accounts fo 90% of the most difficult support bugs we (FTM and they) have. Furthermore, it accounts for about 40% of tech support calls (remember: there are 5 subsystems).
F: why would we want to do thees?
A: (starting to become frustrated) Again, this particular subsystem accounts for 90% of our (and their) work and 40% of our on-site problems.
F: but eets a beeg job
A: well, you needn't do it all at once. To give you an idea of what would be nice, we've gone through xxxx.c and shortened it from 7000 lines to 2400.
F: (now it's his turn to be flustered) but there might be bugs!!!
A: well, we found three that were already there, but the code is much easier to understand and maintenance should be much easier going forward.
F: well, email the bugs you found to me and I must be going.
A: (later. .
The ultimate result: the next release didn't contain the patches or their fixes for the problems identified, but the bugs were on "the leest."
Of course, this place was a disaster for other reasons. Put simply, anyone who stays 3 revs back on their RDBMS and OS without a compelling reason deserves what they get.
are kinda weird, even for Europeans. Nothing they do can surprise me.
I disagree with your opinion.We (i'm fench living in asia) are not "isolated" and what's happening in France now can apply anywhere in 2 ,5 or 10 years...It's not a french problem, because Internet is international, and the bad ideas (like this one from the french governement)are growing faster than the good ones...Be carefull, BigBrother is watching you, too! Help us ,that's a better ideas, mailing your comments to : http://www.premier-ministre.gouv.fr/PM/MAIL.HTM Amically Pierre
It's clear from the Napster insanity (especially, for example, the Salon article) that a problem for content creators is the ease of illegal digital copying over the internet. But the reality is that while Napster may make things easier, it doesn't change the fact that the fundamental design of the internet is to build a web of computers (and routers etc.) to allow any two machines on the network to interchange whatever data they might allow. Napster isn't ENABLING anything. Treating certain "public" publishing methods (e.g. web sites... what about anonymous ftp uploads, though?) as requiring somebody to be responsible for them is just a first step to cracking down on illegal copying. I don't know that it's the intent in this case, but I'm fairly certain it's what you'd have to do if you wanted to crack down on illegal copying--make people responsible for the data they host, and responsible in a way that acts as a deterrent, not just an after-the-fact way. I'm in no way saying this is a good solution to the illegal copying problem; I'm just saying I kind of expect this sort of accountability is exactly what I imagine the RIAA thinks they need, and that the MPAA will think they need whenever video compression bandwidth and home access bandwidth meet. Of course, in reality, the only way to stop illegal copying is to unplug the net. Illegal copying will just move underground (through non "public" facilities where the files aren't "published") and perhaps become better encrypted or anonymized.
We're only bad at foreign languages because everybody else is good at English. When I was in Norway, I just gave up asking "Snakker du Engelsk?" I just spoke in English to everyone I met, and EVERYONE was fluent in English. EVERYONE. So why bother to learn Norwegian, except that it's a musical language and sounds pretty? -russ
While certainly the penalty involved in this legislation seems a bit much, I can certainly sympathize with the intent. If I say something to people out on the street, I am immediately accountable should someone disagree, or more importantly, find what I have to say slanderous. The same would be the case if I were to be handing out or mailing out a publication of some kind. On the web, however, unless this accountability is provided for somehow, it doesn't exist. There are two different approaches to solve this problem, the one existing in British, American and Canadian law where courts have the power to order a service provider to reveal the identity of a web author (everyone having a service provider of some kind, the identity is traceable) if there is a problem and then there is the French approach which is to specify in legislation that such identification will be obtainable from the author or from the provider. The difference is just that while Anglo-Saxon courts already have the authority to get identification through their powers obtained through common law, French courts have to have this authority to get identification specified in legislation because that's how their legal system works. Either way, you are responsible for what you write.
Doug Heath - dkheath@N0SPAMhome.com
... but racism is not a crime. If it were, the websites of the KKK, NRA, and other hate groups would be illegal. Racism is not a crime. Acts of discrimination, assault, et cetera based on racism ARE crimes, but you can not be prosecuted for personal beliefs. Illegal actions the result of those beliefs, yes, but not the beliefs themselves. A Jew-hater who never commits an crime based on his beliefs is free to have, and express his beliefs, in America.
Part of the US idea of basic rights is not prosecuting unpopular ideas.
In that same vein, while it is a crime to make kiddie porn, it is not a crime to have fantasies about children.
(Although certain types of kiddie porn, like Britney Spears videos, go remarkably unpunished!)
I am neither a pedophiliac nor a racist. JonKatz may be both, but not I.
I just have to correct your ignorance, you slimy French person. Go back to smoking cigarettes, drinking "ze vino", not bathing, and applauding "ze Jerry Lewis".
Oh trust me they are. And damn lazy too. Would anyone care if we nuked them? I think the Spanish hate them too. Italians REALLY hate them.
you know, homosexual males. Commonly refered to as 'fagots'
You forgot:
0) Tell your customers that you are planning on doing this, and give them a chance to sign up early to avoid the 404. I have seen web hosts do some pretty random stuff causing sites to break or 404. That is NOT acceptable.
No it is legal, only limited to 128 bit.
ROFL
Tai hao!!!!!!
Je pense que le gouvernement Français devrait regarder Natalie Portman, nue et pétrifiée... ça ira leur faire changer d'avis...
-- fusion
from chefchefchef@createur.org ... ..
to Lionel Jospin
La politique sécuritaire consistant à identifier formellement les auteurs d'édition electronique sur le web est un recul inadmissible des droits de la libre expression
Doit on ainsi pour ouvrir le bec se promener avec un code barre sur le front?
Ou encore mettre en prison les chanteurs d' "Au clair de la Lune"
sous prétexte que l'auteur est anonyme , tous les textes bibliques aussi devront être interdit , ainsi que tous les mots que vous prononcez tous les jours dans vos grandiloquances , sous pretexte de leur origines incertaines
La démocratie c'est le débat populaire, ce n'est pas la pensée ou les ideologies de quelque élus par une poignée de nantis.
Où est la consultation populaire dans ce pays ou il est interdit de donner son opinion ou tout simplement d'écrire sur les écrans de ses propres pensées fussent-elles electroniques et visible par tous, en toute quiétude sous peine de poursuites?
Je vous le dit franchement vos débats conventiculaires m'emmerde
le chef de moi c'est moi , et chaque moi du monde pense la meme chose que cela vous plaise ou non .
Et pour finir votre 'Mél' il est ridicule , encore un non -acte issu des forcenés du pouvoir voulant decider pour les autres
Interlettre Courriel Electrographe... que sais je ! c'est étymologique hé!
What do you expect from france.. Damn fairy french!!
Then they will require net nanny to block all sites that allow anonymous web pages :-)
or would that be neyt french maid ?
and what ever happened to anonymous email services? Anyone remember those?
It will happen...
wait I can't say that, I didn't attach my social security number, birthday, GPS grid coordinate, and DNA sample.
In fact this new french law, when enacted, will not only ban anonymous web hosting, but any public anonymous publishing. Theoretically, that would forbid (from the top of my head):
:-)
Usenet (how do you get the identity of each and every news post that go through your feeders?),
Public chat, like IRC,
Weblogs (eg Slashdot),
Public mailing-lists and for that matter publishing mailing-lists archives,
FTP sites,
etc.
Well, I guess that's just another feeble attempt at trying to apply old-time law to the Internet, without checking the reality first.
Nice try, guys. But this law is simply useless. Unless what you really want is another unusable law that you'll wield against real bad guys that you fail to catch using the law against the crimes they actually commited.
Do the old cryptography laws that were cancelled^Wamended a year ago ring a bell to anyone?
Ah, almost forgot to check the 'Post Anonymously' checkbox
That's why we feel your fucking hasshole
Hey yankee asshole...if it wasn't for the French your fucking joke of a country would most likely not exist..it was the French who funded your American Revolution, why don't you look at your fucking roots asshole.
What "survey"? You're wrong. The US has by far the most productive workers in the world -- including Japan.
Obviously, governments dislike the idea of free, and anonymous speech. I wonder if anyone's ever considered this aspect of the first ammendment in our country. We have the right to free speech, but do we have the right to hide our names from what we say? Granted, I dislike france's decsision, but I'm curious as to where our country stands on this. and what about peolpe who dont properly identify themselves? How can the admin be responsable for that?
1. A Geocities-like France hosted online community would certainly be sued by the government (granted, not by Estelle, but what's the difference?), should the proposed law pass.
2. The minitel can certainly not compare to the Internet. Heck, the Internet creates a whole new economy around it. The Minitel was just a subpar, fisher-price like, VT100 terminal whose sole purpose was to be connected to a non-standard (even at the time) packet network. Only the government pressure and state monopolies made it a success in France whereas the rest of Europe tries of Teletel-like service were an utter failure. The only economy Minitel revigorated was that of the sex industry.
3. Right, but the number of Internet-aware people in the french congress is so low that chances are good that this law will pass however absurd it is.
That's all sheer conjecture. You're also the only one I've ever heard describe it that way, which leads me to believe it's utterly false.
That whole part about the tanks getting stuck in traffic...that was out of deference to Belgium, too? In addition, if they figured the Germans would try and go around the Maginot Line, why didn't they have defenses near the Belgium border?
Because we have the freedom to, you fucking shit headed idiot.
You guy's talk of war and freedom? these two don't dance together (try and figure out what political system the resistance believed in) get real & grow up.
you must be one of those fucking french fags.
You're right... no one should have rights! You fucking idiot.
I may be a bit biased, but on the whole it seems to me that the average French citizen is better protected in his rights than than the average citizen of "corporate America". In France, companies must by law disclose any information they may hold on you in a database upon your request, and are not allowed to share this information with anybody else (no such things there as a big-brother "credit history" that anybody can have access to).
Another thing that makes a *big* difference IMHO is the judiciary system: As I understand it, in the US, lawyer-fees are so huge that any Big Bad Company (TM) can have the average citizen (or the small company) go bankrupt before the end of the trial, even if the small guy was actually *right*. The situation is not so unbalanced in France.
Strong corporate influence in America in law-making policy is also seen in things like the DMCA and UCITA and the ridiculous software-patents (all nasty things that they are trying very hard to push down European's throat...)
As for this new law, I believe somebody should be able to stand by what he says, and the only reason for hiding yourself behind anonimity is either you are doing something that is fundamentally wrong, and you know it, OR what you are doing is right but the system in your country is so scewed up that you will lose your shirt if your name gets known (which is IMO not the case in France, well not yet at least...)
Thank you for sharing any **constructive** comment on these issues...
EU? Euuuuh!
They're still around?
Voulez vouz coucher avec moi.
yeah, but go tell that to the frogs!
It's easier and better PR. If a gov't says "Linux users are bad", then they might lose 2 million votes. But if they say "J. Random Person, who has a wife and two kids, give food to the hungry, and helps out at the local old folks home, is bad.", then they lose 20 million votes.
So the way I figure it, the French government is probably thinking that if they allow anonymous web hosting, people will be bragging about all the things they do anonymously, and the rest of the world will lose whatever trace of respect it still has for France. (Personally, the only thing I find tolerable about France, for which I forgive it its existence, is its wines. A good Cote du Rhone red is worth its weight in gold.)
Of course, being French, they're being ever dumber about this than the US government. It doesn't seem to have occurred to them that other countries also have web servers, including servers that allow site owners to remain anonymous. The internet, as we all know, is international. The same technology that would allow outsiders to view embarrassing anonymous French web sites also allows the French to put their embarrassing anonymous web sites somewhere else.
This makes no sense nor any difference, or rather the other way around. Anyone that has spend time in France knows that they still think the world evolves around them and silly efforts like this is best ignored and circumvented by using servers elsewhere.
May be you should gather some informations before speaking bullshits. If the Maginot line was not built between belgium and France or between Belgium and Germany, it might be because Belgium was a neutral country.:-) Therefore there was no threat and should not having been any coming from that part of Europe. Hitler invaded Belgium regardless of its neutrality. And I dont think anyway hat the US is a peacefull country. It has been the only country mad enough to use the atomic bomb in war. Hey cool they drop a Bomb an kill a few hundred thousand defenseless and innocent people. Who cares, there are not americans anyway. And what if Japan didn't hand out their guns after that. Would america have goe to an extensive atomic bomb campain? It the faat that web hosting is not anonymous anymore is probably aimed to prevent fascist site and kiddie porn stuff to spread all over the place!
because individual are too stupid to respect each others and therefore gov't has to do something to ensure that liberty, equality and fraterity will rule that than god, guns and bucks!!!
In a pure democracy and dont think anybody would be asked wether or not they want someone else to be killed! A democracy, pure or almost should not include death penalty!!! Rohnn
lmao...French are too lazy to learn English!!! What a joke mate!!! Have you got another like that... French people on this forum are writting in English coz otherwise not much idiots of your kind would be able to understand! Do English speak French! Not even mentionning Americans... Rohnn
Luckily the US suprem court hasn't got much power in France. But obviously the KKK is a great defender of democraty and freedom. :-( American fascist bastards. Rohnn
I forget what the case was about, but the Supreme Court has ruled that anonymous speech is protected
The KKK wanted to march, but they weren't allowed to wear hoods. Supreme court says it's okay to wear hoods.
anyone can hide his site under anonymous proxy: Hideip.com
You can see that you donnot live in France. I do. It's far worse than you think. There is absolutely no FREEDOM in France. People are spying on euch other (payd by governement, Unions, Police and the taxoffice to tell on your neighbours. 10 000 ends of phone lines are randomly tapped, and so on, and so on. Now you can say : as long as you are a correct person, living by the law, nothing will happen. Forget it, I was attacked, just because the Unions did not like my policy as CEO of a large company, and was harassed 3 years by the tax-office. France is fastly becoming a dictator driven country (the dictator is not a person, but a class of very privalidged people: sevil servants). BTW/ France is the only European country condemnded for vialation of the human rights in 1999 (several cases). So, don't tell people a lot of nonsebce about a country that's very dangarous for the world, is you are not informed. They made the same mistake with the NAZI's in 1935 ! I'm writing this anonmous to avoid problems, and that's NOT paranoia.
Emperor Kaligula Klinton is the most degraded sexual criminal in history, the bloodiest tyrant since Tarquin the Proud, the most murderous pagan since the Black Hole of Calcutta, and the most prolific liar who can even be imagined.
His blood-soaked criminal reign WILL NOT END NEXT YEAR, contrary to all laws and all rules of decency. THERE WILL BE A MILITARY COUP, mark my words, all you can do is arm yourself and prepare for the worst.
USA free forever! May God bless our cause.
I really think that you all should think about how we can try to change it for the better.? Don't we all have tried to use these new gadets, only to find out that it really won't work with the rest of your stuff. Well, I for one will not work with these problems for long, I tried way too much, way to often, and I am sick and tired. I want it for free instead, but is that possible??
It's kind of like a dog - the dog misbehaves, you whack him, he thinks "Hey, I'll cut that particular crap out and not do it anymore... but this human is still cool, I like him, he's fun" (well, okay, it's a dog so probably more like "Rey, rI'll rut rat raricular..."). On the other hand, just start whacking the dog randomly and watch - he lays in a corner being docile, makes no noise, does nothing, you come near and he cowers, he fears you but does not cross you because you've still got the food.
BTW, please DON'T do this to a dog. It was just a stupid hypothetical example.
The U.S. is a constitutional republic. The democratic process happens to be just *one* of the checks/balances in place to keep gov't powers limited.
You are right that the U.S. is not a pure democracy (thank heavens!). Pure democracy != individual freedom. In a pure democracy, 51% of the population may vote to kill you, and you will be killed. The Majority's will be done.
Seth
People wanting their anon pages will just go to sites outside France. They access just as easy over the net regardless of where they're located. Local hosting sites will see fewer users of their service and fewer web hits, which will drive advertisers $$$ away. The result? Only local hosting sites and local French business people are hurt by this. Did I miss the intent of the legislation here? Or was this it "French hurting French"?
Why? Who knows why the French do anything. They are the fucking morons of the world.
A woman shall not wear anything that pertains to man, nor shall a man wear a woman's garment; for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord. (Deuteronomy 22:5)
Listen, B'nai B'rith has had the devil of a time silencing all those extremists with patriotic/libertarian/nationalist "freedom" sites who criticize the global Nation of Israel. This is just one more effective tool to identify and squash the individuals behind all this criticism. Fortunately, France has been rendered extremely, shall I say, "compliant" to the forces of tolerance. The fix is in. The rest of Europe will fall like dominoes. Sorry, we win.
And thanks to our right to bear arms, we can, and this is why military coups haven't happened. What do you Euros do? Cower in a corner until the nazi coup ends, and then wait for the good ol' USA to come and liberate France.
The french are not only pigs they are idiots of the 5th dimention. They regularly drill holes in their heads and leak out all grey matter to stay as stupid as possible. Fucking french idiots.
The only thing the french tolerate is fagotry. And they prefer to keep the populace stupid so they can impose anything they want on their sorry asses. Poor stupid french people....not!
But the french are not only idiots, they are fagots.
OK. I'll do my part to promote freedom. I'm in Canada; I will consider hosting one web account for a French citizen who requires it (my server's not that big, ya know but I try 8-]), no ID required (and I'll have to verify you're actually from France..)
Just email arghblarg@blitterSPAM.com (removing the spam from the email address, of course) if you have a page you feel is important to keep up. I'm not too experienced with apache config, so fancy dynamic pages probably won't be feasible. But if you have simple static content you want hosted anonymously then feel free. No pr0n/warez though 8-).
(And I apologize but I don't know French..)
You idiots threw away the one chance you had, McCain. You threw him away because he wouldn't take orders from your bizarro religious leaders the way Bush will. All of you dumbass righty types are voting for Bush because Pat Robertson ordered you to. That's freedom? Taking orders from a "religious" con artist? You DESERVE to lose the election. And you will. The American people don't much trust Gore, but they've seen what the religious freak Republicans are capable of and we will never put one of those psychos in the White House. Bank on it.
McCain had support outside of the right wing of the Republican Party because he thinks for himself. I agree with Gore's platform more than McCain's, but i'd've voted for McCain because he's got a mind of his own. I will never vote for somebody like Bush who just does what he's told. You can't trust a puppet when the chips are down.
If you're serious about this, look at www.monarchist.net and contact the webmaster. I own the domain but have not yet had sufficient Copious Spare Time to put anything on the site. Email discussion and/or contributions would be very welcome.
The Resistance, led by whom?
You ahistorical jackass. The French Resistance was an enormous help to Allied Intelligence throughout the war. They existed, they were effective, and unlike the Americans in that war (including both of my grandfathers -- how about yours, eh?) they had the balls to keep fighting against absolutely hopeless odds. We won the war, but we won it with overwhelming numerical superiority. In battles where we were outnumbered, we generally crumbled (see the Battle of the Bulge, Arnhem, etc.). It's an ugly fact but a true one.
Second: I'm an American, stupid. And I've noticed that it's right-wing idiots like you who worship "whatever killer crawled out of Germany", not the French.
And, yes, I know you're a troll
Et je vais vous casser la gueule! :-)
McCain is a religious person you moron, and he's got a near-perfect anti-choice voting record. He's no more liberal than Bush is -- unless you equate liberalism with having enough self-respect not to take direct orders from unelected religious leaders. If so, then yeah, he's a "liberal", but only by that definition.
You love Bush because he's a natural-born slave, just like you.
Don't forget Vietnam. Without France, we wouldn't have even been in that war.
The Colonial Cowardace of France
. . . where 500,001 may very well be 51% of 1,000,000, for all the students know
Americans are too stupid to learn English?
But if there are names and contact info, then it isn't anonymous, right? So that's out. And if the administrators have to be responsible, that makes anonymous hosting completely impractical. /. not responsible for them. If /. was in France, then we couldn't have anonymous posting, which I support (I normally log in, but can't right now).
For example, here on Slashdot "Comments are owned by the Poster". That, among other things, makes
There are a lot of ways that a government can take away rights in subtle, indirect means without having to make something outright-illegal. This is one such way.
Maybe you folks don't know about the situation in the U.S. Our first amendment rights on the web are subject to approval of the PROVIDER and are not automatically guaranteed.
I have had my parody site Mayatreya: the World Spammer BANNED from several providers because of complaint email from members of the cult I'm parodying.
In the US, ISP are not seen as common carriers of data on their servers. They are seen as being responsible for the content on their disks and are AFRAID OF BEING SUED for their client's materials. Thus, our freedom of speech is subject to the approval of our ISPs and webhosts.
The French law removes ISPs from this police responsibility and puts it where it belongs, the person who put the files there in the first place.
If somebody doesn't like your website, rather than whine to your ISP and have it banned, they will have to whine to the author! If you don't think this is appropriate, just try putting up a Free Speech site in the US.
I'm not afraid of letting anybody know my name if I have the power of free speech!
"Their ought to be limits to freedom"
--GW "Stinky" Bush
But then, haven't we all been under sorrow prison?
Haven't we?
Imagine your loved ones conquered by Napoleon and forced to live under french rule. Do you want them to eat those rich foods and those heavy sauces?
No!
Do you want them to have souffle every meal, and croissant?
No!
Umm, there's no way the Chinese government to block people from using US and other countries free servers.
Oh, wait. There is.
(Posted anonymously just to piss of the french.)
Jon Johansen, in Norway, probably thought he didn't need to worry about USA's DMCA.
(Posted anonymously to annoy the french.)
We've settled this in the USA. Paper based political brochures used to have a line denoting ownership, but no more. Now you can publish all the anonymous screeds you can run off a Risograph.
I'm quite shocked by these news. What about the right of an invidual to express himself anonymously ?
HMmmmm...well they can't bloody well put blame on the individual if they don't know who the individual is.
Huh, Oui? Isn't that the name of some porno mag? If you oppose this law, you must be a pornographer. What are you hiding, Cheshire Cat? Wipe that face off your grin!
(Posted anonymous to annoy the french. Ha ha, frenchy! Try to catch me!)
I think that this is really terrible. I've had pages on Altern (my French is good enough that signing up didn't pose any sort of problem), and it's been nothing short of wonderful. The whole reason I kept my webpage there was so that I could keep an online journal and be free from the scrutiny of the people that know/knew me.
To me, being anonymous (whether as an anonymous coward on Slashdot or just going by a pseudonym) is not a privilege: it is a right. Services such as Altern provide an important function: they give a voice to those of us who have something to say and are afraid to say it. Being anonymous doesn't automatically make you a gun runner; there are those of us who would just like to keep our offline and online lives seperate, and find anonymity fills that need quite well.
It's a real shame that this had to happen. At least I can post this as an Anonymous Coward.
s/French/Americans/. Ever seen flags burning on CNN? It's usually the american one. 'nuff said.
Because to appreciate or blame individuals you must know them in the first place; if a provider cannot identify its clients, who will? If we all agree that individuals and groups should be accountable for their acts, both good and bad, this project is ok; it's very french, it's radical, but it's nothing like 1984, on the contrary; free people have an identity. The whole idea of anonymity as liberty is american (whatever american liberty means). I never thought anonymity was the way to go, we mostly prefer to deal with real people. B.T.W, americans are much better at restraining individual and collective liberties, in much insiduous ways; for example a GPS in every cell phone, and a Windows PC on every desktop...
Marc Lavallée (yes, I also have a real name)
Joke of a country?! This from the country that was overrun in six weeks?! The country that built a line of turrets that the enemy marched around?!
If one of us needs to take a look at who's been a bigger joke throughout time...I think you know who would be on the ass end of that joke.
Here is a link you might find handy. *plonk*
The french are god's mistake. Someone, please drop neutron bomb's on the nation so we can kill off the french and use their land.
Dude...it's the French...the same people who managed to be attached to the losing side of the French/Indian War without ever even actually fighting in it.
On the plus side...maybe you could go, and hack government servers and host all sorts of kiddie porn on there, and get the administrators in the government screwed. =)
Netjak.com independent reviews of domestic & import video ga
once again, the french show how backwards they really are.
Dr Fgets Strikes again!
And nothing more!
------
sigs are a total waste of bandwith, especially when the signal-to-noise ratio is lower than 1:10.
French are way too lazy to learn English. Don't confuse this with Americans, who are just too stupid.
I want an emperor.
Just another example of beaurocrats who just don't get it. Why don't they just send the money directly to another country and avoid the middle man.
In celebration of those french bastard's censorship, I have decided to pour a croissant along with the hot grits down my pants. (I don't know how to pour a croissant, must I puree beforehand?) thank you.
There's a lot less child porn on the net than everyone says, believe me, I've looked.
-idealego
NO NO NO! You're missing the point. Any time a government says "It's OK, The only ones who have to worry are the law breakers" you should be afraid that you're about to lose some rights.
Take the example in the documentation for PGP. If everyone paid all their bills and wrote all their letters on postcards and you suddenly started using an envelope then folks would start getting suspicious. "What are you hiding" they would ask. "What are you doing that's illegal?" Well, you wouldn't be doing anything wrong, you just want to maintain your privacy.
Be very afraid when a government tells you that there's no legit use of a particular technology. It usually means we've found a way to use our freedoms and they're getting scared.
I was at dinner with some friends recently, one is working on an MBA at a top b-school (please spare the oxymoron comments) and brought along a classmate. He is from France, so I asked if he was returning there after graduation. He burst out laughing and I wondered what I said that was so funny. He said that no one is motivated in France to work, there is no "getting ahead" or "moving up." If you want to try, forget it, everything is based on status quo... you are what you were born into. He's staying in the U.S. whatever it takes.
Someone else at the table works for a U.S. company with a Paris office, and the claim was that Americans who've just finished up a big project and want a break go to the Paris office for a few months as managers, no matter how low your position is. It's a piece of cake because the French workers hate you no matter what for being American, plus they wouldn't respond to effective management no matter what, so you just yell at them all day to work and basically abuse them (because that's what French managers would do anyway). They don't care what you say to them or call them because they are just putting in time until retirement. Since you aren't really doing much except being a cattle prod, there's lots of time to live it up in Paris and have fun. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Weirdness.
There are really only two ways to handle this 1)the administrator studies the law and becomes expert on all the subtleties and precedents AND defends his legal opinions in court, 2)anything that is even remotely questionable is banned.
If I remember correctly, there is no such thing as precedence in the French Courts (even the Province of Quebec in Canada works in the same way). In other words, everything is codified. So it changes from trying to set a precedent, to following the letter of the law. If anything it becomes more or a word game, trying to find a loophole in a contact can roughly fall within the same idea.
The French government hasn't changed a thing their will be still be free hosting people can access. They might start requiring ISP to block thoses sites to? Then you will see a great uproar. What about web boards are they going to illegal now? What about chat rooms since I don't have personal info on a talker I run in france I will be responsible on what they say? Please this has to stop. Stupity of these governments are getting too much.
http://theotherside.com/dvd/
The French judge ruled that the ISP was responsible for the content its users posted just like a newspaper is responsible for the content it prints. I don't think I even need to comment on the absurdity of that statement. The Altern.org admin was forced to pay a few hundred thousand Francs. Slashdot covered the story.
Altern.org was down for a while. The admin set up a petition webpage. Thanks to Slashdot and the concerned Altern.org users, the site was later put back up, and accepting logins. But now, a name and an email address was required. Later on, this was changed to a verified email address (the usual send-the-unlock-key-in-an-email mechanism.) I'm not sure whether or not Valentin (that's the Altern.org admin) had to pay the money to the model.
Since the service is no longer really anonymous, I don't see what the problem is. When the site went back up, all previous Altern.org users were required to provide an email before their account was reopened.
For some reason, Altern.org is the prime target of all the French anti-freedom legislators. I've yet to hear a story about the other ISP's like Chez or CiteWeb.
--
But, my beteween the lines point was that 'merkins have a significantly overrated view of themselves and there importance in the two major conflicts this (last) century.
I dont know what brought you into WWI, but you were not a decisive factor in its conclusion. And everyone else had been fighting for 3 (4?) more years.
In WWII, you tried desperatly not to get invloved (and I suppose that, in Europe, the Nazis went out of there way not to get you invloved) and managed to avoid 4 years of fighting before someone (woops) sunk half of your Pacific Fleet.
Vietnam asside (for lack of a better description) the Commonwelth has put there ass in the line of fire longer (WWI/II), and more often (UN peacekeeping) then you have in (generaly accepted) nobel goals.
Oh ya, you diddnt win in VietNam either, and the non amercian Alies realy diddnt need you help in WWI.
And in WWII, you invaded France, a netural country, but I guess you can call that saving them from themselves.
Thats a little less than once in my books..
>and I hope France's economy will collapse
Actually, they don't have to worry about that one.
The french economy is already collapsed, and you'd probably have to work pretty hard to make it any worse.
Thanks for the reminder!
.sig: Join AMSAT
I was thinking that, but I guess I thought it was a given.
But I too, have had experiences that indicate that it isn't, not when an admin has so many other things to do in a day. Once again, many eyes makes bugs shallow.
My new
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
At first I thought Big Brother (okay, Frere Grand) was just petulant at the prospect of not having someone to slap around, if something embarrassing gets posted -- but I think we should be looking for deeper implications (aside from the obvious potential spread of this precedent to other jurisidictions)
.sig: Join AMSAT
Thus far, I have only been able to come up with one: civil liability in libel cases, the release of commercially privileged info, hoax sites (with possible criminal intent) etc. It would at least give the injured party someone to sue. While not innocuous, I think this may be justifiable. What nation defines "free speech" as including the right to lie? Or a protected right to hide one's malicious wrongdoing? (Note: I specified civil liability here, which narrows the issue to damages to a 'innocent' party)
On its face, this law is futile, since there is no shortage of anonymous and free (as beer) hosting on the internet. Unless they close the e-borders, any French person can simply set up shop in the US and any french person can see such a page. (Note: the law holds French sys admins liable vs. forcing French end users to identify themselves in all web pages they own)
It could readily be represented as a 'principled stand' against 'anonymous (written) terrorism'. I'm not sure I'd buy it, but it's not outrageous.
Orpheus "yelling 'Liar' in a crowded public forum"
My new
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
The Admin is only liable if he doesn't exercise the equivalent of 'due diligence' in requiring the users to identify themselves when they first register for webspace.
.sig: Join AMSAT
What is due diligence in France? I don't know. Would e-mail address verification count? I certainly recall that requirement (though not government mandated) on many US sites going back to the 70's (E.g. Denver U. FreeNet public shell access account had a variety of methods including a nominal $1 personal check; or all the school and work accounts I've ever had)
My new
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
A lot of work, but easily automated:
.sig: Join AMSAT
1) If the law becomes effective, yank your server HDD's and place them in off-line machines
2) post a new '404' on your server that says all
accounts need to be re-registered
3) as accounts are re-registered, copy each user directory back on the server (automate this to be a customer service one-click function)
4) (optional) since the real concern of the original french article seemed to be datamining, add a watermarking routine to your server that stamps each page with the user info (as Geocities once did with their logo) It should be hard for OCR to read the watermarked data against a variety of user backgrounds. Concerned users would use 'privacy enhancing backgrounds' until the European parliament has a chance to point out that French laws (more the Jan 19 law (which madated release of user info to all third parties) than the current one) are illegal under European data privacy.
My new
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
Well technically it's not anonymous if the web server keeps logs of the people who upload material. What i mean is that IP's (for the most part- esp when it comes to free websites) are pretty much factually identifying the person who is posting material. So in effect, by the pure fact that the server is keeping logs of the person's IP uploading data, it's not anonymous.
if there is a proxy server between the end user and the free webhosting service, no problem. The web hosting service can pass the buck to the next level. They can say (if there was illegal material posted) well, the ip address we have is of proxy.foo.bar. And it's up to the french government to follow the link to the next level. After just two or three of these, i am sure the french gov't will realise that it's too much work to keep track of it.
It can also be done at the account creation level. For example, if someone signs up for an account, they can leave an email address, and a name, etc... then when they are complete with the account creation process, the server stamps the account with a creation IP. Next time they login, they again stamp an ip with it... =) Either way, the webhosting service only has to give the govt the ip, and the govt follows it up with the isp, or university or whatever.
All of this is, of course, IMNSHO. Cheers, Elmo
Disclaimer: I didn't read the article, I'm just replying.
Yes, responsibility is important. No, this is not helpful. I see this as akin to requiring a city park to hand out magnetic badges for people to beep in and out so that criminals tempted to commit a crime in the park could be tracked down. A nice thought, but horribly impractical. The criminals will either defeat the security in place (steal a badge, clime the wall, etc) or commit their crime elsewhere. Meanwhile, the park is not a very nice place to have lunch anymore, since everywhere you look there are prison-esq security measures.
I think the "anonymous hosting is banned" title, if a little exagerated, is not off the mark (again having not read the article), in that if you have to identify all your contributors, there's no way for them to be anonymous. If you continue to allow people to post anonymously, it's extremely easy for someone to frame you.
The other problem with data publishing controls is that it's motivated by the idea that someone's going to publish a piece of data that will be harmful, and someone needs to be held accountable. This notion of "dangerous data" needs to be looked at a lot more closely. We're not talking about shouting "FIRE" on a crowded internet. That's impossible. We're talking about porn, plans for bombs, etc. Let's look at how and why data can be harmful and solve those problems, not the general problem of controlling all data flow.
Socialist: One who advocates the state ownership and control of the means of production and distribution. This has nothing to do with individual freedoms, and is in most cases antagonistic to them.
Information, including websites, are still economic products. To advocate that the state be in charge of them is to advocate against individual webmasters being in charge of their own creations.
So long as the individual can be allied with in the fight against capitalism, the socialist will proclaim his love for individual freedoms. But once the capitalist enemy is no more, their designs inevitably turn towards those not of the collective mind.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
The thing governments could try to do is make setting up anonymously hosted pages illegal, but enforcement might be hard, what with the anonymous nature of the things...
So if I put a whole bunch of links in this posting and posted as an AC, would it be illegal in France? Links directly to this comment would show a bunch of text with links, just as any other web page...although there's this odd "Slashdot" header on top.
I'm a bit confused by the comment that they wouldn't be free anymore. Doesn't the statement just mean that they cannot be anonymous?
If the providers get the identity of the people to whom they provide the service, there shouldn't be any problem, right?
^Z
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
This makes me think that Neal Stephenson might be right about our future. In Cryptonomicon (without getting into the story too much), he foresees a datahaven being "the next big thing."
The main characters convince some king of a Pacific island to create Laws allowing anonymity of electronic data. The whole world (including all the evil guys, hence the plot) want a part of it.
I would HOPE that all of those French users would simply copy their files to some other ISP. I guess the question would be, "would they still be legally bound to their site even if their site is in another country and hosted anonymously?"
You're plain stupid...
Off course in France you're innocent until proved guilty. That's the so called "présomption d'innocence".
if you don't know anything, please just don't talk...
"More is the shame that a Socialist party would be the channel for such an egrerious afront to individual freedoms."
Huh? The protection of individual freedom isn't exactly a strong point of socialism to begin with.
Before flaming back, look carefully to see if any part of this post implies that the right is immune from the impulse to suppress individual freedom.
Corry
-- It Came from C. L. Smith's Unclaimed Mysteries.
Poor newbie sysadmin.
Maybe he could get off on a charge of negligence, maybe not. Either way, six months is the maximum sentence. There is no minimum. Mitigating circumstances, anyone?
------
If a tree falls on an anonymous coward yelling 'first post' in the forest, does anybody hear?
Actually, even with these restrictions, which merely require providers to identify who is hosting at their site (and is not yet law, but just passed first reading) ...
French people have way more rights to privacy than we do in the USA. You can access your records kept by a website, they can't distribute them without your express permission, and they can't sell your profile without your consent.
Donnez-moi la liberte, pas le mort!
Mais l'amour serrait plus preferable, je dit.
Will in Seattle
Funny ? You what ?
Sarcastic ? No.
Ironic ? Well, it appears to be an Americans' post.
Sorry, but this just isn't funny in any sence of the word. It's just someone proclaiming the same old typical "I'm American and I have rights" crap, but instead of changing it, making it funny if you will, they've just left it... as it was originally... i.e. unfunny.
I don't think that the comments count as web hosting.
Don't forget that Slashdot doesn't make any ownership claims towards the comments, they belong to whoever posted them.
Just because someone parks a stolen car on your drive, it doesn't mean you're guilty of anything.
BTW, in WWII, Germany lost the war in Stalingrad. Not in Normandy. Yeah, thanks commies. Sound weird, doesn't it?
Actually, just for the sake of argument, I believe that the one battle that could have changed the course of the war was the Battle of England. If Hitler had not been so hestiant to invade England, instead trying to rely on just bombing, then it is very possible that Germany would have been able to take England out of the war. Without England, the US would have been much less likely to enter the war, much less make much of a difference without having a convenient place to stage their armies. Not to mention the fact that the Germans would then be able to put their focus on the eastern front, rather than having to split their resources.
From demands on what language may be used
No - you are free to speak whatever country you like in France, the only obligation is for business to communicate in French and provide French documentation for their product. Hard to call this "censorship"...
bans on encryption
No it is legal, only limited to 128 bit.
I doubt the U.S. is going to extradite anyone from Andover to France over a slashdot post.
By my reading of this, 6 months in prison for anyone who, for example, creates a web-enabled chat server, or allows the posting of comments from web page viewers, et cetra (without subjecting posters to the ID requirements, probably impossible to do via http).
Almost certainly forbids mailing list and Usenet gateways, too.
I agree with the above poster.
There was a day, not too long ago, on the internet when you had one e-mail address, and if you fucked around, then you lost that e-mail address. Server admins were all Bastard Operators From Hell (BOFHs). If you attracted any attention to yourself, you risked losing your access to the net.
Nowadays, there's absolutely nothing that anyone can do to you. Spam people repeatedly from your AOL account? No problem! Just sign up to AOL with a different credit card number. Or sign up to Earthlink. Or Netcom. Or one of the twenty local ISPs.
I'm all for anarchy, but this is pathetic. There's no way for the community to control itself. The assholes have anarchy, and we have laws binding our hands, keeping us from going after them with baseball bats.
The sooner that everyone on the internet is accounted for, the better.
I don't care if you want to post anonymously to Slashdot or not. I just want to know that if you fuck up, you're going to lose something important to you.
I wouldn't say never. Check out my post from easrlier today.
The American Bill of Rights and the Supreme Court can do *what* to the French Government?
*fwap*
The Colonial Cowardace of France
Actually, France just ran out of resources. They were, afterall, pretty drained from WWII.
But the french are not only idiots, they are fagots.
So they're a bunch of musical instruments? Wow, I never knew =P
Poor newbie sysadmin, period, without this silly law.
They put so many restrictions on speach, France cannot call itself a free country.
From demands on what language may be used to bans on encryption, I pity anyone with tech savvy who has to live there.
And to think we had to bail them out twice last century.
I forget what the case was about, but the Supreme Court has ruled that anonymous speech is protected
An interesting evaluation, to say the least. I wonder how Germany would react? Since WWII, West Germany has been strongly opposed to any sort of government action which impinges on the privacy of it's citizens. Shades of recoil from SS actions. I've read that this is slipping somewhat, but remains a strong presence in policy making.
Also to consider, France from time to time displays a strong Germaniphobic tendency.
> As Valentin points out, if this law passes
> in france, then it could quite well become
> law in all parts of the EU. That is frightening,
> but might happen.
No, this is wrong, EU law becomes national law more or less automatically, the reverse is never true. This would require the EU countries to agree on this great idea by a sufficient majority (or unanimity, depending on the kind of decision).
Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net) - AOL IM: MicroBerto
Berto
France, with its tradition of rational centralized government, had fought bitterly even against the electric telegraph, which seemed to the French entirely too anarchical and frivolous. For decades, nineteenth-century France communicated via the "visual telegraph," a nation-spanning, government-owned semaphore system of huge stone towers that signalled from hilltops, across vast distances, with big windmill-like arms. In 1846, one Dr. Barbay, a semaphore enthusiast, memorably uttered an early version of what might be called "the security expert's argument" against the open media.
"No, the electric telegraph is not a sound invention. It will always be at the mercy of the slightest disruption, wild youths, drunkards, bums, etc. . . . The electric telegraph meets those destructive elements with only a few meters of wire over which supervision is impossible. A single man could, without being seen, cut the telegraph wires leading to Paris, and in twenty-four hours cut in ten different places the wires of the same line, without being arrested. The visual telegraph, on the contrary, has its towers, its high walls, its gates well-guarded from inside by strong armed men. Yes, I declare, substitution of the electric telegraph for the visual one is a dreadful measure, a truly idiotic act."
I see no reason why this measure shouldn't go the semaphore way.
FarHat
Life is a sexually transmitted disease.
At the intersection of computation and biology.
I really find it sad that so many people seem to think that the rules we have in "the real world" shouldn't apply on the Internet. - Generally we have those rules because they are sensible, or maybe even necessary to maintain our society.
Yes, just like in the rest of the publishing business.
I don't know what "AUPs" are, but somebody has to take responsibility for whatever illegal content that might be published. If the author of the content can't be identified, then it is obviously the owner of the server who will be considered the responsible editor.
It really shouldn't be necessary to pass a law to clarify that, and I find that six months of prison for insisting on the anonymity of your sources is unreasonable. On the other hand, the editor must take responsibility for whatever he is publishing.
JacobAtheism is a non-prophet organisation.
I doubt very much that the proposal is against the European Human Rights (US doesn't even live up to our level, so please stop yelling so much) or the rules of the European Community.
I would definitely prefer that the subject was clarified through a slight change to the laws about the responsibilities of publishers and journalists, rather than a new law, but I find that people are exaggerating this a bit.
JacobAtheism is a non-prophet organisation.
If you are already looking for p0rn, you will come across child porn. Especially in usenet, although it is rare, it is there. Just like the spam.
I would estimate it at about a thousand messages out of millions. That is a relativly small number.
There: Something at a specific location.
Their: Owned by someone.
Please make sure your english compiles.
What I am trying to say, is that I have come across child porn maybe 4-5 times over the last three years.
Spam by far outnumbers it by 1000 times, at least.
Anyway, I'm not saying that "two clicks" and you find it. I'm just saying that I have seen it while browsing. Although, not while browsing for non-porn sites.
BTW, every sighting was on usenet.
There: Something at a specific location.
Their: Owned by someone.
Please make sure your english compiles.
Deos this open up a new dimension of revenge?
Person A signs up for a webhosting at ISP X,
person B hacks person A's pages. ISP doesn't care/too busy to notice and because person A is legally in charge of the content; person A goes to jail.
Person B got a badass revenge.
No?
In death race 2000 the French are blamed for the destruction of the US phone system. Isnt it ironic how life imitates art ???
Oh those kooky, crazy French!!
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
Obviously most of the slashdoters did not get the point (what strikes me there is the fact that non-anonymous posts are as clueless as anonymous ones.... or is it that Slashdot is no longer what is used to be ?)
(1) origins of the law proposal
The law is proposed to protect ISPs and web space providers from lawsuit-happy individuals. Over the last few years, several public figures (for example model Estelle Haliday) have sued providers for content displayed on their pages. They did not even ask *who* created the pages. Imagine Geocities sued because a user has mp3 files on his page, even after Geocities has removed the infringent files....
The law seeks to force the provider to be more careful.
(2) The proposal is good for eCommerce
Obviously, having an identification for every user is very good for eCommerce companies. But maybe slashdotters are too busy bashing the French to even think about that.
As a remark, where in the world do you find the only profitable eCommerce companies ? They are in France, where they still use a 17+ years old terminal based system called Minitel. State-of-the-art technology when introduced in the early 80's, it is now totally outclassed by the Internet. But the point is : people in France had a successful eCommerce system for years, while the US is still struggling for it today.
(3) this is a second vote, ie. it still needs to go thru a third vote (France has two legislative elected assemblies, the Senate and the National Assembly)
-- Patrick
Hey, I'm not from France either, but it's still interesting. Is this another "It's not in the good US of A, i don't care"/"Wheres Europe Again?" Questions?
Syllable : It's an Operating System
Is bound to end in tears.
.oO0Oo.
The printing press brought about much that was positive for human development.
It turned humans into individuals.
The ability to transmit ideas wrenched us away from the fields.
Anonymity from the prevelent murderous monarchy had the power to pitch brother against brother in a bloody war.
We continue that struggle to be free from those that would like to control our ideas and behaviour for their convenience at the expense of the misery of their fellows.
If the system tried to distribute happiness instead of generating ever increasing levels of misery then we wouldn't need protecting from each other quite so much.
Dogs in the ring fight each other not the crowd.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Dont you know.. Its all to protect us. *LMAO*
I suppose this was posted as ore of a. hey this is happening and could become a trend in other nations so as a collective group it should concern us :-)
Jeremy
It looks like another useless example of a country attempting to legislate against something that happens outside of their sphere of influence. France has now joined ranks with Australia in attempting to control what their people see and think.
Here's the rub, though. Will we still laugh at them when most countries in the world have done the same thing, and ours joins them? What then? Once there is no longer somewhere else to locate the servers, it's far too late to stand up for your rights.
"Suppose you were an idiot..... And suppose you were a member of Congress... But I repeate myself."
Why do stupid govt try to place blame on admins for everything instead of on the individual? Any ideas?
Ever need an online dictionary?
Sounds very good to me. The FREE services aren't
;)
going anywhere.
Means we're still getting free speech and free
beer, but no more free sickos.
Oh, we aren't encouraging illegal actions here,
are we? Sort of we object the proposed laws but
just until they're enforced, right?
Confucius said:"When arrive to a new country, I
don't ask whether its laws are good or bad, but I
ask whether they're being obeyed."
-- "If you had fallen into a shit pit during a battle, lick yourself off and move on." - Jaroslav Hasek
Please remember that this is Roman law and not English law that is in effect. Instead of innocent till proven guilty, it is guilty until proven innocent. Rather silly though. Information is the most fungible of things. Can't host in France? OK, get a isp in Tonga.
Does this mean no more "geocities" type websites, or is this something else? either way it's pretty stupid.
I can kinda see how this is news for nerds, but how many people are here from France? (sorry if I've offended you if you are)
Make Seven
Username taken, please choose another one.
...Always limiting personal freedoms and blaming everyone but the responsible parties. Hey, since the US owns the Internet 'n all, http://slashdot.org /article.pl?sid=00/03/24/1246243&mode=thread, shouldn't we just bitch slap the French for this attempt to steal our power over the Internet? ...Maybe we should just bitch-slap the French because they're the French. :)Sharkey
www.badassmofo.com
For all of you Western Canadians who dont speak French, here is the full text of the silliness going on in France:
The national assembly votes the identification a priori authors of Web sites under penalty of prison.
Summary:
The authors of Web sites must give their identity to their WebMaster before any public communication under sorrow prison.
In the absence of identification the WebMasters are responsible for the contents and liable six months to prison.
The national assembly voted yesterday March 22 a bearing amendment on the responsibility for the WebMasters of Web sites.
This vote intervenes after the vote of the senat on January 19 which prevoyait the obligation for the WebMasters to communicate the identity of an author to any third interessé under penalty of six months of prison.
All the Web sites for which the identity of the author is not known a priori are legally under the leading responsibility of the WebMaster. To release me from this responsibility I should obtain the identity of each of the 48000 users of altern.org.
Well on the ecommerce will be content, what could be better than a file customer which the law obliges you to constitute by leaving you any latitude to exploit it commercially.
The objective of this law seems to be the installation of a phenomenon of self-censorship on the level of the WebMaster who must proceed to ' diligences appropriées' following a setting of residence of a third. And on the level of the author who beyond the preliminary declaration under penalty of prison, does not have any insurance when with the marketing of his identity.
This law goes against the European legislation, and to that of all the democratic countries.
This vote is not definitif, a third and last reading must take place. But it will be a question of rounding the angles between the text of the senate and of the assembly thus one can fear still worse.
Concerning the future of altern.org, as opposed to what I said yesterday before taking note of the exact text, I can continue to exert as long as I accept my new role of watchdog.
Valentine lacambre.
Feed The Need[goatse.cx]
> we've had to bail their asses out twice in last hundred years.
Please, learn history of WWI. Then come back.
And be happy your country did not have several hundred miles of ground frontier with Germany during these world wars. It's way easier to laugh in your position.
BTW, in WWII, Germany lost the war in Stalingrad. Not in Normandy. Yeah, thanks commies. Sound weird, doesn't it?
> If it were, the websites of the KKK, NRA, and
> other hate groups would be illegal.
> Racism is not a crime. Acts of discrimination,
> assault, et cetera based on racism ARE
> crimes,but you can not be prosecuted for
> personal beliefs.
> Part of the US idea of basic rights is not
> prosecuting unpopular ideas.
I know that, but here we're talking about the French laws. And by the way, what can be prosecuted in France is not one's racist or antisemitic ideas, but the "incitation to racial hate". In other words the fact that you create a web site in which you explain that black, arabic or jews are enemies of society and must be banned. Get the difference?
However, given the fact that you started insulting me at the end of your message simply because you assumed I was French, I'm not surprised that you are more attached to this type of freedom rather than to the right for a human being, black, jew, French, anything, not to be insulted and pointed at just because of its origins. Let's say we have different ideals.
Excuse-me, but what's the problem? You only have to identify yourself, but can continue using free webhostings if they start demanding your true identity. It's the only way to make sure that who's responsible for the contents is you and not the webhosting, that only provides a service, commonly used by idiots that want to host anything.
How to contact me - http://www.pervalidus.net/contact.html
So they have really banned anonymous posting, because nobody is crazy enough to take the responsability of people they don't even know the name of nor what they wan to put on their website.
Makes sense to me. If child pornography is illegal, and someone posts it up on an anonymous webserver, anonymously, *someone* needs to be held responsible for getting rid of the content. With the old system the guy hosting it would remove it as soon as somebody complained/reported it and as soon as he checked, it's not ideal but at least it keeps anonymity possible.
Fuck my government (yeah, I'm French and I'm pissed off)
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
The authors of Web sites must give their identity to their shelterer before any public communication under sorrow prison. In the absence of identification the shelterers are responsible for the contents and liable six months to prison.
Now that's great. You give shelter to some poor anonymous coward with a web site, and the French Government rewards you with 6 months in Papillon.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
My cleaned-up Babelfish version:
In the absence of identification the hosts are responsible for the contents and liable to six months to prison.
The national assembly voted yesterday, March 22, on a bearing amendment regarding the responsibility for Web site hosts.
This vote comes after the vote of the senate on January 19 which (created?) the obligation for the hosts to give the identity of an author to any third party under penalty of six months of prison.
All the Web sites for which the identity of the author is not known are legally the responsibility of the host. To release me [the host] from this responsibility, I should obtain the identity of each of the 48000 users of altern.org.
Well, ecommerce will be content; what could be better than a file customer which the law obliges you to constitute by leaving you any latitude to exploit it commercially?
The objective of this law seems to be the installation of a phenomenon of self-censorship on the level of the host who must proceed to 'appropriate diligence' following a setting of residence of a third. And on the level of the author who beyond the preliminary declaration under penalty of prison, does not have any insurance when with the marketing of his identity.
This law goes against the European legislation, and to that of all the democratic countries.
This vote is not definitive; a third and last reading must take place. But it will be a question of smoothing out the differences between the text of the senate and of the assembly; thus one can fear still worse.
Concerning the future of altern.org: as opposed to what I said yesterday before taking note of the exact text, I can continue to work as long as I accept my new role of watchdog.
"The world doesn't really need more busy people, maybe not even more intelligent people. It needs 'deep people'..."
Although this is a good counter-argument, it won't help much. It's easy to rewrite or interpret the draft in a way that only someone who intentionally provided webspace to others will be liable. And then?
Claus
The second option is impossible. Neither do French courts have legislation over non-French servers (unlike US courts, who are stupid enough to believe that) nor is it possible to find out whether a anonymous post comes from a French citizen or to enter criminal preceedings against him/her -- you know, anonymous posts are..., well, anonymous.
Claus
The article on altern.org says this near the end:
"Ce vote n'est pas definitif, une troisième et dernière lecture doit avoir lieu."
Which translates to something like: The vote isn't definite, a third and final reading has to take place.
This implies that this is not yet law, and there is still time to get involved to stop this law from passing. Why stop it? Well, obviously the law won't affect the majority of the population, since (I assume) it doesn't say that the French are not allowed to post their web sites anonymously on servers in other contries. All the law basically does is makes anonymous web hosts in France illegal (by punishment of prison time), which just puts some of their companies out of business. It's their own economy that the politicians are ruining.
I don't see how France plans on enforcing this law when other countries don't have the same law. A single country simply can't successfully regulate the internet, it's not going to work. Solution - Use a server outside of France.
void theoremProver(){
print "this product is correct"
}
i'm french, and i love my country, but I DON'T HATE USA ! I never have been in USA, so i don't really know USA... but 80% of the people who are posting about the french law are just saying "french are idiots", or "USA is the best", and so on... If you are so proud of your country, and if you HATE so other people (french in this case) why don't you submit in the fucking KKK ? why don't you hate blacks , too ? and why don't you nuke us, like one of you suggest !!!! I really hope that others USA people aren't just like you, RACISTS. There is here a few americans persons who defends french by posting "frendly" letters. Thanks to them ! But I think too that this law about identify us is a bullshit. In here I identify me because i don't want to be a coward... But I appreciate to have the right to choose to identify or not:) Sorry for my not so good english... but look, i am not so lazy to learn english, i think the majority of you can understand what i have writen bye, and think that i'm not better than an american, and amercan is not better than me :), US gov make "mistakes" too !
Dammit, I'm an Anonymous Coward! How will I get by without anonymous web posting? I'll starve, I'll
Oooh, web hosting.
Never mind.
Well, i'm french (and planning to leave the country by emmigration means because of all those problems btw) and as such i just want to add some points that i do think very few people outside of that pitiful country are not aware about:
- We are (also) restricted, by our governement will, to only one real ISP: France-Telecom, which is the only one with the ability to control local communications, all other ISP are in fact paying this one to have the right to use its phone lines. Non local communication costs are (obviously) set to so high rates that no individual or _even_ small company can afford the bill: the local rate is 0.28franc/minute (you need 6.6 francs to make one dollar), you consider it cheap as an american ? Then please consider also that the average salary a simple employee can expect is around 6800F/month (1000US$) and that about 24% of that money goes back to the french governement as income taxes and remember our little VAT rate: 20.6%, in that context you add the local phone bill. ;| ... i almost forgotten that this contract is _only_ available from 22:00 to 08:00, very easy when you are living with a family ! :( ... a day ! yes the number is correct ! As you can see, in that country 'freedom' is everything but a reality. ... because i never came to the point of installing it ! ;|
We do have some way to lower that phone bill if we pay for a kind of special contract which apply just to the Internet connection and which is restricted to only a couple of phone numbers (belonging to France-Telecom of course) called 'Primaliste Internet' then the rate comes down to 0.07fr/mn which gives about 4.5fr/hour, not that cheap hey !
There is also recently another way by subscribing to a special contract (whose name vary with the ISP) and which allow to connect within the same hours and not pay the phone line, of course it is quite expensive and usualy just enough to be useless for individual purposes. Furthermore only FT can sell those lines to other ISP and as such their number are restricted: about a week ago a french ISP had to refuse that connection to 300,000 people asking for it
You can also use ADSL, yes but as it is again FT which is allowed to install it, they delay, they take their time, a lot of time, in fact just as long not to get problems with the EU but long enough to be sure that the people do spend the maximum possible money before the year 2002.
Having a static IP ? Well a dream. Note that you can ask to FT for a permanent connection to the net with a static IP, only (!) 20000F/month (3000US$), and obviously you only have a restricted bandwidth that forbids you to do any ecommerce which would envolves large downloads like sharewares or anything alike, and i didn't said the cost of the installation (which is not included)
So, an acces 24/24-7/7 ? Simple: as the contract ends at 08:00 automatically but doesn't get back to the lower rate automatically at 22:00 and imagining that you manage to use it at least once, you'ld pay about 13000F/month (2000US$).
Free homepages are required, for individuals to express themselves, not only to display the picture of its dog, but also to talk about important problem which may lead to dangers if not stated from an anonymous point of view.
Is it a way to restrict people from doing so ? yes: look just at how many strikes are currently running in france and look at the very few number which are exposed through the media. But don't imagine that only that country is doing such things: why isn't it possible to find an US shop selling things internationaly ?
Yes, a lot of things needs to be done for freedom to become a reality. And as always, an elite chose and vote laws according to their needs, and usually it is money and power which are involved. If they really wanted to stop porn or whatever illegal things they would have just made pay for that to the ISP that way the ISP would have done ti's best to check after that, no they did involved the ID of the user, that way you can only display the image of your dog.
Sorry for my poor english.
PS: It cost me about 5US$ to type in that.
Just host your anonymous pages outside France (e.g., Geocities). Only the local French ISPs and French hosting sites will be hurt by this legislation. The French gov't must be filled with some real sharp thinkers, eh?
j'ai versé les granulations chaudes en bas de mes sous-vêtements à Paris par le passé.
Merci.
Spam is hardly rare in the Usenet.
By the way, does anyone else find these "two clicks and you are smack dab in the middle of child porn" a little hard to believe? Where are these numbers coming from, where do the activists keep finding all of this child porn? To they have a different definition of child porn than I do (maybe anybody under 60 baring their ankles?)
I read the internet for the articles.
The most sinister part of this, as far as I'm concerned, is that the administrator is now responsible for JUDGING what is legal and what isn't.
There are really only two ways to handle this 1)the administrator studies the law and becomes expert on all the subtleties and precedents AND defends his legal opinions in court, 2)anything that is even remotely questionable is banned.
If you thought IP laws were scary today, imagine what happens when your local ISP starts patrolling your site looking for anything that might possibly lead to legal action. Militant ISPs would make the whole idea of free speach and due process meaningless.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
This is mind-bogglingly stupid, it makes the Aussie censorship laws look almost progressive!
--
"If child pornography is illegal, and someone posts it up on an anonymous webserver, anonymously, *someone* needs to be held responsible for getting rid of the content."
huh? first, your sentence doesn't seem to parse. this legislation does nothing to make someone responsible for removing the content. now i think you meant making someone responsible for the content.
why does someone need to be responsible for the content? if i enclose a whole bunch of child porn in an envelope and mail it anonymously is the letter carrier responsible? is the phone company responsible for obscene calls? no.
both organisations will try to help police and may even be required to do so. that's fine - require web sites to take down illegal contnet, and require them to try to trace the source if that's so important. not too keen on that either, but it makes more sense.
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
Why _won't_ the internet quickly lose its American influence? Its because of laws like this. Unless other countries adopt the democratic laws of the internet they will be in a weakened position to influence it.
:)
Yes, here in the US we are facing a similar stuggle, but our government is much slower.
Is internet access neary as cheap anywhere outside of the US as within it? Doubt it.
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
However, according to the summary, it doesn't just say that the content "becomes the responsibility of the webmaster", it also says that the person hosting the content can be imprisoned for six months. And it isn't clear how far the "responsibilty" of the web hosting company extends--would they be treated as if they had put up the content themselves, including criminal liability?
The implications may be fairly benign or they may be pretty serious. Someone with a better understanding of French law should look at it and explain its implications. But I don't think the law is as trivial as you interpret it to be.
Still, I also suspect that it isn't all that different from US practice. It's pretty easy to trace people through IP addresses and phone records. And you can bet that a hosting company that didn't keep log records and showed a pattern of hosting pirated data would be found liable by US courts. And if the US courts couldn't get them for that in a particular case, there are numerous examples where the police just wreak havoc on-site and confiscate equipment indefinitely "as evidence", which usually amounts to a pretty hefty punishment in itself. Give the French this: at least they spell out a policy that, for practical purposes, probably already exists in the US.
CmdrTaco says: "The immediate consequence for this is that free Web hosting services in France, like altern.org or multimania.com, won't be able to continue. "
.sig: Join AMSAT
Hardly. It merely requires that they make a creditable attempt to ensure users identify themselves when they register.
However, on Jan. 19, the French passed a law that said hosts had to provide this ID info to any third party. The original French article seemed quite emphatic that they were afraid of 'data harvesting' by commercial interests (in violation of European data privacy laws) not freedom of speech issues.
The January law was objectionable, and probably illegal in Europe. In its absence, the current law would simply force the hosts to have something to turn over (under court order), or take liability for the things that are said (if there was criminal or civil liability: libel, etc.). But combine the two laws, and it's mandatory publishing of private info.
(incidentally, a stopgap might be to automark watermark the info onto the page with a graphic, as Geocities does (did) with their logo. Human readable, and automated (hence cheaper than responding to individual requests), yet hard or impossible to harvest (I don't think current OCR would be up to it, given the highly variable page backgrounds) Clearly what the spammers want is a datadisk of 'all users'
BTW, will someone fill us in on what the French definition of 'due diligence' ('diligences appropriées') is?
I certainly find it interesting that the original French article doesn't express any real outrage at: "Les auteurs de sites web doivent donner leur identité à leur hébergeur préalablement à toute communication publique sous peine prison."
[My translation: "Web authors must identify themselves to their hostsite before publicly publishing, under pain of prison" -- up to six months, I believe. In other words: don't lie on your registration form.]
My new
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
- All french citizens with web pages on french servers are required to id themselves
- All french citizens with web pages on any web server are required to id themselves
Obviously the latter is a bit more restrictive. In any case, here's bablefish's translation:_______
2B1ASK1
Well.. at fisrt, this kind of made sense to me. I used to think this way. Look at this picture:
I have a computer. It's mine. I own it. I have an internet connection. I put software on my computer to allow anyone on the internet to use it as a platform to, say, put up software. Now... am I not responsible for what my computer does, within reasonable limits? If I am knowingly hosting something illegal, it *IS* my problem.
This ruling goes farther than that, saying that even if I wasn't aware of it, if I cannot identify the person who is responsible, then it is as if I am directly responsible.
The problem is.. what is the 'web' ? Usenet? Web sites? what about when protocols change? I think this can be looked at in a fairly simple manner.
1) It is your computer. Ultimately, it is your responbility what that computer does, within reason.
2) If you are knowingly allowing your computer to be used for a criminal purpose, then you are guilty by association, and are contributing to the crime.
3) If you are participating in a large distributed system, of which a small part is being used for an illegal purpose, you should be required to take reasonable measures to prevent this use, if possible. in other words, if you run an NNTP server, why should you be able to carry alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.pedophilia? Certainly, if you didn't know the group existed, you are not at fault, but if you know it's there, are you not reasonably guilty?
Let me say first that I see no problem whatsoever with the implications of this amendment by the National Assembly. While there are a couple problems in the implementation, most notably for free webservers in the Geocities vein, I have nothing against the alleged loss of privacy in this case.
It all comes down to the balance between accountability and anonymity. Despite this change, the French are not restricting free speech in any fashion. They are simply stating that if you need to say something stupid, you need to put your name on the bottom of it. Rather than use the cliched child-porn example, let's use hate group websites. I don't know what France's laws against the promoting of hatred are like, but I assume they are stronger than Canada's by virtue of having been on the doorstep of the Holocaust. I don't believe that having such a site on the web has any redeeming qualities but for educating people in the effects of hysteria. What this new law says, is that if someone is hosting such a site, they are fully responsible by law for facing the consequences unless they have a proven identity onto which they can pass the buck, so to speak.
This simplifies things greatly and in fact makes things more "free" (libre) for the providers. They are allowed to host anything whatsoever. All that this does is clearly state their responsibility for content.
Recently (in the last couple years), there was a great deal of attention given to a similar situation with a web-hosting company in southern British Columbia. A site was hosting several hate sites, and the maintainer refused to give the identities of the American based clients. I never did hear what the Supreme Court of Canada decided on this case, but throughout the lower court proceedings, the host had been ordered to take the sites down on several occasions, and the order was blocked by appeal in all attempts. Free Speech in Canada is almost -too- unrestricted.
Anyway, it was an interesting proceeding to watch. All that this new French law does is make the line clear between the service and content providers.
------
If a tree falls on an anonymous coward yelling 'first post' in the forest, does anybody hear?
no not funny, insightful, I for one am tired of hearing all the crap to the effect of "Your children are 2 clicks form child porn" in the last issue of readers digest their was an article on CyberAngels, online stalking and child porn, Typical "Save the Children" I mean they called an IP address a secret computer ID number and called traceroute a special tool to track down users.
I for one am tired of media fascination with child porn+net how many times have you heard the media go on and on about child porn without mentioning the net?
my grandma came over to visit for a week, she thought that the net was all about porn and was shocked that my parents would allow me to access such a thing, I explained that the net is like a big city: there is a "Good" and a "Bad" side of town, but I have yet to stumble onto some child porn, and with it being "2 clicks" away from anywhere had any existed I think that I would have ran into some by now...
This is especially relevant in France. Corruption and "gentle" coercion have tradition in France. The government routinely threatens physical violence against anybody who might reveal state secrets, which can be something as trivial as the President de la République having an illegitimate kid.
Back in the old days, the French gummint could prevent the spread of uncomfortable information by threatening the author, then his publisher and finally his printer of abusive "contrôles fiscaux", or worse, by threatening the life of their wives and kids. Now, with the Internet, the government no longer has this ability, and they desperately want it back. The new media allow information travels faster than you can say "écoutes téléphoniques", and if you start threatening people, hundreds more will just mirror. They could easily shut up Jean Edern Hallier who tried to publish the old fashioned way, but a few years later, they couldn't stop Pascal Barbraud.
Hey idiots, everybody understands that the Président de la République may have an extraconjugal lovelife, or *gasp* that he may get old and ill. But nobody understand why you tried so desperately to hide these facts.
> So they're a bunch of musical instruments? Wow, I never knew =P
I guess you never heard French people talk - pure music.
In fact, that's why blockheaded envious Anglos can't ever understand French philosophers, because they think a book of philosophy should sound when read like a 1950s IBM technical manual. Even Germans have more sense than that. Dim Anglos! Have you no hearts for art? Oh well, whatever, nevermind.
As for the moron above you in the thread, yeah sure, that land which blessed this dismal ball, as it doesn't deserve, with Brigitte Bardot and Laetitia Casta, now that there's obviously a country fulla faggots, sure, you bet, like duh, you moron.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
The problem with the French law is, as other posters have pointed out, that the provider is also criminally liable. I'm not sure what the law actually states (my French isn't good enough, nor do I trust Babelfish to grab all the nuances one'd need for a legal analysis), but if merely removing the webpages probably won't be good enough. So, a poor newbie sysadmin, gets cracked, starts serving anonymous content, and he's probably liable. Great.
The French Socialist party has long prided itself for years on being the force of reason and liberatrism... some might debate this... anyways, that comment was intended to mean a rather large *sigh* at watching the *sarcasm* "intellectual elite" of France be so devoid of vision in the face of technology.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
For people like me various "free" services have been almost 100% necessary. In truth the net was a very cost prohibitive area until these things started apearing. Most people can't afford to quit their jobs and go at something they formely did as a hobby full time with ramifications. Plus it's quite hard to justify the use and implimentation of something that costs quite a bit.
I have no idea about France or how their people view things of this nature but I think that it significantly raises the bar on the ability to publish almost any content on the net at all almost in any form. Anonymity is a side issue from the get go. Also now that you have something concrete to loose (namely yourt over priced access to network computing resources) there is incentive to be "good".
Basically what this does is force anyone critizing the government to make their views much, much more painful. Admins are just being pressured into becomming much more greedy and natzi like with things. In all practicality there is little reason not to allow free homepages.
However this is one thing that does indeed worry me. Apparently many people who do software development seem to think that they must force each and every application to have some component to send data back and forth across some network interface. Also almost all of the applications on freshmeat are geared for people creating networks with machines that they have complete control over. This is very bad indeed.
When you look at how much such services cost initially and how much they are not decreasing as a whole there is a really bad problem.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
France is not especially a large bastion of freedom in the first place. I also seriously doubt that the US takes it's cues from France in any way. Although in theory 1984 is possible it is not realistically attainable in any way. Eventually people revolt and do something rash, the government looses money, people don't care anymore and the system collapses, etc. I would also make the bold statement that myself and each ad every person that is currently alive in this world will be dead and nothing but dust before 1984 can occur even on the most optimistic timetables.
Plus there is the issue that perhaps no one realizes. France is a democratic country not a communist one controlled by a dictator. France is also on our side (the US). Last I checked no one is getting randomly slaughtered in France for what they say, nor are there any really large quantities of political prisoneers that could have been possibly jailed. Also realize that 1984 concerned itself with a location of theworld which did not include France in the least so there is a minor problem.
What I see a bigger problem is that the creation of content is becomming much more of an intensive process and costs more and more. I think people don't have any idea how much it takes to create your own content providing system. Now maybe on slashdot people pull 6-7 digit salaries but I do not and I would also wager that most of the people in France don't either. Now we are not simply content to have standard HTML and graphics dynamic content and various levels of java, javascript, and other things are also required and other server side mechanisms that almost no one can really have without a supreme sacrifice. What I see as happening is that the average Joe is going to get screwed not by the government but by inequal distribution of the ability to speak and convey information. Sure I can be as smart as einstein but if I have a page a geoshitties and you have something like http://www.jimmycoolslashdotter.com with all sorts of dynamic content and maybe say 100Gb of page space that you can fill with almost
anything you like and make it look good what does that do? When will it be possible to connect an arbitrary PC to the net and give such preformance?
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
Under the law, does the name of the host need to be publicly available, or merely accessible to the government (though the webmaster for instance). The first outright bans anonymity. The second establishes responsibility for content. Under the second it would also still be possible for webmasters who trusted their users (or monitored them) to allow fully anonymous hosting (at some liability to themselves).
The significance of this depends a great deal on the details of the law. I hope that if it is a reasonable one.
Steve
This specific bill (which has passed the Parliament and Senate readings, and now only has to go back once to the Parliament after the Senate's corrections before it can be made law) has exactly two consequences:
:)
1: Unless you are a big company, there is no way you can devote the manpower to register all your users. Exit the small content providers.
2: Anyone who wants to post anonymously will open a page on Geocities or somewhere else, where such a legislation doesn't exist.
What the government fails to see is that there is exactly 0 difference and 0 added cost accessing a WWW page stored somewhere in New Zealand, for example, rather than France. So the net effect isn't to make "illegal" content disappear or more easily prosecutable. It's to change it's URL
My french isn't that good, but the article seemed to indicate that anyone hosting a web page with no means of identifying authorship was in violation of this new law. As far as I can tell, any agency that allows someone to put up a page under their domain, in france, is responsible for that page if they cannot supply the author.
.fr, and requiring all french domains to be in some manner registered.
So what keeps french citizens with beefs against the government from posting their revolutionary propaganda to, say, a US public hosting page? It doesn't seem like this accomplishes anything but the inconveniencing of harmless teenagers creating their first web site... anyone else would be just as well served getting foreign hosting.
It would have been more effective for a government with such anti-liberty tendancies to take control of these public hosting sites and make them more intrusive without being obvious - IE, requiring an email to send access password to, requiring it to be
Not that I advocate totaltarian governments. No, not I.
[goosestep off, stage left]
-- Still waiting for the Nike endorsement
What if some US legislators think it's a good idea and try to pass it as law? If that should happen it will become increasingly difficult for other countries to remain havens of anonymity.
Precedents can be dangerous. It doesn't matter if there are workarounds.
----
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Can't you guys read the whole thing before going ballistic???
So, for the laymen, this has not happenned yet, and if it does, it will be challenged in the European court.
--
Umm, there's no way the french government to block people from using US and other countries free servers. In other words, this is just another great law that will be a huge pain in the butt and do nothing positive for the French.
It's nice to no that we in the USA are not the only ones being governed by idiots.
Click here to read too much about my personal life
I think you think to highly of your country. It was just a few months ago that the US department of Justice proposed eliminating Anonymity on the Internet. Now, I'm not sure exactly what this entailed (since there isn't really any true anonymity on the net other then IP spoofing). Mostly likely email, but it could probably be read to include websites as well. It?s a widely known fact that just about anyone 'inside the beltway' doesn?t know jack about the 'information cyber web'
Yes, the US does have a constitution that protects the rights of its citizens (god, I almost said users). But from where I'm standing, it looks like there being eaten away to serve corporate, and law enforcement desires. This is the same Nation that passed laws saying that copyrights should be extended 90 years after the author's death (and you can bet they'll be extended again by the time Mickey mouse's © is up). This is a nation who's FBI who wants wiretapping technology built into routers, and the ability to wiretap international satellite phone.
To be honest, it doesn?t really seem like America is that far from the nightmares of Orwell and Gibson. And a lot of western/European countries are following their lead.
Amber Yuan 2k A.D
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
The law started well. It was first designed to solve the altern.org vs. Estelle "Bimbo" Halliday scandal. So it started well. But then ... as the law was being passed in the parliament, some zealot deputy or senator ammended with delirious requirements. Somehow, as that usually happens, those went unnoticed and passed.
But there is worse than what Valentin points out in his small blurb. Here's a fucking insane part of it: you may get 6 months of jail and/or $100k of fines if you misidentify yourself on a bulletin board. Now isn't that insane? Or just plain ridiculous.
Plus that's the kind of law the Scientology will loooooove. They'll be able to get the name and addresses of their opponent, they won't have to spend money researching them to send their hordes of drone picketing outside their home with "XX is a pedophile" signs.
Anyway, everything is not lost, the law might be challenged before the constitutional council. But I'm extremely disappointed by the weak coverage in the press.
Making changes to the TOS "demanding" that users include contact info isn't enough, because if the users DON'T, then BigHostingCompany is responsible for the content. To the French, it is "your problem" if the people hosting on your server didn't put the identification, because YOU are responsible for their content.
Prediction: Mass exodus of web servers, a la Australian and p0rn sites.
Slashdot claims, in a headline, that "anonymous hosting is banned."
Read the little blurb, and it says that not at all. It says that if a webpage does not clearly identify the page owner, any content on it becomes the responsibility of the webmaster.
So either A) the page owner puts up identification, so it's no longer anonymous, or B) the hosting service takes on all responsibility, thus rendering it directly liable for anything that gets posted. B) is, IMHO, not terribly likely.
Granted, the law might not state "anonymous webpages are illegal", but the effect is the same. No more anonymous hosting within the boundaries of France.
Makes sense to me. If child pornography is illegal, and someone posts it up on an anonymous webserver, anonymously, *someone* needs to be held responsible for getting rid of the content.
Illegal content is still illegal. And was illegal before this. Sensible AUPs would disallow illegal content.
What's so wrong with that? Unless the French government is really pushy, sounds to me like it'll only become a problem for webmasters who have users that post illegal content.
"Why do you want to be anonymous if you don't have anything to hide?"
What about commentary on political or social issues? If someone is trying to express an opinion without prejudicing an audience either for or against the expresser, they need anonymity. If someone is trying to avoid flames (or sometimes physical threat), they need anonymity. If someone is blowing the whistle on corruption in business or government, they might also need anonymity.
Ideally, no one would be anonymous. Because ideally, no one would have need to be so.
There is a substantial difference between forcing webmasters to remove illegal content on a web site when it has been discovered and making them ciminally liable for not knowing who it was that posted the material.
The article states the penalty is a prison term of 6 months: Good lord, some poor smuck newbie sys admin gets his web site cracked by script kiddies posting warez in an obscure sub-directory and for that he gets a criminal record and 6 months in jail?
Arguing such a scenario was not the intent of the law plays foolishly into the hands of those who would use it to crush your voice of dissension.
This is nothing but a thinly veiled attempt to restrict content to government sanctionned distribution channels. More is the shame that a Socialist party would be the channel for such an egrerious afront to individual freedoms.
I'm sick and tired of people raising the specter of pornography everytime they want to take away my freedom.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
Slashdot claims, in a headline, that "anonymous hosting is banned."
Read the little blurb, and it says that not at all. It says that if a webpage does not clearly identify the page owner, any content on it becomes the responsibility of the webmaster.
It basically ramps up the responsibilities of those who own the machine.
Makes sense to me. If child pornography is illegal, and someone posts it up on an anonymous webserver, anonymously, *someone* needs to be held responsible for getting rid of the content.
What's so wrong with that? Unless the French government is really pushy, sounds to me like it'll only become a problem for webmasters who have users that post illegal content.
Those web hosting services *can* continue, right? They'll just probably be modifying the TOS to enforce their users to supply names and contact info.
Anonymous Coward comments are, in a sense, anonymous webhosting.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Sounds dumb to me for another reason. They are going to kill the ISPs and thus Internet industary in France. ISPs have to prove the identity's of all persons having a web page. So if they can't they get fined or jailed. So what do the ISP's do instead, remove all pages. If someone in France wants a page they have to goto another country (Hopefully the USA, since I am resident of that country and it would make our economy stronger).
No ISPs? Then French will leave France and work in other countries when it comes to eCommerce, they Next Big Thing.
Linux O Muerte!
Anonymity has always been outlawed in France, this is the summary of a bill before the french national assembly to codify a law banning all anonymity on any internet service physically on french territory.
As this article points out, the law is not yet final, but one more vote will make it final. The bill was unopposed by the clueless elected officials, because it merely confirms the internet must follow existing french law.
The new law will require all web hosting services to verify the identity of every person putting a web page on their servers, and must turn over that identity to any person who ask for it, including any cop or government official, as well as any private citizen. There is no requirement to publish the web authors information on the web page, merely to maintain a copy and to give it out when asked. It also says that if the web site owner can't or won't turn over the identity of a user, then its 6 months in prison.
The immediate downside of this law if it passes is that altern.org will have to kick off all users, and only let back on those who can prove their identity in one of the ways acceptable to the french government (carte d'identity, permis conduire (driving permit), or passport, as well as proof of residency of a current phone or electricity bill).
As Valentin points out, if this law passes in france, then it could quite well become law in all parts of the EU. That is frightening, but might happen.
The uncertain thing is what happens to people in other countries using french web hosting services and cant travel to france to prove their identity. As the law is currently written, french web hosting can only allow identified users on french soil, and all others must be kicked off.
ahhh, c'est les francais
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Anyone remember how this case got started?
This all came about over a copyright fight because model Estelle Hallyday did not like that nude photos of her had been scanned from a magazine and posted to free website AlternB.
One VERY important note from the original case is that the plaintiffs did not even TRY to identify the poster of the "offending" material. They specifically targeted the ISP. In fact, it seems that it would have been quite trivial to identify the owner of the pages.
Article from March, 1999 in Wired News
The implications of this decision are FAR worse than a cursory examination would reveal.
The National Assembly passes law requiring Web site authors to identify themselves
under penalty of imprisonment.
Summary:
Web site authors must identify themselves to their hoster before any public
communication can be made, under penalty of imprisonment.
In the absence of an identification, the hoster is responsible for the site's
contents and is liable for up to six months in prison.
Yesterday, March 22, the national assembly approved an amendment dealing with
the responsibilities of Web site hosters.
This law follows from the vote of
the Senate on January 19 which required Web hosters to disclose the
identity of any author to a third party under penalty of six months in prison.
All Web sites whose authors are unknown are the legal responsibility
of the hoster. In order to free myself from this responsibility I would
have to obtain the identities of each of altern.org's 48,000 users!
Of course, the e-commerce industry will be happy. What could be better than
requiring customers to reveal their identities, leaving you the possibility
of commercial exploitation?
The goal of this law seems to be to enact self-censorship on the level of the
Web hoster, and on the level of the author who, after giving up his identity
under penalty of imprisonment, has no insurance that his personal identity will
not be used for unfair profit.
This vote, however, is not definitive. A third and last reading must take
place. But it will be a question of reconciling differences in the texts
put forth by the assembly and by the Senate, so the law could conceivably
get worse.
As far as the future of altern.org is concerned, contrary to what I said
yesterday before reading the law's exact text, I can continue to host
sites as long as I accept my new role as watchdog.
[Note: I, the translator, take no responsibility for discrepancies
between the translation and its original version on altern.org.]
kugano
Who the heck do the french think they are? Have they ever heard of the Bill of Rights? Don't they realize that we have rights in America that they have to respect. If they don't, we'll have to take them to court. Those Supreme Court guys have this funny tendancy to uphold the constitution.
French people piss me off.
-----
The new orange petal fuckers is coming for you and he has a big belt buckle.