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France Passes Harsh Three-Strikes Legislation, Again
shrik writes "After having it struck down as 'unconstitutional' by the Conseil Constitutionnel once, Sarkozy's controversial 'three-strikes' law (known as HADOPI) was once again passed by the French National Assembly, this time allowing for a judge to order the disconnection (without requiring the presence of the accused party!), thus placating some of the administrative concerns. Opponents say they will 'challenge the law again in front of the Constitutional Council because it deprives the accused of being able to defend themselves properly.' Coverage at Ars also points out a provision that says, 'all Internet users must keep their connections 'secure' and are responsible for what happens on them.'"
all Internet users must keep their connections "secure" and are responsible for what happens on them
Windows users..... RUN!
839*929
I know this is taking place in France, but in North America hasn't the RIAA already prosecuted people without notifying them they were being prosecuted?
every government trying to legislate safety and functionality into the internet. Hire competent engineers, pay them a fair salary, do not expect kickbacks, this system of interconnected computers and servers is a wonderful thing and it seems every time i turn around, another bureaucrat is trying to murder it in the name of re-election and approval ratings. the internet is for all mankind, but fatbodies in armani suits for some reason forget this.
to france: stop letting your government divert from the real issues. get back on track with employment and reform.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I wonder if they included a provision that excludes French National Assembly members from the three strikes.
Given enough time any connection can be compromised and if France's script kiddies are like all the others I wouldn't put it past them to pwn a couple of assembly member's connections. Since you are responsible for what happens on your connection...
If at first you don't succeed, bribe and bribe again.
How will this pass the European Unions "right to free speech" when you have no internet connection to communicate with anyone? Oh silly me, it's the French we're talking about, they never did give a cr@p about European laws unless it was in their favour.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
I LIKE leaving my wrouter unpassworded. I have a resource that costs me nothing it makes good sense to share. My neighbours do the same and are on a different ISP. The result? Near 0 downtime. But it seems this will be legislated away. It depresses me that since I got cable almost 10years ago my speed and capacity has dropped, reliability has dropped massively and is going to take another hit. Capitalism works very well on small individual items but clearly cannot deal with massive projects. Oh well at least its not as bad as cellphones...
It passed, but with a 285-225 vote, there's noticeably significant opposition. And that's just the lower house; it still has to go to a "parliamentary commission of seven senators and seven members of the lower house to pen a final draft that's acceptable to both houses". And that's if it's not blocked by another constitutional appeal.
So, just typical politicking bullshit you'd see across the pond over here, or really anywhere, nowadays, so that Jack can say he was for it and accuse Jane of being against it, to further some hatespeech... er, campaigning. I can't get too worked up until it's actually for real; there's just too much of this nonsense nowadays.
All countries should have a law that prevents their governments from being allowed to repeatedly reattempt to pass a law the got turned down once already. Especially when the law has already been found to be unconstitutional.
Coverage at Ars also points out a provision that says, 'all Internet users must keep their connections "secure" and are responsible for what happens on them.
That sounds great, especially to those of us who have to deal with the Great Unwashed Masses PC problems, but most users are doing good to find the power switch. Making them responsible for what happens to the internals of their PC without their knowledge in a rapidly evolving threat landscape that even security professionals struggle with at times is blaming the victim. It's not their fault Windows is a highly porkable product.
They're teaching young people how to use computers in school but, with few exceptions, they're not teaching them how to use them safely. In many schools it would be the blind leading the blind in security education. Most teachers don't know enough about PC security to make any relevant contribution to solving the bigger problem. Ultimately, it's like trying to fight a fully involved house fire with a garden hose.
I'm not sure what the answer is, but I am glad that it's someone else being heavy-handed and dickish for a change.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
So saying that a connection must be secure immediately raises the question: how secure?
Are they responsible if a neighbor guesses a WEP password and downloads kiddie porn?
Are they responsible if they have a fully patched Windows box, with virus checking, but get compromised by a virus missed by those safeguards and become part of a botnet?
If a criminal breaks into the house while they're on vacation and makes a bunch of purchases with fraudulent credit card numbers, are they still responsible?
Legislatures all over the world pass laws that can't be enforced universally. They are trolling their constituents and trying to look busy to justify having a full time job. The problem is you get huge law books with thousands of obscure laws that have never been tested in court. The police, and by extension the state, can arrest anyone and find a law to justify it. While it might not stick in court yet, being arrested will generally cost you a great deal of money and embarrassment, many employers will fire you with no recourse, it can be used as justification for seizing assets in some cases, etc... Our only protections are the state's lack of interest in us as individuals, or aggressive protesting by the mob if we are visible enough.
So the copyright industry wants you kicked off the net for three mere accusations of copyright infringement. That could be as little as three songs. The songs sell for a buck on Amazon and iTunes. So for a mere three bucks the copyright industry wants you banned from the net for eternity.
Let's imagine a different law. Let's imagine that the banking industry gets fed up with people stealing pens out of their lobbies. These pens are expensive, a buck each. Imagine that a law is enacted stating that any person merely accused by a bank of stealing three pens is banned from the entire banking industry for the rest of his or her life.
Does anyone think such a law has any chance to be passed? Does anyone seriously think that such a law makes sense? Of course it would not and of course it does not. But in the crazy world of copyrights, people actually take the proposed three strikes law seriously.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
You don't treat the symptom, you treat the cause. Otherwise you may as well be jerking off. What causes crime? Poverty, lack of prospects for a future, and ignorance. You may deter one individual from committing more crimes by putting him in jail for life but that does nothing to dissuade the one after him and the one after that. Yes, there will always be the bad seeds, the one no amount of opportunity and guidance will help. But there will be fewer of them than what we have now if we address the causes.
Want to know how to set the drug problems straight in this country? Legalize and regulate the shit. Those who are hooked on the hard shit like heroin will get their maintenance dose from a government clinic for free. Those who aren't yet hooked will find it harder to score in the first place as the street supply dries up. And pot? For fuck's sake, give the growers licenses and let them operate like micro-breweries. Keep big business out of it, don't let their marketing departments start trying to manipulate public demand. Can you imagine how much peace would be had in Mexico if illicit drug money from the US dried up? Hell, just imagine knowing your flat won't get broken into by a junkie looking for shit to fence.
Politicians don't have the fucking stones to put forward this kind of legislation.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
You've been marked troll, but you're quite right. The idea that the an average windows user can keep a PC secure, keep their wireless network secure, etc. is right up there with expecting the poor to get a fair trial in court. Admin is a day-in-day-out job of constant vigilence and few missteps -- by a professional-level definition of misstep. The average user probably makes their PC vulnerable in about 5 different ways for every new day they use it.
Um, you're replying to a comment about France's legislature passing a very enforceable law. They are defining liability: if your agent (computer) does something, you are responsible for what it did.
This is almost the exact opposite of the phenomenon that you're talking about. It simplifies law immensely (assuming they wrote it generally enough) and on top of that..
People say users can't deal with security issues, and maybe they are right, but it's also true that users are the best and only people who even have the slightest chance. Users don't, but nobody else can. Saying their computers are their computers, is a damn good step on the road to progress.
Of course, you can't have the principle in place that users are responsible for their computers, without also making sure they have the power to control their computers. If your computer is doing things that you don't like, and if you are responsible for whatever it does do, then it's a requirement that you be able to maintain it.
There are some rather obvious implications, and we should expect a lot of complaining about such a principle from the very parties that bought this law. They are this close [imagine me holding my finger and thumb close together] to outlawing DRM, since no computer can serve two masters.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.