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Tech Specs Leaked For French Spyware
An anonymous reader writes "With the 'three strikes' law now in effect in France, the organization tasked with implementing it, Hadopi, has been working on technology specs for making the process work — and those specs have now leaked. It appears to involve client-side monitoring and controlling software, that would try to watch what you were doing online, and even warn you before you used any P2P protocol (must make Skype phone calls fun). It's hard to believe people will accept this kind of thing being installed on their computers, so I can't wait to see how Hadopi moves forward with it. It also appears to violate EU rules on privacy."
In France your ISP (well 99% of them) provide you with a preconfigured modem/routeur that they call a "box". This box handles IPTV and VoIP too. IPTV and VoIP depends on specs often known only to the ISP and therefore it is hard to find a compatible modem/routeur of your own, forcing you to use the ISP's if you want to use VoIP and IPTV (which is actually forced upon you as part of most ISP's basic package, it is difficult to get a truly IP-only connection here for a reasonable price, IP+VoIP+IPTV is actually cheaper than just IP) The long term plan is for all ISPs to agree on some basic standards for their "box" and the filtering software/spyware would be implemented on the "box" thus making it "unavoidable". Most people won't notice (don't get me started on how completely technically illiterate people are even allowed to connect to the network) the firmware update (they already don't as it is and most rely on basic out of the box settings) and blacklist updates and so on. Thank you ISPs who catter to technical morons and thanks to the french government for basically planning to introduce a mandatory in-your-home wiretap for everyone, guilty or not.