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."

Comments

Not to worry

[elrous0]

The government pinky-promised that they won't use this for anything other than enforcing this law. And you have their *word* on that.

Re:Not to worry

[mlts]

Just wait until the blackhats get ahold of this and change the phone home site from the standard to the blackhat's servers. Voila, instant botnet that is illegal for a French citizen to remove. I'm sure the guys on Elbonia are just drooling over that they can do once they can poison an ISP's DNS to get command/control access to the machines.

Re:Not to worry

[HungryHobo]

The internet seems to be going down the shitter now that all the politicians kids are using it and those in power have started thinking internet==facebook.

So what's the next communication medium that the government has so little understanding of that they don't even think about regulating it?

Darknets are halfway there but they'll probably be outlawed in a few years.

Re:Not to worry

[Buddy027]

Why change it? Just add their own URL. It can still phone home so it looks like it still works. Even sending in false data.

Good luck with that

[Anonymous Coward]

What are they going to do? Fucking outlaw Mac OS X, Linux and all the other non-Microsoft operating systems?

Funny fact: in french it's called système d'exploitation. Maybe that's why they want such software. To exploit you and your computer.

Re:Woot

[kipd]

They came first for the Windows-users, and I didn't speak up because I didn't use Windows...

So how Naive are the French?

[Dyinobal]

Looking over the spec I can't honestly think that the French are dumb enough to think something like this could work, the scope is to broad, and software solutions are silly easy to bypass.

client-side enforcement is stupid

[bugs2squash]

The whole suggestion of enforcing this client-side is so idiotic that I'm inclined to believe that there will be ISP-side enforcement and that in fact the client is only there to warn the user.

Re:Woot

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, nice! Can I have the Linux version?

No, Linux is now illegal because it can't be monitored by this software.

Re:Woot

[cpghost]

Which one do you prefer? qt-hadopi, gtk-hadopi, ... or just that plain old fashioned nvidia/ati binary blob driver for your graphics adapter?

We Joke, but...

[carp3_noct3m]

You know we around /. like to joke about things like encryption and the year of the linux desktop, but the more intrusive governments get, the more I see the internet as a whole routing around this damage and increasing both the use of *nix based systems and encryption. Imagine facebook levels of popularity but with encryption, privacy, and control as primary factors of computing for the masses. Because, in the end, its either that or we might as well just start walking around naked because we have "nothing to hide".

Re:Sarkozy is the pawn of the media elite in Franc

[John Hasler]

> So much for liberté... we still have egalité and fraternité (until further notice)

Unless you are Roma.