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French Legislation Would Block Tor and Restrict Free Wi-Fi (vice.com)
Several readers sent word that French newspaper Le Monde got its hands on documents showing the French government is debating two new pieces of legislation that are unfriendly to internet users. The first would ban people from sharing Wi-Fi connections during a state of emergency. "This comes from a police opinion included in the document: the reason being that it is apparently difficult to track individuals who use public Wi-Fi networks." The second would forbid the use of Tor within France's borders. "The main problem with such a ban on Tor is that it wouldn't achieve a whole lot. Would-be terrorists could still access Tor from outside the country, and if they did manage to access Tor from within France I doubt they're concerned about being arrested for illegal use of the network."
"War and security posturing" is orthogonal to the left-right (liberal-conservative) axis. What you're actually complaining about is that the Socialist party is becoming more authoritarian, not that it's becoming more conservative.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
"War and security posturing" is orthogonal to the left-right (liberal-conservative) axis. What you're actually complaining about is that the Socialist party is becoming more authoritarian, not that it's becoming more conservative.
Bzzzt! You are wrong. When a "Socialist" Prime Minister says, talking about a minority that they should go back to their "own country" (conveniently located in Eastern Europe) because they don't want to integrate in France, it's time to recognize that this is so called "Socialist" party is now trying very hard to follow the footsteps of the racist National Front.
And that's, again, a "Socialist/Liberal/Left party. Conservatives are even worse.
Don't believe me? Read it and weep.
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Did you realize that your are talking with the legitimate choice of French citizen ? For sure there are not your enemy, even if you disagree on how to act.As a Swiss citizen I would be more than happy to see France in a better political health. This could be a bit harsh to read for you, but I describes actual French political system as a "monarchie républicaine" that are not so far from the old "monarchie constitutionelle" and "monarchie absolue". Basically the the president have far too much power in the whole government system. This lay down to basic math:
When you have only a single party that can win the election, the system tend to make 50% peoples against the other 50%. The frustration is high, so any problem will make the believe that the opposition party will be better, so the system will oscillate near 50% frustration. After some cycle the peoples eventually realize that the two main parties never meet there goals, so a other one will gain support as the situation degrade. At some point you have 3 parties, and whenever to one that win he is almost granted to have near 66% of frustration against it. So it look like having 50% frustration is the best possible score? Wait!
In Switzerland, instead of a president, we experience since more than 150 years a federal council composed on 7 peoples from a range of leading parties. This make the vast majority of the peoples with different political orientation represented up to the head of state. The frustration is then lowered to the the peoples that don't have representation, probably below 20%.
Just winning an election is not enough, you still have to negotiate with the others to make a positive move.
Next to impossible. Let's look at wi-fi routers. Everyone has one or more; hotels, B&B's, student dorms, apartment block tenants, home owners, railway stations, airports. Even a netbook or smartphone can be configured to become a wi-fi or bluetooth hotspot. Not even mandating secure encrypted connections requiring passwords is going to be an obstacle, since you just put the password up on a noticeboard somewhere, or make it the ESSID itself. The effective radius of bluetooth is around 10 meters. So the French government are going to be patrolling every single "bubble" of bluetooth space?
France has had problems with terrorists in the past, so they have tight controls over communications. Even to get a PAYG SIM card (Mobicarte), you need to provide photographic ID. Meanwhile, in any hotel in the UK, you can just buy a PAYG SIM card from a vending machine. For a while, any form of encryption was illegal, but Internet commerce pushed that aside.
If they try to make Tor illegal, they must also make VPN tunneling and any other form of encrypted communication because it's always possible to reassign port numbers.
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