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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."
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---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
That's "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité" to you, sir. FTFY. (Yes, I am French).
I am afraid this is just another scurity theater in action, in a country where the "Front National" has been polluting the political discourse for the past 10 years, and has been cheaply imitated by politicians of every stripe.
Essentially, the "Socialist" government is now a center right government, complete with war and security posturing.
The Conservatives are that close to the Front National.
The Front National has been winning the very latest election.
With politicians like these, who needs enemies? They will damage France more than Daesh, those sons of b* ever will.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
That's exactly what ISIS told us was their strategy, and told us that they wanted us to do. Their public web sites and social media accounts have been quite clear that they want the west to make life worse for citizens and take away basic freedoms. That helps radicalise people to join their cause, and demonstrates that they are not some ineffectively little group by rather a powerful movement with the ability to influence and control western governments.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
behead their asses.
At first I was confused by this phase, but then I realized what you meant: they suffer from rectal-cranial impaction, so a beheading does indeed involve their ass.
"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
Yeah well, they can't be that dumb if they're winning elections. For 'dumb' you have to look elsewhere.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The Islamic Paris terrorists texted each other on a public network. One of the Islamic California terrorists pledged support to ISIS on Facebook.
If our national governments aren't bothering to watch the people who "like" ISIS's homepage or otherwise raise flags on themselves in public, why would we think any restrictions on encryption (that they won't watch either) would improve public safety?
"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.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
The sad-but-funny thing is, Romani are actually descendants of peoples from the North of India and part of current Pakistan who were displaced by the expansion of Islam and later by the growth of the Ottoman Empire. They're unrelated to Romanians and Bulgarians (and Polish and Italians and Greeks and Czech and Irish and Germans and.. and ...) as Roms, beyond the limited intermixing that happened while they traveled for centuries across Europe. Using them to claim that the Schengen Space has failed is a ridiculous lie as well as a wild anachronism.
But let's face the real issue here: Marine Le Pen's F.N. has successfully re-marketed itself as the new center of the french political landscape, and the reigning parties are only now getting the memo. Out of sheer laziness and panderism they've been casting themselves as merely reacting to each of Marine's sorties on every new topic, so she got to define everyone's position for years now. And the recent elections have just now given her all the weight she needs to make them dance any way she wishes. All of this, courtesy of both parites' strategy of popularizing the F.N. in the hopes of being the only alternative left against it. It's like Kodos and Kang playing less-and-lesser-evil to C'htuluh.
The F.N. has made Syrian refugees, unpatriotic (read: gov't-dissentive) behavior and Islam the topics du jour, so PS and LR have happily obliged, and bipartisanly passed State-of-emergency laws as well as broad mass-surveillance laws. Unemploy-what ? Who gives a rat's ass ? We'll only worry about the smoldering ruins of our economy when the moosleems are defeated, apparently.
But only after the current government is done building up the totalitarian state that the ex-far-right-and-now-center F.N. will need to implement its crazy policies.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
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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