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France is Building Its Own Encrypted Messaging Service To Ease Fears That Foreign Entities Could Spy on Private Conversations (reuters.com)
The French government is building its own encrypted messenger service to ease fears that foreign entities could spy on private conversations between top officials, the digital ministry said on Monday. From a report: None of the world's major encrypted messaging apps, including Facebook's WhatsApp and Telegram -- a favorite of President Emmanuel Macron -- are based in France, raising the risk of data breaches at servers outside the country.
About 20 officials and top civil servants are testing the new app which a state-employed developer has designed, a ministry spokeswoman said, with the aim that its use will become mandatory for the whole government by the summer. "We need to find a way to have an encrypted messaging service that is not encrypted by the United States or Russia," the spokeswoman said. "You start thinking about the potential breaches that could happen, as we saw with Facebook, so we should take the lead."
About 20 officials and top civil servants are testing the new app which a state-employed developer has designed, a ministry spokeswoman said, with the aim that its use will become mandatory for the whole government by the summer. "We need to find a way to have an encrypted messaging service that is not encrypted by the United States or Russia," the spokeswoman said. "You start thinking about the potential breaches that could happen, as we saw with Facebook, so we should take the lead."
The French government’s encrypted app has been developed on the basis of free-to-use code found on the Internet and could be eventually made available to all citizens, the spokeswoman said. She declined to give the names of either the codes or the messaging service.
They seemed to build their end of the Channel Tunnel in the same length of time as it took the British to do their half. In the mean time you can't get a f---ing tunnel everyone knows needs building that goes 1/20th of the distance in the US because of politics, and it'll cost 10x as much if it ever gets built. So I'd say the French are fine actually with their 30 hour weeks - it seems fewer hours = more productive. Who knew?
I don't know about 30hours vs 40hour workweeks- but there have been studies that show increasing work hours per week does have diminishing returns up until a point where adding more hours does actually result in lower overall productivity.
There have also been studies that show that taking a lot of vacation actually increases productivity over the year than forcing people to go to work 50 weeks a year and only have 2 weeks vacation. America's stingy vacation policy actually negatively impacts productivity. If you want your workers to be more productive over a year- give them 6 weeks off not 2.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
On the other hand, if a government creates a F/OSS app that has been vetted, isn't this a boon for pretty much anyone in the world? The German government is why GNU's Privacy Guard is still being updated, and France already funds VeraCrypt.