Tech Specs Leaked For French Spyware 212
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."
Of course they will, they're *French* (Score:3, Interesting)
France is the only country on the planet that has actual SCUBA Police to wander around underwater and make sure you have your "Diving License".
http://www.scubaboard.com/forums/basic-scuba-discussions/300289-scuba-police.html [scubaboard.com]
Re:Not to worry (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:We Joke, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Imagine facebook levels of popularity but with encryption, privacy, and control as primary factors of computing for the masses.
As I understand it, this is essentially what the Diaspora project [joindiaspora.com] is trying to do. Hopefully they'll succeed. (And maybe smooth out some of those concerns that the name is inappropriate.)
Hey, the specs actually bring up free software. :P (Score:5, Interesting)
Page 15, under "key objectives": "integration in any environment, including free software".
I'm curious to see how they intend to make that work out. :P
Re:Not to worry (Score:3, Interesting)
Perfect way to frame someone too... just fake "OMG, this guy is P2P-ing copyrighted stuff" a few times, and now the roomie or whomever owns that computer is banned from any access to the Internet.
I'm sure someone will make an easy to use app or website to visit on a mark's computer just to trip this software.
Re:Good luck with that (Score:3, Interesting)
What are they going to do? Fucking outlaw Mac OS X, Linux and all the other non-Microsoft operating systems?
They wouldn't outlaw them, just buraucratize it and wash their hands. "You can run Linux, MacOS, any OS you want, you just have to run this software on it. It is win32 software. You are free to choose your own OS but must resolve technical problems arising from these choices. " Polite, diplomatic, bureaucratic way of saying "fuck you".
Actually reichwingers are pissed off (Score:4, Interesting)
In the first elections after the damn law was passed (regionales), they got disastrous results for the below 30 demo. Sarkonazy met with UMP MPs to discuss the bad results, and according to insiders they were freaked out and complained that his pet project had cost them the young vote for good. In an unpublished poll they found out that they had lost something close to half the young voters. Now those are not the most reliable voters, but Naboléon's core demographics of Alzheimer patients, racist deranged grannies and Vichy nostalgists has one redeeming quality: they're more likely to be rotting in hell than to be getting a hard on at the fucker's newest racist gimmick while dropping their bulletin in the ballot box.
For reference, in the 2007 election, the son of a bitch got 53% of the votes; but his opponent got 53% of the below 65 demo, he just got 65% of the geriatrics! Thankfully, many of those scumbags will have expired next time.
Re:The power and influence of the copyright indust (Score:3, Interesting)
You assume it's the copyright industry. For years, any form of encryption was illegal in France and that had much more to do with government paranoia than anything else.
Heck, at one point my employer had a VPN tunnel to a subsidiary in France and I established beyond any doubt that the encrypted (no I am not losing my mind, I asked a respected colleague) traffic was being eavesdropped as a very select subset of this traffic was not making it across the tunnel - yet made it quite happily across another tunnel based on the same software.
That was the big driver that proved to me that not only was CIPE not hugely secure (which I already knew - it had been demonstrated a couple of months previously and the recommendation was to abandon in favour of IPSec), but it was being actively eavesdropped and censored (which I did not know).