French Legislation Would Block Tor and Restrict Free Wi-Fi (vice.com) 115
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."
So a national emergency gets declared and... (Score:3)
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So much for egalité, fraternité, liberté.
Re:So a national emergency gets declared and... (Score:4, Insightful)
And add character sets that work on Slashdot.
Re:So a national emergency gets declared and... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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What are the chances of this being enacted and enforced? I hope, like hell, they don't do the whole knee-jerk response thing and end up looking as stupid as my country.
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I heard they intend to pass legislation renaming their fries "liberté fries".
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What are the chances of this being enacted and enforced? I hope, like hell, they don't do the whole knee-jerk response thing and end up looking as stupid as my country.
Unfortunately, given the recent terrorism and idiotic response to it, I think it's pretty high.
Re:So a national emergency gets declared and... (Score:4, Informative)
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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I jumbled the order for emphasis, and yes, you're right. It's nihilistic at best, to punish open WiFi AP owners, and stanching Tor is another exercise in WTF. Know that the scared politicians are doing the same thing in the USA, but on a different scale: they sift everything, including this text. Why doesn't Slashdot use https?
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Um, no. Look at your browser's security icon.
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How silly.
Why shouldn't what's posted here be private content, vetted by your auth? Must all of the Internet's conversations be public record?
Re:So a national emergency gets declared and... (Score:5, Informative)
"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.
Re:So a national emergency gets declared and... (Score:4, Informative)
"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. [leparisien.fr]
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"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. [leparisien.fr]
We all know the Socialist said that.
The problem is you seem to think Socialism is immune to racism for some reason, and that reason is unrelated to experience and human history.
Romas = north of India origin (Score:5, Interesting)
The sad-but-funny thing is, Romani are actually descendants of peoples from the North of India and part of current Pakistan [wikipedia.org] 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.
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Actually socialists are always authoritarian, so are fascists and all other types of collectivists. What is happening is that this authoritarian regime is now creating laws that are not only about stealing money from employers and generally wealthier people to subsidise the desires of the mob but now the new usurpation of power touches the mob as well.
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Oh yeah? Then how do you explain the Green Party?
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Oh, okay, so you have no goddamn clue what you're talking about then.
(FYI, the Green Party is left-libertarian. In particular, like the Libertarian Party, the Green Party supports "anti-federalism" and seeks to weaken the Federal government allowing state and local governments to take up the slack (or not, as they see fit). The main point of contention between Greens and Libertarians is their approach to solving the Tragedy of the Commons. Of course, by the fact that the Greens and Libertarians tend to arri
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The "Ten Key Values" of the US Green Party are as follows:
Of those ten items, I see three (grassroots democracy, decentralization and community-based economics) that directly conflict with your claim of support for central planning. Clearly, you're just flat-out wrong about that part.
As for the "social justice" aspect, you're right that they cl
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Governments are all designed to protect the elites from the poor.
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Obviously, you're talking about some kind of delusional caricature of the Green Party and not the actual thing itself; thus, engaging with you is pointless.
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Also: U.S. citizen here, and all jokes about your country aside (because they're all in good fun any
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Re:So a national emergency gets declared and... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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1. People are scared.
2. People want the government to do "something". You are always in trouble when someone starts saying "We have to do something". Without a good idea of what that something should be.
The law is dumb. Use a VPN to a nation without the restriction on tor and use TOR.
Going to outlaw VPNs?
Not really possible or even a good idea.
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Well, you indicate they are polluting the political discourse.
Ok
It sounds like French people are faced with a choice to either allow refugees who running around killing people or some assertions that they aren't polluting discourse.
I can't remember voting for
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Looks like somebody has trouble using Unicode correctly.
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You type it in the text box.... and the text box renders it like it's 1999.
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For some people it is always somebody else's fault. It it not. It is yours.
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how does one get unicode to work right here? I'm sure it's doable but I don't recall ever seeing instructions on how to get it to happen.
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ASCII question, here's your ANSI [ascii.cl] (Not all characters render)
Browser support: All browsers
Now, there's something you don't see everyday...
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ah, I was thinking unicode needed something else, rather than just more digits. (and of course a capable browser and font :)
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It's not unicode. Unicode is "unsafe" [unicode.org]...
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so the answer to my original question of how to get unicode to work is "don't" :)
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You can kinda fake it... It's good enough
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Stop spreading FUD. As far as is known there is one instance of people having done that, and it was both glaringly obvious in hindsight and is not a whole lot harder.
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Right now the tor network is just to small to hide in. There is not enough onion.
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Seriously, stop lying and twisting the truth. The TOR network has countermeasures to it and it is large enough to make such an attack both hard and obvious. The question is not whether this is theoretically possible, the question is whether this is being done in practice.
And if you are unable to control your fears (as you seem to be), you are doing about the worst disservice to others by spreading them here.
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Send out letters and a chat down about still trying to use that service.
Finding out who is using the service within a nation is not difficult. Reconciliation of information flowing at an international level in and out of France would need more funding ie a Tempora like effort to capture all the communications in and out of France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Oh? Then why are people in China still able to use it? Maybe the authorities there are not trying hard to block it? Oh, wait....
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Your point might have been valid 5 years ago, but now we have good pluggable transports.
If you want to block meek, you'll have to be blocking all of Google, Amazon and Microsoft's servers. If you want to block obfs4, you'll need a serious budget and more research. Good luck with that.
Re: Disruption. (Score:3)
why attack your enemy when you can get them to attack themselves?
Re: Disruption. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Proper credit (Score:2)
But to be honest, this is from the playbook written by
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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.
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Shouldn't they behead the actual politicians instead of their donkeys?
Fsck those bastards (Score:1)
There used to be a saying in France: "We have the dumbest conservatives in the world".
I vote to change it to: "We just have the fscking dumbest a-holes politicians in the world".
That is all.
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Conservatives are always dumb. There is even research showing that by now, obviously not widely known.
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Yeah well, they can't be that dumb if they're winning elections. For 'dumb' you have to look elsewhere.
Quickly, (Score:1)
rename Tor !
If we can't watch Facebook and Texting... (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Re:If we can't watch Facebook and Texting... (Score:5, Insightful)
Because terrorism isn't the reason, it's the excuse.
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That was easy. (Score:2)
One attack and Liberté, égalité, fraternité goes out the window.
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Well done for completely missing my actual point but having a nerdgasm about some trivial cut and paste error.
Sometimes I fucking hate Slashdot jsut because of all the hypercritical anal morons on here.
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Everyone keep this crap in mind (Score:1)
When you get the urge to shout that someone needs to do something in the wake of a tragedy. It's exactly what an oppressive government counts on - "never let a good crisis go to waste" is the oft quoted phrase.
Paris attacks? Ban encryption (which had nothing to do with it). San Bernadino attacks? "Common sense gun controls" (none of which would have helped, but all of which can be seen as either an end run around due process or another step towards total confiscation & disarmament of the law-abiding
OPEC oil (Score:1)
Since 1971 OPEC is selling crude oil exclusively in US$, starting the friction between Islamic and Western; It's a lose-lose proposition; You're riding a Frankenstein monster; As a Muslim, President Obama is pretty much aware of it;
http://qz.com/562128/isil-is-a... [qz.com]
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The problem with that is the type of investigation that has been opened. In some nations "security" investigations its not just that a person has to be pro