I think a lot of us have been feeling that for a while. This only adds to it.
Well, if it comes to pass it will only last a year or so until the french government realises that every single server in the country has been savagely violated by every enterprising blackhat on the planet. It will start to become a game for bored script kiddies. I can see them on IRC now, "dude, you wanna go root some frenchies?"
(French here). This is a really sad day for the country. I don't really know what to add here to the conversation, it was pretty much expected after the massive amount of laws during the past 10 years that tried to limit freedom of speech and increase the surveillance, it's just the next step.
The country has just reached a new low. I just hoped until the end that it would not pass but I was delusional. As a side effect, it's also going to destroy the few technological businesses we had left, like they needed that... I was really hoping that things would change and that the country could finally take advantage of massive amount of bright minds we have here... So much potential is wasted... Anyway, that will be for another year...
It's the same with basically any law regarding security and intellectual property on the Internet in France. Even though many associations and informed people send snail mails and publish open letters to their MP/Congressman and ministries explaining that it doesn't work, can't ever work both technically and legally, and violates about half of the human rights. Yet they just keep ignoring it and vote laws because they have the majority, carefully referring to the rare, selected advisors that subscribe to their point of view to justify their decisions.
It's been a few years already I've been ashamed of being French myself. From here it just looks like France is turning more and more into an Orwellian state and we are helplessly watching it become so step by step.
This is a huge setback, both for democracy and for the french tech ecosystem.
While the most preeminent french hosting and cloud providers (OVH, Online, Gandi, Alter Way...) have been quite vocal about the issue, none of the big french telcos (Orange, SFR, Bouygues) have said a single word about it. Shame on them!
900 tech companies, research organisations, and trade associations (so far) have asked the government to reconsider the law proposal (http://ni-pigeons-ni-espions.fr/en/), with not success, obviously. Several organisations I'm part of (including the two companies I have founded) where part of the movement, of course.
There is still some hope that the law will be modified, by the french Senate, or that it will be censored by the french Constitutional Council, or the European Court of Human Rights.
We also plan to start evangelising people on the use of VPNs.
How much is this silly thing going to hurt hosting companies in France? Think about it, I'd rather hash passwords and host my site in Belgium than host locally. The government is hurting its own country!
We visited France/Paris for our marriage anniversary back in June; and the city left a lasting impression on for over the course of 4 days.
All I can say is; don't change your fundamentals. Then they have won. It's just a larger version of your bitcoin demanding DDOS bandits. Once you give in, humanity will fail.
I am more worried about the innocent people who are going to suffer because of this.
I'm sorry but this reaction is just stupid and based on wild speculation. I'll bet you $100 right now that France will not prosecute anyone for using hashed password.
What people should be concerned about is the impact this will have on online anonymity, which this law is actually a direct threat to.
Despite the noble 'Little guy fights back' story. I'm starting to wonder if this will have an overall detrimental effect?, Give wings to Sarkozy's desire to police and control the internet, and overall limit consumer and business confidence in web security?
I'm French, and that's also the first thing I thought when I read this title. I really don't see this happening, knowing how the French government is anti us tech companies (remember when yahoo wanted to buy Dailymotion?)
There're a bunch of corrupted inviduals with no counter power to keep them in check. No decisions are made for the benefit of the French people since a long time, every law passed is either to augment their power, rise taxes (already world top 1 or 2 depending on the year) or to the benefit their friends owning private companies. Of course technology freedom will suffer from this as well.
French politics simply does not understand the internet. And they are uninterested in privacy or security. They "lost it" in my eyes with their LOPPSI internet filtering laws (which they heavily promoted with nonsense about child sex offenders) [1]
This law (in general) is going from the sublime to the ridiculous.
> Obviously there is going to be someone who doesn't do business in France and operates a public DNS server that doesn't censor anything.
and so when the rights holders notice enough people pirating using dns resolvers they can't force to do anything via the french courts, they'll probably just take it up with the french ISPs and ask for IP blocks of these resolvers. And I'd guess they may already be trying to IP block various piracy sites.
Will be interesting to see them play whack-a-mole. I wonder if at some point France will just start maintaining national blocklists, that if you want to run an ISP or reply to DNS queries from France, you are legally obligated to follow (or get blocked yourself); from the article, it sounds like the current law is significantly short of that so the whack-a-mole will continue.
Well, if it comes to pass it will only last a year or so until the french government realises that every single server in the country has been savagely violated by every enterprising blackhat on the planet. It will start to become a game for bored script kiddies. I can see them on IRC now, "dude, you wanna go root some frenchies?"
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