Re: Minitel "saved" by hackers?

At 05:51 12/07/96 +0200, Daniel Salber wrote:
>At 2:37 AM +0500 on 7/11/96, Arun Mehta wrote:
>
>> I'd love to find out exactly what happened.
>
>"Hacking" is inaccurate: the users
>were not necessarily computer-litterate but just found another way to use
>the help feature of the server. Rheingold's Virtual Community has a pretty
>accurate account of the facts (see chapter 8, also online as
><http://www.well.com/user/hlr/vcbook/vcbook8.html>).

Thank you for the correction. I checked Andre Lemos' original, and he uses
both terms. To quote, "Through thie detournement -- literally, a 'hijacking'
was born the messagerie. By hacking and then making available the bulletin
board software, a counter-current to the French technocratic approach
produced a usage of the system which was never a planned objective."
Slightly inaccurate.

>In a previous post, you said:
>
>> So, shocked by this, what does the government do? Being unable to
>> distinguish between different kinds of messageries, the government put a 30%
>> tax in 1989 on all, and raised it to 50% in 1991! No wonder the Internet is
>> gaining rapid popularity in France.
>
>I think this is wrong. These taxes were only for sex messageries and the
>30% tax didn't actually stop most of them from making money. I think the
>50% tax wasn't actually enforced and the tax rate remains at 30% (see
>http://www.univ-paris8.fr/~babelweb/voltaire/v_no23.htm -- this is in
>french, sorry).
>
>You must realize that the government has no interest in stopping all
>messageries: France Telecom is (at least for the coming few months) a
>government agency and makes a lot of money from the messageries.

Once again going back to the original: "In 1986 the first roadside
billboards for the messaggeries rose appeared (picturing, for example, a
robust male or a woman with slogan '3515 BUSTY', the online address of a
Mintel rose chat service). French traditionalists were outraged and Charles
Pasqua, acting Minister of the Interior, attacked the gay messagerie Gay
Pied. Worse, the French state gains 36% of the total charges paid. Taxes on
all the messagerie services became the order of the day. France Telecom has
no way of distinguishing between the messagerie rose and any other board or
messagerie. In 1989 the government tax was 30% and in 1991 a 50% tax was
imposed in the hope of eliminating all messageries."

That's seriously innacurate, it seems to me: but I would appreciate some
confirmation before I attack the guy in my review. Will check out the urls
you suggested, problem is during the monsoons the phone connection to my ISP
keeps dropping.

>
>The Minitel is no more "centralized and bureaucratic" than the Internet was
>only a while ago (ie, when NSF was in charge of most of the core
>infrastructure).
>The Minitel may look centralized and bureaucratic because anyone who wishes
>to open a server has to go through France Telecom (which delivers unique
>names like Internic).

Has FT ever denied permission (to hard-core sex servers or neo-Nazis, for
example)? That, the tax they charge and the prohibition of encryption make
it too centralized for my taste. And will ultimately kill it. The longer the
French take to migrate to the Internet, the worse for them (IMHO).

>There were even some experiments of a european Minitel system linking
>several european videotex services a few years ago. I think they fell short
>because the videotex technology has been so quickly outdated.

Why not link up videotex in every country with the Internet? Let people surf
the Web using their TVs and remotes (and maybe a keyboard with an infra-red
link). That's what I'm trying to tell our utter failure of a videotex
service in India.

Arun Mehta Phone +91-11-6841172, 6849103 amehta@cpsr.org
http://mahavir.doe.ernet.in/~pinaward/arun.htm
The protestors of Tiananmen Square will be back. Next time, 
the battle will be fought in cyberspace, where the students 
have the more powerful tanks...

At 21:31 +0500 on 12/07/96, Arun Mehta wrote:

> Has FT ever denied permission (to hard-core sex servers or neo-Nazis, for
> example)? That, the tax they charge and the prohibition of encryption make
> it too centralized for my taste. And will ultimately kill it. The longer the
> French take to migrate to the Internet, the worse for them (IMHO).

The tax wasn't charged by FT but by the government (ok, FT is
government-owned but it makes a difference nevertheless). Yes there have
been a few cases of censorship by the government (not FT!). As fas as I
remember the reasons were like chat services that allowed online
prostitutes or drugs dealers.

Prohibition of encryption is definitely a problem here. Although it's not
officially prohibited, you have to request a permit to use strong crypto,
and you don't get one if you plan to use "too strong" crypto like RSA and
you're not a "serious" institution like a bank. Some recent changes in the
organization of the security agency in charge of delivering permits as well
as the current trends towards the deregulation of crypto export in the US
may bring some change... some day. (see http://www.cnam.fr/Network/Crypto/
-- in french -- for details of french encryption regulations)

> Why not link up videotex in every country with the Internet? Let people surf
> the Web using their TVs and remotes (and maybe a keyboard with an infra-red
> link). That's what I'm trying to tell our utter failure of a videotex
> service in India.

As far as I know, most videotex systems use 1200 bps and crude 8-color
graphics. That's ok to make use of many web sites, but the web seems to be
heading full speed towards higher and higher bandwidth and interactivity.

Daniel