161 posts, only 190 comments, but the statistics shows a stable increase in the number of visitors (in average a bit less than 500 unique visitors per day).

During the week-end, I have worked on upgrading WordPress to the newer 2.9 release, and have just finished optimising my apache and mysql configurations. Access to my websites should now be somehow faster.

This is not a real surprise, as it has also happened with the HADOPI I law last May, but this time, I will take the time to write him a letter to express my feelings.

I will only quote the following parts of his letter, referring to the amendments proposed to this law, following to the partial censure of the Constitutional Council:

[...] ce qui me laisse plus que très dubitatif sur l’efficacité du dispositif. [...] cette procédure me semble tout à fait inadaptée.

Which can be translated as follows:

[...] I doubt this disposal will have any effect. [...] I think this procedure is absolutely not adapted.

Now, let’s bet what will be his vote in September!

As expected, my local representative voted in favour of this law.

I had however kept a secret hope that he would abstain for this vote, following to the email I have received from his assistant following to our meeting. Mr Vannson planned to take the floor during the finale discussions. He had sent me for review the text they wrote, which perfectly matched my arguments, and even referred to the law as a “Rube Goldberg machine” (“Ma conviction est que nous avons monté une usine à gaz” in the original version). This text also stated that he was netiher convinced nor satisfied by the law.

His speech planned for the final discussions of the law never happened, and was replaced by a single line question to the Minister, during a meeting of the Law Commission.
This question was even technically incorrect as he refers to firewall, whereas I had (with a great help from other members of APRIL) amended this part of the text to refer to “usage control software”:

M. François Vannson. Les logiciels « pare-feu » ne risquent-ils pas, madame la ministre, de nuire aux logiciels libres ?
Mme la ministre. Il n’y a aucune menace sur les logiciels libres, qui peuvent tout à fait accepter des logiciels de sécurisation.

From: http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/13/rapports/r1626.asp

Which could be approximately translated as follows:

M. François Vannson. Mrs Minister, aren’t firewall a threat on Free Software?
Mrs Minister. There is no threat on Free Software who can accept well accept securisation software.

I must hence express my real disappointment.
Now, let’s hope this law won’t be applicable, following the idea of most of its opponents.

I won’t write to my local representative, as I think it is totally hopeless. I guess he will get the pingbacks from this blog post, as his own political weblog runs on Free Software!

This half an hour meeting allowed me to explain my fears regarding this “firewall” which could be set up on French citizens’ computers to enable them to prove their non-culpability (provided their computer runs a popular proprietary OS).

My representative kindly listened to me and his assistant understood the situation very well. I was even impressed that they have worked a lot on this law before the meeting.

They both proposed to raise this issue to Christine Albanel, the current French Minister for Culture and Communication, who is at the origin of this law. They agreed to say that this wouldn’t be changed for the next lecture (planned for the end of the month), as this particular chapter was meant to be detailed in further texts.

They also admitted that this law had little chance to be really applied as is, as they consider some aspects to be anti-constitutional – they hence think that the French Constitutional Council will prevent this law to be applied, at least as it is when writing this post.
My representative also admitted that this law was somewhat outdated (even if not yet voted!). Actually, this kind of law will ever be outdated…

I kindly thank my representative for his time and his frankness (even if on the bad side for this law, he was very open to my thoughts).

Good to know France is still a real Democracy!

The Portuguese Magalhães Project lead to provide 300,000 netbooks to Portuguese children aged of 6 to 10, for a fee varying from 0€ to 50€, depending on the earnings of the family. These netbooks have a dual boot, with Windows and Linux (a distribution based on Mandriva called “Caixa Mágica” – Magic Box in English).

The problem has begun when some opponents to this project pointed out that the Portuguese translation of GCompris, a free educational software for children from 2 to 10, contained some grammar, syntax and spelling faults, and did not reach the level of quality expected to be distributed to Portuguese children. This story was even published by some major Portuguese newspaper, which is a very bad publicity not only for GCompris, but also for free software in general.

Caixa Mágica Software have also published a press release explaining the situation.

The Portuguese Government have even published a document explaining how to uninstall GCompris, whereas work for correcting the translation was running, and automatic updates being set up on all Magalhães netbooks.

The GNOME Portuguese translation team have made some hard work during the week-end to review and correct the existing translation, following to a call for help raised by GCompris lead developer. The new version released yesterday already include an updated Portuguese translation.

I have noticed that this problem was already reported on launchpad 2 years ago, but people got lost as the translation was not made through Rosetta (a closed source platform for open source application translation). This should have been reported upstream or at least to the main translator!

I take the occasion to thank all translators, l10n and i18n coordinators of the various free software projects I enjoy using in French!

Not that I am in favor of illegal downloads of movies and music, but the way this law plans to fight against them is a real threat for French free software developers and users.

I won’t explain here all the details of this law, but to sum up, it plans to suspend the Internet access to people downloading illegal files from the peer-to-peer network, after 2 notices. Here are the problems I have noticed, as far as I am personally concerned, besides more general aspects this law implies (user freedom etc.):

• Some private actors, indirectly working for French leisure and cultural companies, will be in charge of controlling the French Internet. They will only base their accusations on the IP addresses, which I do not think to be a proof alone.
• An Internet user, accused to have illegally downloaded movies or music will have to prove by his own means he has not done it – ie. his Internet connection could have been hacked, but he needs to prove it! This is totally contrary to the way justice normally works in France, where you are supposed to be innocent until the contrary is proved. A large majority of French Internet users do not have the necessary technical skills to secure their wireless network and hence their Internet connection. And even with good skills, all of them do not own a wireless router supporting eg. WPA2, which creates a real discrimination towards French Internet users.
• A chapter of the project of law plans the possibility to set up a kind of firewall on the computers connected to the Internet – they will allow Internet users to prove their sincerity. This causes however a big issue for free software users: I doubt such a piece of software will be available for free operating systems (such as GNU/Linux, FreeBSD etc.). Even if it is, it won’t be opensource – if it was, anybody could amend it and/or disable it, hence no real possibility for the user to prove it was running when the illegal download was noticed.
• This law doesn’t take into account the fact that an increasing part of the peer-to-peer exchanges are encrypted, or run anonymously. More over, other technical ways of downloading are not considered (streaming, direct downloads especially when the websites are hosted abroad).

The law should be discussed at the Assemblée Nationale from today (the second house of Parliament), I hence contacted my local representative last week in order to propose a meeting allowing me to expose my concerns. Until now, I have received no answer, despite the fact he accepted to commit in favor of free software when running for being re-elected in june 2007 (he signed the “Pacte des logiciels libres” from the APRIL association). I guess I will receive an answer once the law is voted!