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.

The migration has caused a downtime of more or less 4 hours yesterday, time for the data to cross the ocean.
The migration was successful, though you might still experience issues to connect to the services hosts on this linode due to the new IP adressess (both IPv4 and IPv6). Most DNS servers should however now be up-to-date.

Thanks again to Linode for their great service and support.

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!

I have tried installing sun-java6-plugin, which allowed me to go one step further, but I was still unable to choose the certificate with which I had to sign my declaration. Actually, it was only a display problem (the combo box was simply not displayed).

Guess what? I had to use the Windows 7 RC version I had installed in a VirtualBox to be able to sign my declaration!

I didn’t want to lose more time with this, but my girlfriend hasn’t yet made her declaration, hence any hints on how to do this on GNU/Linux would be highly apprciated.

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!

My personal key 9F71D449 will hence be progressively replaced by my new key: 290D20C5
Its fingerprint is:

092F 4CB5 5F19 E006 1CFD  B489 D32B 8D66 290D 20C5

The old key will continue to be valid for some time (at least until the new one get signed by a Debian Developer, in order to be included in the DM keyring), but I prefer all future correspondence to come to the new one.

Transition statement signed by both keys is available at: http://www.kirya.net/~julien/GPG-key-transition_20090508.txt

They key used for my personal package repository (FBABB737) has already been revoked and replaced by E435C74B, with the following fingerprint:

D17A A78F 7992 A07D 9D85  517C C3E1 8B20 E435 C74B

You have to make apt-key aware of this change:

wget -O - http://packages.kirya.net/Kirya.netDebianpackagesVerificationKey.asc | apt-key add -

Transition statement signed by both keys is available at: http://packages.kirya.net/GPG-key-transition_20090508.txt

Also note I have generated the key with ID 90A9E71B and got it sent to public servers by mistake. I do not own the private key hence I cannot revoke it: make sure you do not use it!

Thanks to my readers

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!

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!