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Comment by kuwze | Hacker News Reader

It's sort of ironic considering France's history with Minitel[0] and encryption[1].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel

[1]: https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1997/1201/6012058a.html#75b6a6...

Specifically from [1] is the line: "Its illegal in France to encrypt any communication in any way unless you have permission from the government. How is electronic commerce going to get off the ground in such a society? Good question, which appears not to have occurred to the authorities."

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Thankfully, since 2004, the law for trust in the digital economy[0] (LCEN) mostly liberalized the use of cryptography[1].

[0]: https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte=JORFT...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptography_law#France

The US used to regulate "exports" of cryptography under the U.S. Munitions List. Some of the restrictions still remain, but most of them were gradually relaxed in until 2000.

I can't even download FPGA toolchains like a regular person without an account saying I live in the US and a US VPN to support my claim. FPGAs still accounted as ammo, even if you get the dev boards from China.

I'm looking at you, Xilinx.

I don't live in the US and downloaded the latest Xilinx tools earlier this week, don't work for a US company either.

It's a hit or miss, and sometimes accounts get "flagged". From France I didn't have a problem until I connected from Ukraine; since then I have to always fill the infamous "download workaround form" that may or may not succeed, in the best case you get the download link in an email a few days later. Also the download workaround form doesn't let you select the most recent versions of Vivado and ISE.

It's pretty common. Almost all EU governments reserve the right to decrypt encrypted communications by law, also India, Russia, China, Australia. Here's a map https://www.gp-digital.org/world-map-of-encryption/, click 'Powers to intercept...'

I've always wondered about that. The law says

    Criminal Procedure Code: Article 230, modified by Law No. 2001-1062 
    and Law No. 2014-1353 requires the disclosure of encryption keys upon 
    the authorization of a judge.

So what happens if the connection uses diffie-hellman or double ratchet (as Matrix can use)? the intermediate doesn't have any useful keys to turn over.

I expect you get convicted for not turning over the keys I assume, unless its clear that some other service provided made that technical choice for you in which case hopefully they get convicted.

I would see this as a positive step - it’s a lot harder to legislate against E2E crypto for the populous when the govt is relying on it :)

It has nothing to do with Minitel as it is a private government only slack-like tool. And the encryption restriction is long gone like in the US. Why there is alway francophobes in threads like that ?

It's not about francophobes, it's that people remember what they heard earlier, they don't seek out unimportant (to them) facts on random.

Maybe they're government-a-phobes, not Francophobes.

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