At 05:51 12/07/96 +0200, Daniel Salber wrote:

At 2:37 AM +0500 on 7/11/96, Arun Mehta wrote:

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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:

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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...