MozillaZine(fr)'s New (Temporary) HomeThursday July 20th, 2000Hervé Renault, maintainer of the French translation of Mozillazine, writes, "I'm coming back from my summer vacation and I have some rather bad news about MozillaZine(fr) : "altern.org is now closed because of a new law here in France that forbids anonymous web pages. It states that web pages authors must be identified before they put anything online, and the web hosting service must remove the pages and give the identity of the author to the justice anytime a legal complaint is raised about those pages, by anyone, by any means (even an anonymous e-mail !!) before any judgement !!! "So now... if someone is against your web page, he can shut it down whenever he wants ! And second... the web hosting service is more or less considered liable for the content of the pages it hosts, or to put it differently, the web hosting service is now considered as the editor of the pages it serves. "This law completely denies that ISPs are purely technical entities, and forces every web hosting service to hire lawyers to defend themselves in case of a legal complaint. as you guess, only wealthy commercial services can survive by those rules, and altern.org is already closed because it was a not-for-profit free web hosting service which can't afford verifying web authors identity, evaluating each and every web page content, and paying a lawyer... "Altern.org's father, Valentin Lacambre, was a pionneer in giving free web access. he hosted more than 20,000 sites and there was a strong community of people using his service. All this is destroyed. That's a space of freedom which disappears... many french people and organizations are angry about this new law because it won't help against piracy or criminal entities but it rather hurts freedom of speech indirectly. "you can read a paper about this, in french and english [here]. "MozillaZine is now temporarily hosted [here] (not yet online). "best regards. "ps: i'm glad to see that the german MZ is now online!" I'm sorry to hear this. Apparently the French government wants to make sure French people post only on servers hosted outside their borders. Isn't this against european privacy rules? Bye Kirys Hello, I reside in the french part of Switzerland, so i'm not concern by the frech law. ------------------ I'm my own ISP, with web-ftp-email-dns servers. So if you could send me some technical information about how much place on disk you must have, how much bandwith consume by month the "zine". I could see if i can hosted it for free, and during all it's life..... Please don't hesitate to contact me ! brunofr@ioda.net It could be my second participation for the Mozilla Project. Don't forget, it's the only alternative for IE..... it formerly located at HONGKONG, but it is dead link now. if it is about space troubles, i can provide my space, only 20M, but i think it is enough to release information about chinese MZ. [for french readers] MZ(fr) est maintenant à l'adresse suivante : http://mozillazine-fr.org/ -- Hervé |