Merde ! French President’s Residence ‘Busted’ For BitTorrent Piracy

French President’s Residence ‘Busted’ For BitTorrent Piracy | TorrentFreak.

French President Nicholas Sarkozy is a man who has championed some of the most aggressive anti-piracy legislation in Europe. But today it’s revealed that the occupants of his very own office and home are responsible for a nice selection of pirate downloads using BitTorrent. Three strikes? Those with access to the Presidential Palace’s IP addresses have already doubled that quota.

Located near the Champs-Élysées in the French capital, Paris, the Élysée Palace is the official residence of President Sarkozy. As husband of ‘first lady’ and musician Carla Bruni, Sarkozy has helped promote and push through some of the toughest anti-filesharing legislation to be found anywhere in Europe.

Those provisions include Internet disconnections for persistent pirates, and as of October this year 60 French Internet subscribers were on their third and final strike.

This morning, however, we’re left wondering if Sarkozy, his family and French ministers will be able to answer any emails in the months to come.

As reported to TorrentFreak this morning by Nicolas Perrier of Nikopik, people using IP addresses allocated to the Élysée Palace (62.160.71.0 – 62.160.71.255) have been very naughty indeed.

According to data from YouHaveDownloaded.com, a range of downloads have been actioned from the Palace including a cam copy of Tower Heist, a telesync copy of Arthur Christmas, and music from The Beach Boys. The latter was actually a lossless FLAC rip, but as one might expect, only the best quality will do for the Palace.

In total six infringing downloads were tracked back to Sarkozy’s residence, double the country’s three-strike limit.

It’s been an embarrassing few days for some not-so-secret users of BitTorrent. The IP addresses of several entertainment companies were reported as connected to allegedly infringing activity earlier this week using the same methods.

Image via Wikipedia

But while the reports from YouHaveDownloaded certainly have discussion value, it is worth noting that their data collection methods are just as untested as those employed by many private anti-piracy companies and their notoriously secretive ‘proprietary software’. The difference is, however, YHD aren’t using their data for the filing of lawsuits and getting people cut off from the Internet.

BitTorrent users are increasingly aware that their activities are public – those that monitor them for the purposes of punitive responses should experience the same standard. Finally, on the subject of equality, any predictions on odds for the Palace being disconnected for piracy? Save your money folks, some bets are a lost cause.

Sarkozy tells Obama Israeli PM is a ‘liar’

Fragments of conversation overhead by journalists

The Associated Press

Posted: Nov 8, 2011

 French President Nicholas Sarkozy and U.S. President Barack Obama shake hands as they attend an event in Cannes, France on Nov. 4, 2011. The French leader has worked to strengthen his country’s relationship with Israel since 2007. (Susan Walsh/Associated Press)

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who has laboured to improve French relations with Israel, said he “can’t stand” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and called him a liar in a chat with President Barack Obama.

The conversation between Sarkozy and Obama was overheard by reporters last week at the Group of 20 summit in southern France, via headsets that were to be used for simultaneous translation of an upcoming news conference.

Obama, whose remarks were heard via a French translation, was not heard objecting to Sarkozy’s characterization of Netanyahu. Through the interpreter, Obama was heard asking Sarkozy to help persuade the Palestinians to stop their efforts to gain UN recognition of a Palestinian state.

Several French-speaking journalists, including one from The Associated Press, overheard the comments but did not initially report them because Sarkozy’s office had asked the journalists not to turn on the headsets until the press conference began, and the comments were deemed private under French media traditions.

A French website that analyzes media coverage of current affairs, Arret sur images, reported the fragments Tuesday.

Sarkozy’s office would not comment Tuesday on the remarks, or on France’s relations with Israel. The White House and Netanyahu’s spokesman also said they had no comment.

In the remarks Thursday in Cannes, Sarkozy said: “Netanyahu, I can’t stand him. He’s a liar.”

According to the French interpreter, Obama responded, “You are sick of him, but I have to work with him every day.”

The journalists heard only fragments of the leaders’ conversation.

May complicate peace process

Since becoming president in 2007, Sarkozy has strengthened French ties with Israel while also seeking to use France’s traditional good relations with Arab allies to encourage peace talks.

His latest comments reflect his increasing frustration with Netanyahu, and may complicate French efforts toward Mideast peace.

The overheard remarks by Sarkozy and Obama were prominently covered in Israel, where Sarkozy — whose maternal grandfather was Jewish — is widely perceived as a friend, in striking contrast to some of his predecessors, including Jacques Chirac, whom Sarkozy replaced in 2007.

Israel has had a fraught up-and-down relationship with France. The country was an early supporter of the Jewish state, selling it arms and planes and helping it develop a nuclear reactor. But the relationship soured under Charles de Gaulle, perceived as having abandoned Israel before the 1967 war.

“There has been improvement of the relationship since Sarkozy took over,” Avi Pazner, who was Israel’s ambassador to France in the 1990s, said Tuesday. “He has shown himself as a friend of the state of Israel.”

In comments at the G20 last week, Sarkozy said that if Israel’s existence is threatened, “France will not stand by with arms crossed.”

Netanyahu, meanwhile, is a controversial figure even at home. He is widely seen as divisive, and is regularly pilloried by the centre-left opposition who say he prefers settlement construction in the West Bank to peace talks.

The often blunt Sarkozy has shown little patience with Israeli hardliners, and two years ago urged Netanyahu to fire his outspoken foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman. In a private meeting, Sarkozy told Netanyahu that “you must get rid of that man,” according to two officials.

This September, the French leader tried to head off the Palestinians’ request for membership in the United Nations with a last-minute effort to revive peace talks.

But France then surprised Washington and other observers by voting last week in favour of Palestinian membership in UNESCO, the UN cultural and educational agency.

via Sarkozy tells Obama Israeli PM is a ‘liar’ – World – CBC News.

Europe closing its borders:France and Italy in call to close EU borders in fear of Arab invasion

Sarkozy and Berlusconi want passport-free travel within the EU suspended as north African migrants flee north

Sarkozy and Berlusconi are demanding European deportation pacts with the countries of revolutionary north Africa to send migrants home. Photograph: Alessandro Di Meo/EPA

France and Italy have thrown down the gauntlet over Europe’s system of passport-free travel, saying a crisis of immigration sparked by the Arab spring was calling into question the borderless regime enjoyed by more than 400 million people in 25 countries.

Challenging one of the biggest achievements of European integration of recent decades, Nicolas Sarkozy and Silvio Berlusconi also launched a joint effort to stem immigration and demanded European deportation pacts with the countries of revolutionary north Africa to send new arrivals packing.

The French president and the Italian prime minister, at a summit in Rome, opted to pile the pressure on Brussels and the governments of the other 25 EU states, demanding an “in-depth revision” of European law regulating the passport-free travel that takes in almost all of the EU with the exception of Britain and Ireland.

Prompted by the influx to Italy of almost 30,000 immigrants, mainly from Tunisia, in recent months, the two leaders warned that the upheavals in north Africa “could swiftly become an out-and-out crisis capable of undermining the trust our fellow citizens place in the free circulation within the Schengen area”.

The passport-free travel system known as the Schengen regime was agreed by a handful of countries in 1985 and put into practice in 1995. Since then it has been embraced by 22 EU countries as well as Norway, Switzerland and Iceland, but spurned by Britain and Ireland. It is widely seen, along with the euro single currency, as Europe’s signature unification project of recent decades.

But like the euro, fighting its biggest crisis over the past year, the Schengen regime is being tested amid mounting populism and the renationalisation of politics across the EU.

In other setbacks to borderless Europe, Germany, France and other countries have been blocking the admission of Bulgaria and Romania to Schengen in recent months, while the arrival of thousands of Middle Eastern migrants in Greece has fed exasperation with Athens’s inability to control the EU’s southern border.

The Franco-Italian move, following weeks of bad-tempered exchanges between Paris and Rome over how to deal with the Tunisian influx, is the biggest threat yet to the Schengen regime.

“For the treaty to stay alive, it must be reformed,” Sarkozy said. Berlusconi added: “We both believe that in exceptional circumstances there should be variations to the Schengen treaty.”

They sent a joint letter to the European commission and European council chiefs, José Manuel Barroso and Herman Van Rompuy, urging proposals from Brussels and agreement on a new system at an EU summit of government heads in June.

The commission said it was drawing up new proposals, tinkering with the current system, to be unveiled next week. But it has resisted, with the support of most EU governments, intense Italian pressure to label the arrivals from north Africa an emergency.

Under European law the border-free regime can be suspended only for reasons of national security, routinely invoked in recent years by member states hosting major international sporting events such as the World Cup or the European football championships, where individual countries contend with a huge, one-off influx of foreigners.

Sarkozy and Berlusconi insisted the rules be changed to allow more restrictions on freedom of travel. A new deal was “indispensable”, they said. The June summit should “examine the possibility of temporarily re-establishing internal frontier controls in case of exceptional difficulty in the management of the [EU's] common external frontiers”.

This, however, would clearly not be in the interests of Italy, which fears an end to the hostilities in Libya could spark an even bigger exodus. In that event, the letter said, the EU should provide “mechanisms of specific solidarity” including the distribution of immigrants among member states.

This will prove extremely divisive and will be rejected by countries such as Germany and Sweden, which have much higher numbers of asylum seekers than Italy, less restrictive immigration policies, and little sympathy for Italy’s plight.

The concerted Franco-Italian initiative also called for accords between the EU and north African countries on repatriating immigrants, a policy certain to spark outrage among human rights groups, the refugee lobby, and more liberal EU governments.

Promising strong support for the democratic revolutions sweeping the Maghreb and the Middle East, Sarkozy and Berlusconi added: “In exchange we have the right to expect from our partner countries a commitment to a rapid and efficacious co-operation with the European Union and its member states in fighting illegal immigration.”

Tuesday’s move followed weeks of feuding between Rome and Paris over the Tunisian exodus. Furious at the failure of other EU countries to “share the burden”, the Italians granted visas to the immigrants enabling them to move elsewhere in the EU. The Germans and the Austrians complained. The Belgians accused Rome of “cheating” on the Schengen rulebook. The French government promptly closed a part of the border with Italy briefly, re-erecting passport controls to halt trains.

But Berlusconi and Sarkozy, seeking to curry favour with the strong far-right constituencies in both countries, sought to bury their differences by urging the rest of Europe to buy into their anti-immigration agenda.

France and Italy in call to close EU borders in wake of Arab protests | World news | The Guardian.

French riot police in uproar over lunchtime booze ban

Police unions furious as official decree is passed to prevent CRS officers enjoying their usual lunchtime wine and beer

French riot police at work. They are challenging a decree preventing them drinking on duty. Photograph: Domenico Stinellis/AP

They might be lampooned as a bunch of truncheon-happy meatheads by leftwing street demonstrators, but that doesn’t mean French riot police don’t appreciate a nice glass of Burgundy with their lunch.

The notorious Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité, or CRS, are outraged at an official decree stating they can no longer drink wine or beer with their meals.

Until now, a civilised tipple was part of the daily lunch menu of the controversial force, lauded by Nicolas Sarkozy, whose trademark black body armour and riot shields are a regular feature on French streets.

A glass of wine, beer or cider – but not spirits – was always permitted with lunch, including while on duty. Even packed lunches provided out of riot vans while they were patrolling demonstrations came with a can of beer or glass of wine.

But in October last year, authorities were annoyed when pictures published on the website Bakchich showed uniformed riot police swigging beer from cans on the sidelines of a sixth-formers’ street-protest against pension reforms in Perreux-sur-Marne, north of Paris. The website reported that having told locals it was too dangerous to go outside during the high-school demo, uniformed officers stopped for a beer on a street corner in full view of the public.

Police unions expressed their fury at the new decree. Paul Le Guennec, of the biggest riot police union, Unité Police SGP-FO, said the French public had not seemed shocked at the notion of a CRS officer drinking at lunch.

“Does the fact that having a glass of wine while eating prevent any kind of worker from carrying out their job? I don’t think the chief of police drinks water when he’s having a meal,” Le Guennec told the paper Le JDD.

The union argued that the CRS did not have a higher incidence of alcohol problems than the rest of society, saying a small drink with lunch was in line with French labour law.

But unions warned that the row over lunchtime drinking should not be allowed to detract from their protests over cuts to the 14,000-strong force. Earlier this year, there was unprecedented strike action and protests by riot police over cuts to barracks and staff, with some CRS in Marseille going on hunger strike in an embarrassment to the security-minded Sarkozy.

French riot police in uproar over lunchtime booze ban | World news | The Guardian.

France begins ban on burqas: First European country to do so.

 

Kenza Drider, from Avignon, arrives at Gare de Lyon in Paris.

France‘s ban on face veils, a first in Europe, went into force on Monday, and anyone wearing the niqab or burqa in public could now face a fine of €150 (£132), or lessons in French citizenship.

The centre-right government, which passed the law in October, has rolled out a public relations campaign to explain the ban and the rules of its application that includes posters, pamphlets and a government-hosted website.

Guidelines spelled out in the pamphlet forbid police from asking women to remove their burqa in the street. They will instead be escorted to a police station and asked to remove the veil there for identification.

Widely criticised by Muslims abroad as impinging on their religious freedom, the law has provoked a limited backlash in France where a strict separation of church and state is seen as central to maintaining a peaceful civil society.

A property dealer is urging women to engage in “civil disobedience” by continuing to wear the veil if they so desire and has called on supporters to hold a silent prayer in protest at the ban in front of Notre Dame cathedral. Rachid Nekkaz, who is a Muslim, said in a webcast he would help pay fines and was putting a property worth around €2m up for sale to fund his campaign.

“The street is the universal home of freedom and nobody should challenge that so long as these woman are not impinging on anyone else’s freedom,” he said. “I am calling on all free women who so wish to wear the veil in the street and engage in civil disobedience,” he said.

In Avignon, Vaucluse, Reuters TV filmed a woman boarding a train wearing a niqab, unchallenged by police.




“It’s not an act of provocation,” said Kenza Drider. “I’m only carrying out my citizens’ rights, I’m not committing a crime … If they [police] ask me for identity papers I’ll show them, no problem.”

France has five million Muslims, but fewer than 2,000 women are believed actually to wear a face veil.

Many Muslim leaders have said they support neither the veil nor the law banning it.

On Saturday, French police arrested around 60 people who turned up for a banned protest over the veil ban which had been called by a Muslim group in Britain. One of the protesters was arrested on his arrival from Britain, a police spokesman said.

The timing is all the more sensitive after France’s ruling UMP party called a debate on the role of Islam in French society, a forum that some criticised as unfairly singling out a portion of the population as problematic.

The guide sent out last week to police notes that the burqa ban does not apply inside private cars, but it reminds officers that such cases can be dealt with under road safety rules.

France begins ban on niqab and burqa | World news | The Guardian.

‘One poor harvest away from chaos’

Image via Wikipedia

 

“Within a decade,” promised the top representative of the world’s mightiest country, “no man, woman or child will go to bed hungry.”

Dr Henry Kissinger, at the height of his powers as US Secretary of State, was speaking to the landmark 1974 World Food Conference. Since then, the number of hungry people worldwide has almost exactly doubled: from 460 million to 925 million.

And this week the airwaves have been full of warnings that the formidable figure could be about to increase further, as a new food crisis takes hold. Some experts warned that the world could be on the verge of a “nightmare scenario” of cut‑throat competition for the control of shrinking supplies.

The cause of such alarm? On Wednesday, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) reported that global food prices had hit a record high and were likely to go on rising, entering what Abdolreza Abbassian, its senior grains economist, called “danger territory”.

That is bad enough for Britain, adding to the inflationary pressures from the soaring cost of oil and other commodities, not to mention the VAT increase. But for the world’s poor, who have to spend 80 per cent of their income on food, it could be catastrophic.

Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, warns that the rising prices are “a threat to global growth and social stability”, and Nicolas Sarkozy has identified them as a priority for the G20, which he chairs this year.

Already they are higher than in 2008, when they drove the tally of the malnourished briefly above a billion for the first time in history, and caused riots in countries as far apart as Indonesia, Cameroon and Mexico. That ended nearly two decades during which the number of hungry people had stayed the same, while the world population grew by 1.2 billion, so that the proportion of an increasing humanity without enough to eat steadily fell.

But the crisis of two years ago, and the one that may be unfolding now, are polar opposites of the one behind the World Food Conference. Then, bad harvests had produced a real shortage. Now, we have bumper crops: the past three years have produced the biggest harvests ever. The issue is not one of supply, but of demand.

The mushrooming middle classes of India and China helped cause
the 2008 price hike by eating more meat, which, in turn, mops up grain: it can take, for example, 8lb of cereals to produce one of beef. And cars contributed as well as cows. Biofuels transferred over 100 million tons of cereals from plates to petrol tanks: to fill a 4 x 4 tank requires enough grain to feed a poor person for a year. Speculation, too, helped drive prices up.

The same factors are at work again, though fortunately the hungry are not yet as badly hit. This is partly because the price of rice, which feeds almost half of humanity, has remained relatively stable; and partly because it is mainly the higher-quality wheat and maize – eaten by the better off – that has got much more expensive.

But things remain volatile, since the world has heavily run down its grain stocks over the past decade, and much of what remains is in China, which does not readily release them even when prices are high. So the present abrupt rises have been brought about by a harvest that is only 1.4 per cent down on last year, and prices remain unusually hostage to the weather.

So if it is all so precarious at times of bumper harvests, what will happen if – or rather, when – we get a really bad one? That is what is worrying Lester Brown, president of the Washingtion-based Earth Policy Institute, whom I first met at the 1974 conference. A former champion tomato-grower – then an enthusiast for the Green Revolution, now a leading prophet of danger and one of the first to forecast the present situation – he is publishing a book on the issue on Wednesday.

“The reality,” he says, “is that the world is only one poor harvest away from chaos. We are so close to the edge that politically destabilising food prices could come at any time.”

Imagine, he says, if last year’s Moscow heatwave – which sent average temperatures 14F above normal, and contributed to this year’s smaller harvest – next hit Chicago and the Midwestern bread basket. The US harvest could slump by 40 per cent, sending prices “off the chart” and cause “the global economy to start to unravel”. As the climate changes, such extremes are likely to be more common.

Back in 1974, Kissinger spoke of the “thin edge between hope and hunger”. A generation on, it is time to take it seriously.

India’s leopards go out on the town

It was about as long as a small leopard, the biggest of its species ever recorded in Britain. The 4ft predator, which gobbled down a family cat in middle-class Maidstone for its Boxing Day dinner, ended quite a year for the urban fox. In October, one killed 11 penguins in London Zoo; in August, two invaded bedrooms in Folkestone and Fulham to kill a kitten and bite a lawyer; in June, yet another attacked twin nine-month-old girls as they slept in Hackney,

Worried? It could be worse. In India, the role of Britain’s streetfighter foxes is increasingly being filled by, well, leopards. Driven from their natural habitat by its destruction, drawn by the easy pickings of urban life, the big cats are now constantly spotted in the subcontinent’s towns and cities. Stray dogs are a staple diet, but the leopards also regularly kill people. Indeed, in June one even took on the Indian Army itself, injuring 12 adults and children near the gate of the military academy at Dehra Dun.

Both foxes and leopards are aggressive, adaptable animals, and both are thriving. There are now thought to be 34,000 urban foxes in Britain, visiting more than a third of the country’s urban gardens at least once a month. And the leopard – which is also increasingly invading South African cities – has avoided the fate of, say, the endangered tiger: by one estimate more than half a million of them are at large. Could their motto be: “If you can’t beat them, eat them”?

via ‘One poor harvest away from chaos’ – Telegraph.

Related Articles

• “United Nations Warns of Food Price Hikes, Painting a Picture Similar to 2008′s “Silent Tsunami”" and related posts (moneymorning.com)
• Commodity speculators ‘risk starving the poor’ as bets raise food prices (newstatesman.com)
• The Fertile Continent (devex.com)

French take to the barricades over Internet piracy law

PARIS – French Internet users are taking a centuries-old tradition into the cyber age and erecting barricades against a new law aimed at clamping down on film and music piracy through illegal file sharing.

The law — known as Hadopi — is being touted as an example for other countries and the best way to protect artists’ income but critics see the threat of having their Internet connection cut as a human rights infraction.

The conflict has been brewing since President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government in 2009 set up the High Authority for Dissemination of Works and Protection of Rights on the Internet (Hadopi) to fight piracy and promote legal online sales.

Hadopi’s procedure is this: they ask Internet service providers (ISPs) to hand over IP addresses — a string of numbers that constitutes a fingerprint unique to a computer on a particular network — being used for file sharing.

Suspects are then warned of the offence in an email, which says that legal action will follow if the piracy, usually over so-called peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, continues.

“Attention, your internet connection has been used to commit legally-noted acts that could constitute a breach of the law,” begins the lengthy email. Piracy “is a serious threat to the economy of the cultural sector,” it says.

If the piracy recurs within six months, the Internet user receives a second email, followed by a registered letter. After a third infraction, their Internet connection can be cut for up to a year and a fine imposed.

Measures have been taken to prevent those targetted from obtaining another Internet connection while suspended but the battle lines have been drawn and freedom-loving French are rising to the challenge of defeating Hadopi.

One chatroom user suggests sabotaging the system by only partially downloading files en masse — thus creating millions of red herrings as a partial download cannot be viewed or listened to and is in theory not illegal.

via French take to the barricades over Internet piracy law.

Related Articles

• France issues warnings to web pirates (newsinfo.inquirer.net)
• France Starts Reporting ‘Millions’ of File-Sharers (torrentfreak.com)
• BT Seeks Moratorium On Internet Piracy Cases (yro.slashdot.org)