Re: Minitel "saved" by hackers?

[Daniel Salber <daniel.salber@imag.fr>]

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

> True, but as I understand it, there was also a hacking involved: they took
> the original software, modified it (what I would also call hacking) and made
> it freely available: that is what made the messageries possible. If I'm
> using the technical terminology wrong, thanks for the correction.
>
> I'd love to find out exactly what happened.

This so-called "hijack" happened in Strasbourg on the GRETEL server (which
was sponsored by the local newspaper). "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>).

As Minow pointed out, this is not the only case of "hijacking". The
telephone was first intended as a way to listen to remote concerts. Then
users found out they could use it for one-to-one conversations.


In a previous post, you said:

> 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.

The Internet is not so successful in France mainly because the Minitel is
still widely used and sufficient for most casual uses. Remember France
Telecom kick-started the Minitel by giving away the Minitel terminals.
France Telecom doesn't seem to be willing to give away computers to
kick-start the Internet :-)

You also asked:

> Do you know of any country in Asia or elsewhere favoring the Minitel
> "centralized and bureaucratic" model over the Internet?

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). But the structure is not really centralized: all
traffic goes through the public packet-switching X25 network. Server
operators (there are more than 20,000 of them today) are legally
responsible for the content they serve. It may also look centralized
because there is only one telco in France, but that's another problem.

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.

Daniel