From: Arun Mehta <amehta@giasdl01.vsnl.net.in>
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 17:42:01 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Minitel "saved" by hackers?
Message-ID: <1.5.4.32.19960710115147.002ccb8c@giasdl01.vsnl.net.in>
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I'm reviewing "Cultures of Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living
Bodies" edited by Rob Shields. Chapter 2, "The Labyrinth of Minitel" by
Andre Lemos tells a fascinating story, after you get past the verbiage in
the introduction (sample: "If modernity refused the artificial, and deepened
separations and dichotomies, postmodernity tries to surpass well-established
dichotomies, not in the dialectical sense through sublimation and synthesis,
but more in the direction of making a place for dialogical complexity").

This may be old hat to cypherpunks, but it seems that the system, conceived
as a videotex system, was hacked: "At the end of 1981 the messaging software
... was pirated by some users planning to communicate between each other in
real time. Through this detournement -- literally, a 'hijacking' was born
the messagerie." These included games dialogs in real time and postings.
Soon there was the "messagerie rose", the sex stuff  -- which generated most
of the revenues. As Claire Ancelin notes,"the public has not hesitated to
manifest tastes often opposed to those foreseen by experts, this public has
not hesitated to make a serious information tool into a frivolous
communication tool."

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.

My questions: 
1) are any of those 1981 French hackers on this list or known to people here?

2) I checked out "Minitel history" on Alta Vista, and since my French is
very modest, downloaded http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december95/12kessler.html,
The French Minitel: Is There Digital Life Outside of the "US ASCII" Internet?
A Challenge or Convergence? by Jack Kessler, and
http://tklab6.informatik.uni-bremen.de/nii/Conference/Abstracts/berne.html
THE MINITEL SUCCESS by Dr. Michel Berne.  Surprisingly, neither mentioned
the 1981 hijack. Can anyone suggest better references?

3) Kessler raised a controversial point: "Centralized control -- its
political as well as its social and economic manifestations -- is relatively
untested. Some fans of the Internet even deny the possibility of centralized
control in their version
of "Cyberspace". Yet such control is the single greatest issue of networked
information to many Asians. Minitel's approach, which is so different from
the Internet's celebrated de-centralized structure, provides useful
comparisons for both systems to consider.
...
The question for networking's next generation is what will scale up for
Asia? To meet this challenge, some "convergence" -- some pooling of talents
and approach, combining the sophisticated with the simple, the academic with the
commercial, the decentralized and chaotic with the centralized and
bureaucratic and controlled -- might not be such a bad idea for both the
Internet and the Minitel to pursue now."

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