Tycoon Xavier Niel says he was spy who hacked ex-French president | Hacker News Reader

Tycoon Xavier Niel says he was spy who hacked ex-French president

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36 pointswallflower48 comments

The article is misleading, you can see the interview video here : https://www.journaldugeek.com/2020/05/21/xavier-niel-un-espi... (french)

He says that he was not working for them, but instead after getting caught hacking a few things, he was noticed by the secret service, and after that he was informing them what he was finding.

He says he was doing that for fun, and didnt pursue by working for them, because he is not a spy but an entrepreneur (and quite successful actually)

He is a bit the local Elon Musk actually. Has fans and haters. Is technically competent and occasionally trollish.

Slightly off-topic: Is it ok to say "ex-French" president in English? (Rather than French ex-president).

I'm not a native but to me it reads like the guy stopped being French.

No, it isn't. It sounds like he's still the president, but he's no longer French.

Yet, it happens so often, one would think it was OK. Like the Salisbury poisoning, where the victims were referred to as an 'ex-Russian spy', when he was really a 'Russian ex-spy'. Unfortunately, there are cases, where if one is true to form, it becomes rather a mouthful.

Unfortunately, I believe it is because what they mean to say is he is no longer the French President (as if 'French President' was a single term), and attach 'ex-' in front of that term. Similarly for the 'Russian spy', which apparently is also a single term, rather than two terms.

The correct way to handle it is to use the word "former" instead. "Former French President" parses correctly.

"Ex-" binds tightly to the word in front of it because of the dash, but "former" allows "French President" to be the noun phrase being modified.

Only in your incredibly contrived interpretation of the english language. "Former" would be better here but there is still not any significant ambiguity as to what is meant.

It's clear what they meant to say, but that doesn't make it correct. Just because someone can understand me when I'm speaking broken Russian doesn't mean my grammar is suddenly good.

If it's clear what you're saying, then it is okay to say it. Nobody said anything about formal correctness until now.

Newspaper headlines ought to be formally correct.

I think it is, ex (French president) is a correct parsing of that phrase. French ex president is less specific because we then know their nationality but the speaker has left a large degree of ambiguity over what they were president of.

ex-(french president) was what they were trying to say, but unfortunately that doesn't look good as a headline.

french ex-president doesn't sound right to me, because that would mean a french person who is an "ex-president". Subtle difference, but to make a point let me stretch it out a bit. He could be an "ex-president" of anything, maybe an ex-president of a high school class, and just happens to be a french guy.

What they're trying to say is a person who is an "ex-president of france", so the "ex" prefix applies to "french president".

If you have space, ex-president of France seems more precise.

French ex-president is a bit less clear. There’s a little ambiguity about what kind of president is being referenced, but the article should provide that context.

France has multiple kinds of presidents?

There are multiple presidents that are French.

Contrary to the US, when a president isn't president anymore we stop calling him "President" -- it's not a honorary title for life

Sure. Président is a common name for a group leader, and it's the French equivalent of CEO. So there are many possible French presidents.

"Renault sues French ex-President" would probably refer to Ghosn, not Hollande or Sarkozy.

It depends on whether he's bald

"Everybody" knew he created equipment and designed networks for the DST (Directorate of Territorial Surveillance in the article). I did not know he was also hacking for them.

Rumors i heard when i was closer to Paris and when it interested me is that a lot of french engineers who worked in the silicon Valley during the 90s came back between 1998 and 2002, bringing back ideas and skills that Niel quite successfully used to build Online (now Scaleway) and Free.

He is the owner of Online.net/Scaleway and the Iliad Group among others, FYI

News aside (whether true or not), this guy is definitely more evil than Jeff and Zuck combined.

can you explain why ?

Not sure he did anything wrong. By the way, the article title is misleading, in that he did not hack Mitterand as a spy, but the reverse: he hacked for fun (to prove it was possible), and then was spotted for his skills and thus became a spy for the French police/military (Directorate of Territorial Surveillance). So that's rather white.

In those days, anybody could hack a french analogue board with a answering machine.

But, Xavier Niel says "They told us it was impossible.", implying there was some form of mitigation, and he was skilled enough to get around it. At least that's what he says. Anyway I guess he did something more than other guys if he managed to get spotted.

Does "We told them it was impossible" count as mitigation?

> Does "We told them it was impossible" count as mitigation?

He said he "got around" something, so that goes in the same direction.

I cannot be sure of anything, but that would be pretty dumb (and discredit them) from the French President's comms techs to just say "that's impossible" while anybody could hack it.

So, the working hypothesis is that, yes, there seem to have been mitigation in place.

Please pray to Xavier Niel : https://imgur.com/a/J8d74VT

Context: it was hanging in one of the rooms of the former HQ of Scaleway (an Illiad/Xavier Niel subsidiary) avenue d'Iena.

Among several others, I think there was Steve Jobs.

When the company moved out, to settle in its current buidling, the portraits stayed behind

disclaimer: he was an investor in my startup

He spends a lot of his money on giving back: 42, a free programming bootcamp (https://www.42.fr/), Station F, a huge co-working space in Paris which hosts entrepreneurs for free (https://stationf.co/)

He also has a very active VC/Business Angel fund (he funds 2 early stage startups every week out of his own pocket). His telecom company (free) helped divide by 2 the average price of mobile plans in France.

All in all, his impact seems very positive, I'd love to understand why you think he is evil

I still respect him because it's one of the few US-style entrepreneur in France who successfully built his tech empire from almost nothing and also give back to the community with the 42 school & startup funds.

Most of the other french billionaires are more like oligarchs and aristocrats, they are not from the same world as Xavier Niel.

Why would you say he's 'definitely more evil than Jeff and Zuck combined'? He has revolutionized the telecom industry in France (most people now pay less than 40 USD for phone/internet/TV) with Free (which doesn't have a monopoly), he has a participation in the biggest newspaper in France (Le Monde), but doesn't have any influence in the reporting, and he created the free computer programming school 42 (which has arguable results, but is not evil).

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cr%C3%A9puscule_(pamphlet)

.. would you care to explain this, yourself, in English of at least a few sentences, s'il vous plait?

The only reference to Xavier Niel in this page is that he may have advised and eventually financially helped the french president Macron in his campaign. It is complete none sense that this would support the claim that Xavier Niel is evil.

In addition it's a pamphlet written by Juan Branco of all people, a nutcase conspiracy theorist who is more interested in self-promotion than any real social justice

- one of the biggest and earliest support of Emmanuel Macron, helped him become president (offering to do his PR, made him met the right persons -- especially Mimi Marchand, who can make and break celebrities, lawfully or not, helped set up Macron's political party with other billionaires, etc)

- control the #1 French newspaper, "Le Monde" (extremely poplar on the Web, too), is buying up other media (Nice-Matin, most recently), is/was also influential in opposition media (e.g Mediapart)

- his spouse is the first daughter of Bernard Arnault, the 3rd richest man in the world, and together they form the most powerful couple in the country

He his making a reference to a book published some times ago that was accusing a few french oligarch (which include Xavier Niel) to have basically put E. Macron in the Elysée. This book, that was also published around the time of the gilet jaune if I remember, made a lot of polemic, especially since his author is quite controversial and can be very vitriolic.

A big issue with the book was that, even though some claim look legitimate and really not surprising for any French people (Macron being helped by a few powerful people was no surprise, he came out of nowhere and had suddenly more press coverage than any other candidate), it was also making a lot of heavy, and sometimes weird, accusation about some people, one of them being X. Niel, with nothing to back them up.

It also didn't help that the author was writing in a way that really looked like he was settling some scores with people instead of actually doing a journalistic investigation (he seemed to especially bare some hatred toward X. Niel). It helped even less that he started beef with anyone criticizing his book, especially respected journalist and news outlet.

I read that book and what Juan Branco say is that XN wanted to construct soft power relations with Emmanuel Macron to keep its influence. XN puts himself in a bad political position with Sarkozy.

In this book JB explain how rich peoples invest the political side in various ways to keep their benefits high. XN is one of them, specially because he was self-made and have no relations.

JB say the problem is not that rich peoples try to keep their influence, it's that noting prevent (and punish) them to do so.

It's not about being evil or not, it's about how evil can be part of the game (because political campaign funding).

The guy who wrote this outed his former classmate as gay, among other weird things, like editing his own Wikipedia page with sockpuppets. Not a good look.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Branco

As far as I understand, that Branco guy has had a lot of short-sighted attempts at getting into high-profile roles, with no consistent thread beyond that. Plus some pointless and spiteful attempts at getting into the limelight for all the wrong reasons, as with the above backstabbing.

Our politicians generally turn once in their lives, often rightwards, but this guy is thirty and has already bounced between so many attempts at becoming "important" ASAP, within unrelated and ideologically incompatible currents, abandoning them or being forced out almost immediately. Clearly, he has a lot more ego than resolve, probably needs psychological help, and I hope he won't be another psychopath getting into meaningful power.

He is indeed rumored to be close to criminals, probably because of his investments in porn. But he is mostly a white hat, accessible, and you can accidentally meet in if you trail in the catacombs (not the legal ones).

He did not invest in porn, and that would not make him a criminal anyway. He did own a "Minitel Rose" company which offered erotic chatting services over Minitel, the french precursor of Internet. After getting rich with it, he sold it and started a new company named Free, a company offering a free internet access services.

This has nothing to do with criminal activity. Running an erotic chatting service was a perfectly legal activity in France at the time. It was latter refrained and maybe the reason Xavier Niel changed his business activity.

The guy who did more for the purchasing power of every French family than any politician could? Whatever else he does, and whatever his motivations, his legacy is that every French phone or internet subscriber pays about 10 euros a month less than they would have without him.

I don't think so. Most of his success with Free Telecom is by putting the customer first, which led to fair pricing for both broadband and mobile and no-bullshit mobile plans that are impossible to understand. His plans were "a single, affordable, all unlimited plan".

Now, he's said to be pretty ruthless in a business setting, but it's because he's basically the only self-made billionaire in France (all the others have inherited) and he couldn't play by the rules because the rules were stacked against him.

Thanks to this guy I pay less than 40 euros/month for 1Gbps unlimited fiber at home, with a fixed ipv4. I pay 16 euros a month for my mobile plan, with unlimited everything, including while roaming in Europe or North America.

He didn't do that by exploiting his employees like Jeff, he did it by not taking part of the telecom oligopoly who used to milk customers (surprisingly they had no problem to align with his prices to keep their business).

He didn't do it by selling out his users data to third party, on the contrary he provided adblocking tech right in the broadband router you get with your subscription.

I'm not saying he's a saint, you can't become a billionaire without screwing a bunch of people, but he's clearly better than most billionaires especially the ones you cited.

I would still argue that Free use to have the best of the best customer service. I remember in the early 2010', when you were calling them, you usually had somebody that spoke perfectly and was very technically savy.

Now, their customer service, while not awful, is no better than the other operator, which is a shame.

Their fight with Google for the Youtube bandwidth was really not putting their customer first also. Their problem was maybe justified, but being a Free customer, you were paying the price for it with Youtube being sometimes barely usable. Same happened, and still happen sometime with Twitch and Netflix. Their 4g coverage is still garbage in a lot of place also and definitely worse than any other operator.

Overall these days, they are not so much better than the other big telco. But I have to agree that they really shook up the market and that was really beneficial. And they are still pushing and innovating, arguably less than before, which keep the competition going.

What you say is totally true and if not for him we'd all be paying somwhere twice as much for the same bandwidth and possibly with a data cap, but I feel it's more objective that Free Telecom started as "the challenger against the system" but today it definitely is part of the system. It's still teasing its competitors on their extremities, but nothing fundamentally as big as its two uppercuts when it entered the game

(I absolutely don't blame them for settling in, I just feel it's fair to paint a proper snapshot of what the situation is today)

You may be confusing him with someone else.

At the very least, to be considered more evil than either of your examples, you need to have the word “controversy” on your Wikipedia page.

Xavier Niel has a history of pro-consumerism, democratization of technology, and streamlining of venture investments.

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