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Comment by drdaeman | Hacker News Reader

From /. comments:

> I suspect the OP did not verify the exact wording. The law requires retention of (among other things) "mot de passe ou données permettant de le vérifier ou de le modifie" (password or data to verify it or change it) so it seems that it would be enough to store the password hash and/or do a password reset when demanded by the law enforcement guys.

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In addition to that the decree is not so much about data retention but about what gets transmitted to law enforcement. About the passwords, it also specifies that you don't have to store anything extra, which at least to me doesn't mean you have to suddenly store everything in plain text. Sad to see so much misinformation...

So it's all tempest in a teapot, like so many "scandalous" things that land on HN these days... Being able to change a user's password is quite normal.

I left Slashdot to get away from these kinds of stories. Anything to do with politics especially and most of the time you would read the linked article or the comments to find the summary was just hysterical nonsense.

Which, while pretty poor from a privacy point of view, is entirely reasonable from a technical point of view.

Once a court order is involved, any expectation of privacy basically goes out the window anyway. This law seems to just stipulate that a simple mechanism should exist to aid law enforcement.

The only thing about this whole situation is that what if a company is based in the US? Does it mean that the company is now ip-blocked from france if they don't conform?

Problem with non-international laws is like the US State dissallowing adult content to be served to minors, that becomes a world-wide law not only localized. Hence why the internet needs an international governing body to truly control because it is global, a concept never before seen in history.

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