taylor@hplabsc.UUCP (Dave Taylor) (09/13/86)
This article is from MJackson.Wbst@Xerox.COM and was received on Fri Sep 12 15:25:17 1986 UPI wire story from /The Buffalo [NY] News/ of September 7: FRENCH LOVE EROTIC MESSAGE LINE, BUT CRITICS CALL IT A DIRTY SHAME Paris - Sex by computer has arrived in France, and the government is helping to pay for it. Take a home computer the government will provide free, dial the number 3615, type in one of several special codes and you can talk dirty to a multitude of people for a small fee. Some people make dates. Others simply exchange erotic messages. There are reports the system has been used for prostitution. One Nice woman found a man she liked by exchanging computer messages with him, and they agreed to a date. Her new friend turned out to be a multiple sex offender. She told police she was held captive, raped and tortured for several days before escaping. It all started in 1979 when the government introduced the worlds most modern home somputer service, Minitel. Anyone with a telephone can have a Minitel computer unit. It doesn't cost anything. The state-run Post, Telegraph, and Telecommunications agency makes its money by charging for use of the Minitel on an hourly basis. Nearly 2 million Minitels are in service nationwide, and the agency says message services represent nearly a fourth of the system's traffic. [blablabla] The state agency, meantime, is profiting. the computer costs about $10 an hour to use, and more than half of that goes to the service, the rest to the utility. With a Minitel one can reserve air flights and hotels, check the weather or the news, have a virtual library of information at the fingertips and engage in computer conversations with politicians. [blablabla] ---------- Having gotten your attention with the subject header and the first few paragraphs, I've elided the rest of the predictable details of the problem and arguments on what can, or should, be done. What *really* interests me is more detail about this French experiment in nationwide computer networking - hardware, services, and experience. Can anyone on these lists provide information? Mark ----------------------------------------------------------------
taylor@hplabsc.UUCP (Dave Taylor) (09/15/86)
This article is from seismo!mcvax!inria!sermage (Philippe Sermage) and was received on Mon Sep 15 10:29:31 1986 [ slightly edited ] All of this is true, except the Minitel is not free everywhere yet. The telephone administration borrow a mini-terminal instead of a paper telephon catalog. You can use the terminal for free the first three minutes, after that you have to pay a small fee. Before that you got the papper telephone catalog for free only for a part of the country (a departement: there are 95 of them in France). After that there are 3 codes: 3613, 3614, 3615. The difference between the three numbers is the price and the utilities. The first one cost about 15 cents for 20 minutes - it is used for information about administration. The second one cost about the same price every 2 minutes. This is used for services like tourism information or mostly a service which is paid in another way mail selling, short information and so on. The third cost about 15 cents every 45 seconds 12$ by hour. With this one you can spell a lot, take contact under a pseudo with people, ask your bank about your contos, move money from one to another, do a train, a hotel, a boat, a restaurant reservation, read news classified advertissements in newspaper database. That is normal usage but if you want you can open a server - I don't know about the price an you get a standard TRANSPAC (French net) code. For the 3 codes if you're a server then most of them are private and you can sell subscriptions and give passwords to get in the server after that you do what you want. About the mini-terminal: it's realy mini because three keys are missing: CTRL ESC, and BREAK. The screen is 40 columns, 25 lines and the worst is that the system TELETEL works in block mode only. I don't know which computers are used to make the net working. Last year in June all the systems crashed because of the success, but after a summer with limited services it worked again. If you want more information just tell me - I can try to get it.