Starting 2025 with a blog post and new resolutions

2025 is here and I have to acknowledge that this blog has been a bit abandoned lately. So now is a good time to bring some life back here and also a good time to reflect on 2024 and what’s next.

Reflecting on 2024#

In many aspects, 2024 has been a rough year with so many crises in the world. Like many people, I have looked with horror at the genocide in Gaza and felt powerless to participate in anything that could prevent it. I have also seen so many people affected by the horrible attacks in Palestine and Lebanon. After many years working in Human Rights, it has been hard to look at how inefficient Human Rights and International Law has been to prevent these massacres. The war in Ukraine is continuing and is not showing any sign of positive resolution, and there have been major political crises with violence against the population in so many countries like Sudan, Kenya or Mozambique. The Trump election in the US and the growing far-right and neo-fascist movement in Europe, US and elsewhere is scary. Capitalism is pushing us slowly but surely into fascism, largely helped by far-right billionaires like Elon Musk, Vincent Boloré or Tobias Lütke, and it is hard to see any efficient strategy to counter it.

On the other side, there have been some positive moments personally this year. My work in the digital security team of Human Rights Watch has been going well and is really interesting. It has been incredible to be involved in such an organization in these times of crisis. I have also spent time working with a coach to do a career assessment. After 15 years in infosec, and almost 10 years in the NGO world, it has been hard to be as excited to fight against digital surveillance. It is hard to see any improvement in that space and I feel I am looping into the same discussions about the same problems, and trying to solve symptoms rather than the solve the core issues that lead to this surveillance abuse (whether it is authoritarianism, capitalism, patriarchy or colonialism/racism). I have been more and more interested to work on digital investigations on human rights violations like the HRW Digital Investigation Lab, Amnesty Citizen Evidence Lab or Bellingcat have doing, investigations that require technical skill but to tackle human rights violations beyond tech issues.

I have also really enjoyed doing trainings ; I taught digital infrastructures in the third session GIJN’s Cyber Investigations Training Course (and the 4th is coming soon) which was a lot of fun. I also had a great opportunity to lead a training on fighting against unlawful digital surveillance to the American Bar Association. I also had the privilege to attend the Global Gathering in Portugal in September and meet and chat with incredible people in the Internet Freedom space (and host a small workshop on Android Forensics). I, in collaboration with my friend taziden, finally managed to finish and publish our analysis of censorship in France, something I have been wanting to do for years to expand my censorship knowledge and legal analysis, but also because I feel censorship has been understudied in Europe. And finally, I have spent some time updating and improving Echap’s digital security guides and led an online discussion on the dangers of geolocation with domestic violence professionals in September.

So it is the end of a very busy year, where I have learned a lot, read a lot and ended up often overwhelmed and exhausted. I definitely need to be a bit more intentional with where I invest time if I don’t want to end up drained at the same time next year.

On the need for a website#

A quick note on why this website exists: like many of you reading my blog, I have noticed the excessive centralization of online content on big online platforms, social networks first, but also the rise of publications platforms like Medium or Substack. But centralisation is not healthy, a lot of these platforms hold way too much power, way too much data on people and are not reliable. We have seen the quick destruction of Twitter by an egoistic billionaire, but we also see everyday the enshitification of many services, just because serving the wants and needs of investors does not serve the needs of the users. And now we also have to avoid our own content to be used to train stupid AI algorithms regardless of any copyright law, or abusing the copyleft ideology for profit (my own robots.txt blocks several AI platforms even if they probably don’t respect it).

So it is clear that we have a need for more decentralized and federated tools. The Fediverse is a fascinating exploration of that, but websites and RSS are also great solutions. We need small decentralised websites, which we can easily follow through the RSS tools, that allow us to read who we want to follow without being influenced by algorithms we don’t control. And so here is my small bit of the internet, powered by Hugo to generate static files hosted on a small VPS server. No tracker, no external resources, no analytics. Just plain HTML and CSS, and minimal JavaScript. It is simple and it works (even if I may consider moving to a more complex system to have a federated website).

On a side note, I have also discovered Shaarli from Louis Derrac’s website and ended up installing my own here. It is an easy way to keep track of interesting articles I am reading and sharing. Each time I find an interesting article, I add it to Shaarli with tags, and it gets automatically shared on my social networks. You can search for articles on topics that you find interesting but also follow it in your favourite RSS reader.

Looking into 2025#

New resolutions are hard but let’s try to have a few ones, and see if I can keep them this year.

Have more spaces for thinking and debating. I love book clubs so I am going to continue them but I also need more spaces to find interesting political discussions and take part in them.
Get more comfortable with writing more regularly by introducing a writing routine and by structuring my thoughts and how I express them more clearly. This blog is going to be the main place for that but I hope to find a few more places to write and publish.
Be strategic about what I spend time on. I have done too many things this year; I need to get better at saying no, even when projects seem super interesting and very nice people are asking.

10 rules for blogging#

I liked reading Damon Kiesow blogging rules for 2025, so here are mine:

Make writing a habit
Slowly improve my writing process. Which editor? How to review? How to publish? How to get feedback?
Write things I like and accept that it is not perfect
Write for myself
Write short pieces that get published rather than long pieces that never leaves my drafts.
Write in English mainly, but also sometimes in French or both languages
Open perspectives: infosec and OSINT will be my core topics but need to expands to other aspects of life and politics
Write monthly notes (inspired by weekly notes done by several friends)
Reference where I find my knowledge or ideas. More quoting, giving thanks or h/t people who have inspired me or shared information I reused
And keep sharing music that inspired me.

This month I have been listening a lot the Johannes Brahms’s 1st piano concerto.

See you on the Internet o/