2025 - Week 39 | Etienne's Website

Here we are, 10 months after I mentioned wanting to write weekly notes, I am finally adding that section to my website. I have really enjoyed reading weekly notes from friends like Julie Brillet or people I find interesting like Alexis Métaireau or Molly White in a different format, so I am going to try to add that to my routine. For me, it seems complementary to my (rare) blogging and social media accounts, first it contributes to reclaim the web with self-hosted and decentralized websites. It also gives me a more structured way to do a weekly check-in with myself of the events that happened and what I found interesting or important. The format itself may evolve over time, and change depending on my weeks, but I will try to keep some world news, and a focus on tech, human rights and digital investigations.

This week is also the first I am spending in Toronto after recently moving there! I mentioned that on Mastodon and got some amazing recommendations of activities to do and resources to know what is happening in the city (Show Up Toronto is amazing), thanks Fediverse!

What Happened in the World#

The Genocide in Gaza is continuing, and the recognition of the State of Palestine by Canada, UK, Portugal, France and Australia doesn’t seem to change that. Week after week it is still so hard to read stories of killings, starvation or survival in Gaza.
The flotilla going in direction of Gaza with humanitarian aid was attacked by Israeli drones.
In France, former president Nicolas Sarkozy was recognized guilty of criminal conspiracy over the financing of his 2007 presidential campaign by Gaddafi. He was sentenced to five years in prison. Kudos to the impressive Mediapart team who has relentlessly and almost only alone investigated this story over more than 14 years.

In the Tech World#

After the impactful investigation by the Guardian and +972 Magazine over Israeli military usage of Microsoft Azure to record and analyze phone calls of millions of Palestinians, Microsoft has terminated the access used by the IDF for this service. This is a major step in accountability of big tech platforms over war crimes and abuse of their services, and once again due to solid investigate journalism.
Years after the Predator scandal in Greece where journalists and MEPs have been targeted by a commercial spyware and by the Greek intelligence, it seems that there will finally be a trial but not at the level of what should happen. The BBC has a good summary of what happened.

(As usual you can find these articles in my Shaarli instance)

What I did#

I attended the Indicator monthly meeting on capturing webpages and social media content. It was great to get a refresher on the latest changes in Hunchly or discover the recently released Ubikron. Craig Silverman released an in-depth comparison of these tools recently.
I also attended a training on how to communicate online by Christina Gorr from Crafted Voices and it was really interesting. While I previously followed trainings on the writing itself, this session was higher level and giving tools and tips about how to define your communication identity and develop strategies and habits for that. It was very insightful and definitely led to these weekly notes. Among other things, I am adding the book Writing for Busy Readers to my to read list.

Readings and Podcasts#

I discovered that GIJN has a great Substack titled How They Investigated where journalists share their investigation methodology and results. I found the one on pollution in France’s groundwater fascinating.
An interesting analysis of a forged PDF by Matthew Garrett.
In French, a good podcast on the history of crimes against humanity and genocide on France Culture
I am almost done reading Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt.

This week in music#

I went back to classic this week with “Homogenic” by Björk, and Igorrr and Grandbrothers just released new albums!