2025 - Week 41

Another week in the world and we are finally seeing a ceasefire in Gaza!

What happened in the world#

• Finally, finally, finally, there is a ceasefire in Gaza! It seems that the ceasefire agreement between Israel and the Hamas is going to hold under US pressure, and that hostages in Gaza and Palestinian prisoners and detainees in Israel are going to be released tomorrow. This is happening in a situation of complete devastation in Gaza and only the first steps of the ceasefire were agreed upon. There are many open questions on what the next steps will be, in terms of humanitarian aid, rebuilding of Gaza and who will govern the territory. After 2 years of horrors, let’s hope that we will finally see positive changes.
• The Egyptian activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah was finally released from Egyptian jails after 12 years. His short interview with the Guardian is touching.
• The UN Human Rights Council has decided to establish an independent investigative body on past and ongoing crimes in Afghanistan
• Tunisia is getting every day more into an authoritarian country with now unprecedented sentences for peaceful expression on social media, a man was recently sentenced to death for his publications on Facebook.
• The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Maria Corina Machado, a Venezuelan conservative leader and long-time opponent of Nicolás Maduro. She dedicated her prize to Donald Trump.

Technology - for good and for bad (mostly for bad)#

• This week, I spent some time reading about the danger of the AI bubble, including how circular deals are used to pump up market prices of companies and how the giant datacenter projects by OpenAI and others make no sense. You may have seen this fascinating diagram from Bloomberg on social media that explains the interconnected investments of OpenAI and Nvidia:

  How Nvidia and OpenAI Fuel the AI Money Machine - Bloomberg News reporting

• Like many, I looked at what Sora 2, the new OpenAI video generation model, can do, partially curious, partially scared by the implications. The New York Times has a scary articles about what this means for journalism and fact-based research. It also seems that OpenAI wasn’t expecting the copyright issues they got, which to me sounds like another example of “move fast and break things”.

• A solid write-up on the attempts to actually decentralize BlueSky and recent moderation issues on the platform. I really love that some collectives, like BlackSky, are actually trying to make BlueSky federation promises real, but as expected, the very centralized model of BlueSky is making that very challenging, both by the lack of software available to run the platform, but also because of the important resources needed to run the central relay.

• An interesting write-up of Signal phishing messages against Belarusian activists by Resident NGO

• NSO to be acquired by U.S. investors, ending Israeli control of Pegasus maker, this is dramatic news, especially considering the current situation in the US. NSO Group has enabled human rights violations for a decade, what it deserve is to shutdown, not to enable more abuses in other parts of the world.

• Prominent Italian businessman also among the targets of Paragon spyware

• Apple announced revamping their bug bounty program to increase payments for critical vulnerabilities

• I am slowly trying to catch up on recent research on intimate partner violence and this paper “Abusability of Automation Apps in Intimate Partner Violence” is a needed reading (I added it to my slightly outdated bibliography)

What I did#

I attended a workshop on homelessness in Toronto. There has been a homeless crisis in Toronto since 2020 that affects primarily black, indigenous and people of color. The city is opening new shelters, but there are challenges to integrate them well in communities in the city, and the federal government just cut hundred millions of dollars aimed at homeless shelters. The Homeless Hub website has great resources on this question.

Blue Bus Stop 2 by Terry Chapman (CC-BY-NC-ND)

Reading & listening#

• An interesting article on the secularization of meditation.
• A fascinating and heartbreaking podcast about the history of the heroin crisis in the 80s in France, another story of failed health policies to support poor and racialized populations (in French).
• A map of native lands that is really useful for land acknowledgments.
• A reflection on our modern culture of optimization: there is Only One Hack: Do it for a Decade.

This week in music#

I discovered and really enjoyed Tancade by Gaspar Claus