2025 - Week 42
What happened in the world#
- For now, the ceasefire in Gaza seems to hold even with multiple deadly strikes by IDF.
- Following Gen-Z protests in Madagascar, an army colonel led a coup and is the new Madagascar’s president.
- Support to Palestine has been criminalized in many countries, especially Germany and now UN experts urge Germany to halt criminalization and police violence against Palestinian solidarity activism.
Technology - for good and for bad#
- A group of media published several stories on the SS7 geolocation company called First Wap. First Wap offers geolocation of smartphones by exploiting flaws in the SS7 network, which is not new. A few years ago, Circles was leading that market. The interesting part is that they had access to a set of data on people targeted which allowed them to retrace stories of person surveilled, from journalists investigating the Vatican to startup CEO and women who rejected a man who had access to this technology. The Lighthouse Reports article is really good, Mother Jones also has a solid report.
- A fascinating work by research teams at the University of Maryland and San Diego: they eavesdropped satellite communications from several satellites for three years with cheap commercial hardware and found way more unencrypted data than expected (Wired has a good piece covering this research).
- A US court orders spyware company NSO to stop targeting WhatsApp, which is a very positive development following last week’s announcement that NSO was purchased by a US based investor. I hope that will prevent NSO Group from re-entering the US market.
- After Anthropic agreed to pay 1.5 billion in a class action lawsuit for training AI on pirated books, the Anthropic Settlement website for copyright owners is online.
What I did#
- I met some people from the collective Science for the People at a book fair. They advocate for a radical transformation of science and society.
Reading, listening, watching#
- Another great episode from Minuit dans le siècle (a French antifascist podcast) on Trump, Big Tech and the libertarian counter-revolution with Sylvie Laurent (related to the publication of her new book). One interesting angle of this episode is to dismantle the narrative of progressive counter-culture in California : she comes back on the genocide of indigenous people during the gold rush in 1848, but also on the heavy WWII military investments at the core of the development of the current tech industry (Lockheed Martin was the first employer of California for a long time post WWII).
- An interesting investigation into the shady funding behind the Canary Mission’s Operations
- The State of the AI Industry is Freaking Me Out by Hank Green
- An old episode from Working Class History on the history of Industrial Workers of the World in Canada
This week in music#
not an elegy from Leila Bordreuil is excellent (experimental music from March 2021)