2025 - Week 43
What happened in the world#
- Another week and the ceasefire in Gaza seems to hold, but in the meantime, the Israeli parliament pushed a law to annex the West Bank while violence by settlers against Palestinians is increasing.
- In a grand media show where we saw people crying for him, Nicolas Sarkozy became the first president of the 5th Republic to be jailed for corruption.
- After several weeks of protests, Moroccan authorities have started to heavily repress GenZ212 activists.
Technology - for good and for bad#
- Last week, we saw a rare AWS outage that, for once, was indeed due to DNS. Once again, this raises the question of the centralization of the internet with countless anecdotes of critical apps down during that outage, from connected clocks to cat food distribution systems. An issue perfectly summarized by a drawing from Design Thinking from 2001:
- This has also restarted the discussion about the centralization of Signal, which is a good discussion to have to build more resilient technologies, not to encourage people to migrate while these technologies are not mature yet.
- An interesting story in the vulnerability market: the US government accuses a manager of the US vulnerability company L3Harris of selling secrets to Russia, and we learn in the same week that Apple alerted an exploit developer at this same firm that his iPhone was targeted with government spyware before he was fired earlier this year.
- An interesting article on NGO usage of AI: AI-generated ‘poverty porn’ fake images being used by aid agencies.
- How ICE Spies On WhatsApp.
- Cameroon’s Internet access was disrupted during election protests even if I haven’t read any clear evidence that this is linked to a government request.
- And it seems we are into a new browser war: OpenAI launched the Atlas AI browser while Microsoft relaunched Copilot in Edge. Considering how complex and critical browsers are, I really don’t think it is a good idea to integrate immature technologies like LLMs. It is like giving the keys to your house to an 8-year-old during the holidays and hoping that everything will be fine. Zack Whittaker has a good summary of the security issues.
- We can’t trust technology, even vacuums: Man Alarmed to Discover His Smart Vacuum Was Broadcasting a Secret Map of His House.
Reading & listening#
- I read about how inflatable tanks and flat-pack guns used in the Ukraine/Russia war.
- I listened to this great podcast about Robert Mugabe and Zimbabwe decolonization (in French).
- I started reading Cory Doctorow’s new book: Enshittification ahead of his quick tour to present it in his home-town of Toronto next week.
- I liked the conclusion of this “We are heading toward a post-literacy society” video by Cole Hastings: “You have to find time to deeply engage with long and difficult forms of reading and writing”.
This week in music#
Last week was the final week of the International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition that saw the victory of the US pianist Eric Lu. His interpretation of the Piano Concerto n°2 was excellent but I was personally more touched by Tianyao Lyu’s interpretation of the Piano Concerto n°1 (largely based on the fact that I find the 1st piano concerto way more touching).
(and if you haven’t read it, the case of deliberately mistranslated letters from Chopin to hide his potential homosexuality is a notable piece of music history)