2025 - Week 44

So much is happening these days, the world is burning and tech companies are throwing oil on it, which means that these weekly notes are getting longer and longer.

What happened in the world#

• Despite the ceasefire, Israel continues attacks around the region while NGOs are demanding Israel to allow aid into Gaza.
• This week has seen a dramatic escalation in Sudan with the capture of el-Fasher by RSF militia. Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab has found evidence of mass killings while thousands of people are feeling the city.
• Surprisingly, Javier Milei’s party won Argentina’s midterm elections.
• A US colonel went public on the fact that the US misrepresented evidence on Israel military responsibility in the killing of the Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh.
• More than 300 writers, scholars and public figures have decided to refuse to write for the New York Times’s Opinion section until they change their coverage of Palestine.
• In Canada, governments are increasingly using old laws to quash strikes, such as the recent back-to-work bill in Alberta.

Technology - for good and for bad#

• After years, it turns out that Memento Labs (the new name of the infamous Hacking Team spyware company) is still active and selling Windows spyware exploiting Chrome 0-days to target organizations and individuals in Russia and Belarus. Surprisingly, the Memento Labs CEO, Paolo Lezzi, answered questions from TechCrunch to confirm that the spyware caught by Kaspersky was from them, but indicated that it was an old agent and that they are now only developing malware for mobile platforms.
• Following last week’s revelations, Former L3Harris Trenchant boss pleads guilty to selling zero-day exploits to a Russian broker, he allegedly made $1.3 million for the sale of exploits to a Russian exploit broker.
• Based on federal procurement records, the Lever has revealed that ICE bought access to a social media monitoring platform called Zignal Labs, while ICE and CBP agents are apparently relying on a facial recognition app to verify people’s citizenship in the street.
• Noyb launched a criminal complaint against Clearview AI in Austria for GDPR breaches in collecting billions of photos and videos to build their database.
• Internet disrupted in Tanzania on election day as the ruling party seeks to extend decades in power.
• A wild story: Israel demanded Google and Amazon use secret ‘wink’ to sidestep legal orders.
• Some recent information on the forensic capabilities of Cellebrite on Android shows that GrapheneOS is more secure than Android on Pixel phones (see 404media article here too).
• Japanese convenience stores are hiring robots run by workers in the Philippines.

The Problem with Censorship is XXXXXXXXX, Budapest, Hungary by Cory Doctorow (CC-BY-SA)

Digital Investigations#

• The Indicator has published a guide on investigating digital ad libraries.

What I did#

• It seems that Telegram has finally started to update their transparency numbers for Q3, so I have started to crowdsource Telegram transparency data again, here is what I have so far:

• I made some updates to pycrtsh that allows to query the certificate transparency database https://crt.sh/.
• I am slowly working through my backlog of research papers to update my bibliography of Selected Research Papers on Technology used in Intimate Partner Violence.
• I attended an interesting workshop by the Indicator on ad transparency platforms.
• I saw Cory Doctorow present his new book Enshittification.
• I spent some time playing with RayHunter, an EFF tool to attempt to detect IMSI catchers.

Reading & listening#

• On tech abuse: “Tech Abuse Personas: Exploring Help-Seeking Behaviours and Support Needs of Victim/Survivors of Technology-Facilitated Abuse”
• In French, two new episodes of the great antifascist podcast Minuit dans le siècle on the situation in Italy under Giorgia Meloni (Episode 1 and Episode 2)

This week in music#

I loved the album Living Torch by Kali Malone.