2025 - Week 46
What happened in the world#
- Oxfam has published a piece about the awful consequences of the cut of US Aid.
- As expected, the Trump administration is cutting taxes to wealthy people. I saw this really good meme turning on Mastodon:
- This good analysis on France Inter (in French) raised the point that the war in Sudan wouldn’t stop without stopping foreign interferences.
- The Syrian President Ahmed al-Shara met with Trump at White House for the first time, something quite incredible for someone considered a terrorist a few years ago.
- Attacks against refugees and migrants are continuing in Tunisia fueled by racist rhetoric from officials.
- Attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinian are continuing in the West Bank.
- BBC is the new target of Trump after several US media backed down from a fight with the bullying US president, but it seems that BBC will fight.
Technology - for good and for bad#
- Google is reversing its decision and will let ‘experienced users’ keep sideloading Android apps, the question after many people criticized that move is how this is going to be implemented.
- The AI company Anthropic published a report on how a Chinese state-sponsored group used AI agents for targeted attacks. Anthropic noted that Claude regularly fabricated data and claimed to have discovered credentials for targets that didn’t, but many experts still don’t believe Anthropic analysis and how useful the report describes Claude agents.
- After it was revealed that the FBI opened an investigation into the archive.today archiving platform, another weird story emerged of a French non-profit trying to get the platform blocked. Many weird elements in that story.
- A new disinformation campaign has been trying to create trouble between France and Armenia.
- An interesting threat report on recent Iranian state-sponsored phishing and malware attacks
- After a lot of advocacy by digital rights NGO to push back against Chat Control at the EU, it seems that the bill may come back in closed-door negotiations.
- The International Criminal Court is migrating from Microsoft to the Open Desk open-source software after being sanctioned by the US.
Digital Investigations#
- Johanna Wild published an interesting blog post on lessons learned from building the Bellingcat Online Toolkit.
- DefCon recently published videos from DefCon 33, including this interesting talk on detecting deepfake images and video.
- A new fascinating investigation on identifying the three identical offices Putin is using to hide his location.
Reading & listening#
- Tech Won’t Save Us has another great episode on the war on Cars with the authors of the new book Life After Cars.
- An article on the rapprochement between Syria and Russia.
- A list of failed opsec stories.
- A website compiling deaths attributed to LLM.
This week in music#
I am discovering Grand River aka Aimée Portioli and her amazing album All Above (ambient/experimental - 2023).