2025 - Week 47
What happened in the world#
- Shamefully, Trump received Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman at the White House. He even criticized Jamal Khashoggi and said that MBS knew nothing of his killing, contradicting his own intelligence agencies.
- Israel kills top Hezbollah official in first attack on Beirut in months.
- Human Rights Watch published a report on Israel’s forced displacements of Palestinians in the West Bank that amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.
- In a weird turn of events, it seems that Trump was really seduced by Zohran Mamdani after meeting him at the White House. Seeing Trump really liking Mamdani and Mamdani answering questions about Trump being a fascist was… awkward and hard to understand. This picture that will likely stay in history:
- In France, the Insee has published an analysis of the evolution of ultra-rich income, it shows that the 0.1 richest people had an income increase of 119% over the last 20 years (in French):
- And finally, this really interesting interview with the French ICC judge Nicolas Guillou about what it means to live under US sanctions, including not being able to have a credit card or use any US online platform (in French).
Technology - for good and for bad#
- A solid report by OONI on throttling of social media in Turkey during protests since March this year. The methodology they developed to identify data throttling is interesting.
- NSO is trying to overturn the WhatsApp case, saying it is ‘catastrophic’ for the spyware maker.
- It seems that for years, WhatsApp hasn’t limited at all the discovery of accounts, which allowed researchers to identify 3.5 billion accounts. The article also mentions some interesting parts about the profile messages and public keys (also well covered by Wired).
- The surveillance tech company Protei was hacked, its data stolen, and its website defaced.
- Another week, another massive outage in a too centralized web, this time with a Cloudflare outage on November 18. It seems that even some downtime detectors are relying on Cloudflare and were out, which led to this hilarious https://downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector.com/.
- Mastodon announced a transition in leadership and presented the new structure and team.
- Border Patrol is monitoring US drivers and detaining those with ‘suspicious’ travel patterns.
- Apparently, poetry is a solid jailbreak mechanism for LLMs.
- OnlyFans will start checking criminal records and it is a terrible idea.
- Pornhub is trying to have Apple and Google develop Device-Based age verification.
Digital investigations#
- I discovered the great JuxtaposeJS framework to juxtapose two images.
- Google has introduced an image AI detection in Gemini called SynthID.
- I have been following the release of the Epstein file, besides the political analysis of Epstein political role and potential involvement of politicians in sex trafficking, it is also an interesting case of data analysis and different people are using different tools for that. Zeteo for instance has released some of a Google Pinpoint project, while DDoS Secrets keeps adding to their Aleph instance. In the meantime, some people are developing creative tools like this amazing copy of Gmail interface.
- MacWhisper looks like a great local implementation of OpenAI Whisper on MacOS.
Reading & listening#
- This amazing podcast on the history of Franco and the Spanish dictatorship (in French).
- “I Tried the First Humanoid Home Robot. It Got Weird”.
- Weekly notes of Alexis, Julie and Benjamin.
This week in music#
I really enjoyed this adaptation of Bach’s Goldberg Variations for two guitars by Thibaut Garcia & Antoine Morinière.