Winter is definitely coming: light is gone, and I'm starting to hibernate. My energy in the past weeks have been very fluctuant, for good and for bad.
What happened
Dangerzone / Freedom of the Press Foundation:
- We've had around 200 downloads for our 0.10.0 first release candidate, and got some interesting feedback. We spent time fixing the WSL installation on Windows, making independent container updates work in Tails, disabling using rosetta on macOS Silicon, plus a few extra items. It's long, but we're about to cross the finish line! RC2 will be out this week, and should be quickly followed by the actual release.
- I've started working on alternative implementations of Dangerzone in rust 🦀, mostly for fun. It worked as a way to get me entertained, and the results are quite pleasant: binaries are small, and I've been able to do a script that reconstructs a PDF from pixel buffers, without the need of an external dependency. This allows to reduce the attack surface, and probably is faster in the end. Nothing on this front is public yet, though.
- I've also taken a look at Apple's Container project, currently still in beta, but is promising, and might render the need of shipping Podman to macOS useless.
- I've had fun playing with Dioxus to build APIs with Rust+CSS. It feels a bit like using Elm — even if of course it's not functional — as the compiler is really useful and the way to implement components is quite similar (with pReact style HTML elements)
Open source projects:
- We're currently looking for maintainers for Ihatemoney, as nobody is currently taking care of it. The project is 14 years old and has served its purpose. It looks like it's living its last year. I'm actually pleased about this: a few other projects are able to replace it, some of them even reimplementing the same REST API. The whole idea will continue to live!
- I've announced other folks at La chariotte that I'll be less involved going forward. It's long overdue, as I was supposed to mainly do deployments, but was actively developing and reviewing. I'm happy to make things clearer.
- I've started working on a tool to collaboratively review messages from Signal. The current limitation of 5 devices per number is hitting us in larger collectives. Pretty fun to use signal-cli-rest-api for this.
Feelings
- ❤️❤️ Going back to the gym. Good for my brain, good for my health.
- ❤️❤️ Meeting with folks made me want to be more involved, where I was thinking of quitting.
- ❤️❤️ It's been nice to hack my brain and do some cool research related to Dangerzone while waiting for the RC1 phase to come to an end, but…
- 💔 … I did this during the weekend, which was then not that different from the week, leading to fatigue at the end of the following week.
- 💔 Moral hasn't been great lately. Bad weather, and too much screen time. I need more time to rest, more time off-screens, more time reading.
Read, Seen, Listened-to, Played
- 📖 I've read «Capital et Idéologie», a graphic novel adapted from Thomas Picketty book. We follow the evolution of capitalism trough a lineage of rich folks, starting as bourgeois and ending up on the left side of the spectrum. It made me want to reach for the original book to see what else can be found in there.
- 📖 I finished reading Where the crawdads sing from Delia Owens, which apparently is one of the best selling books of all times. A romance with a social background, with at its heart a murder mystery. I liked it and didn't want to finish it.
- 🎬 I watched the first 3 episodes of Pluribus, the new series from Vince Gilligan (the creator of Breaking Bad). Quite pleasant so far!
- 🎬 I stopped in the middle of season two of the series Foundation. I liked the first season, but then... I don't know, the rhythm wasn't really there anymore, and it felt like I'm losing my time when watching it. Spoiler Alert. I liked how the good and the bad are questioned. The character of Hari Seldon, who betrays his friends for "the good cause", preparing everything in advance and not seeing how that makes him despicable (to manipulate the others like this); The Emperor being so found of itself that he decides to clone himself ad-nausea, people just motivated by revenge, etc.
- 🎮 I played to Disco Elyseum for a few hours. They manage to put you in the weird position of a cop with a hangover who tries to solve a murder. I liked how they treat racism, even though it's a bit early to tell.
- ▶︎ I found a French translation of The alt-right playbook: Le guide de la fachosphère. Excellent! Too bad they don't have more content!
- ▶︎ Climate Town released a new episode, where they talk about how Exxon made us believe they had a way to replace fuel by algae. But… they didn't.
- ▶︎ Watched "Is AI killing music ?", where a guy says somehow that AI is just another instrument. I don't understand what they don't see in the current state of affairs. They don't talk at all about the impact on artists and on the music industry, how this whole technology is detrimental to the lives of data workers, nor they talk about the environmental problems this is currently causing. Yeah, it's fun. It's true, it's fun 🤯
- 🎧 Listened to the 4 episodes of Catholiques de France, la tentation radicale, on LSD. They're covering lots of grounds, from the impact Gay marriage protesters had on politics, to how billionaires like Stérin and Bolloré are close to traditional Catholicism, and fostering the right-wing politics, to how social organizations are deeply rooted in Left-wing Catholicism. I highly recommend it, thanks to the people who recommended, I don't remember who!
- 🎧 Listened to 4 episodes of Can the record be trusted? from LawPod, where Human Rights documentalists and archivists are talking about their job and why it matters. (Thanks Etienne for the recommendation)
- 🎵 I discovered Seuls et Vaincus, sing by Gael Faye and Melissa Laveaux, with Lyrics from Christiane Taubira. We're planning to use it in a show I'm helping for, with/for Asylum Seekers. First, I found it too complex, but, damn. It made me cry.
Quotes, etc.
Specifically, below is a non-exhaustive list of some of the many known negative impacts, human rights violations, human psychological costs, and society-wide risks of unregulated deployment of various AI-based technologies that have already emerged to date, with particular focus on generative AI and algorithmic decision-making systems. — Open Letter to the Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation from civil society organizations and individuals opposing “National Sprint” consultation on AI strategy
The list is sick. So many links to unpack here. Just the headings read as:
- Compounding socioeconomic inequality and erosion of labour rights
- Grave environmental and climate impacts, Colonization, dispossession, and erasure of Indigenous peoples and their rights
- Automated racism across society,
- Intensified misogyny and gender-based violence, abuse and harassment
- Marginalization and exclusion of LGBTQ2SIA+ individuals
- Fundamental threats to mental health and cognitive well-being
- Privacy risks, mass surveillance, and security vulnerabilities
- Implicit promotion of eugenics and disability exclusion
- Collapse of functional information environment
I like the fact that they're calling for a pause, to think about it rather than just join the currently ongoing sprint.
These dashboards display the following sources: nuclear, gas, coal, fuel oil, hydro, wind, solar and bioenergy (the latter also includes waste-to-energy production, which is partly non-renewable) — Power generation by energy source, RTE France
In case it wasn't clear before. Solar+Hydro+Wind are making 30% of the energy at most, where nuclear is around 60%.
Quite a tangent, but I didn't know Gabriella Coleman was on the board at Tor. That's fun, she's an anthropologist who wrote on free software in the past (on the Debian community).
Il est impossible d’envisager une transition sans réduire notre dépendance au modèle minier actuel, qui repose sur une ressource épuisable. Et la transition énergétique se réduit à un slogan si on ne dialogue pas avec les populations pour savoir si elles souhaitent ou non l’exploitation minière sur leurs territoires.
— COP30 : « La transition énergétique véhicule de nouvelles formes de colonialisme »
Yep, yep.
ICE detentions getting worse
47 539 people in ICE detention, 70% without criminal records
A map where you can see the current number of people in ICE detention in the USA. The vast majority of them is detained even though they have no criminal records.
It's possible that this tendency will continue in this direction, as ICE officials have been replaced by Border Patrol officials on November 10.
But unlike ICE’s once-targeted operations, Border Patrol’s arrests now appear arbitrary. Agents drive up and down residential streets and stop mostly brown people seemingly at random — landscapers, pedestrians, construction workers — demanding to know, “Where were you born?” or “Are you a U.S. citizen?”
People documenting this have been arrested as well, as the article states:
Chicago’s rapid-response volunteers, who monitor enforcement operations and document abuses, have become targets. Many have been arrested for recording agents, following agents or alerting people of federal agents in a neighborhood.
CRAs in France
In France, even though of course the situation is different, so-called "irregular foreigners" are detained in CRAs (centre de retention administrative). According to Wikipedia, the total number of places in CRA, is 2 084 and they plan to increase this number to 3 000 in 2027. This number was 1400 in 2017, that's a +100% increase in 10 years.
According to the common report of associations, 46 955 people have been detained in 2023, from which 29 986 overseas. The maximum duration of detention is 90 days.
I've learned that CRAs were officialized by the socialists under François Mitterand in 1981, after the Arenc affair, which detained a total of 3,299 individuals in 1974, according to a press release from the Ministry of the Interior.
It seems that what they tried at that time was to legitimize the camps, by letting non-profits guarantee the rights of the detained people. Since then, these associations have called for
Bien que gérés par la police ou la gendarmerie, les CRA contemporains incluent ainsi depuis 1984 des intervenants associatifs, ceux de l’association Cimade (Comité inter-mouvements auprès des évacués), dont le rôle officiel est de garantir « l’effectivité des droits des personnes retenues », notamment par un travail de surveillance et de témoignage sur la pratique quotidienne de l’enfermement
This work by Nicolas Fischer seem to be worth a read on the subject.