In times of curfew or confinement, it is difficult to meet new people. Especially when moving to new territory. To remedy the isolation she has known since arriving in Poitiers 3 years ago, Marine Krief created, during the first confinement in the spring, the Facebook group “The rendezvous of the girls of Poitiers”. A space that allows for the forging of bonds of solidarity and friendship.
“This loneliness is heavy and therefore by creating this group, it allows me to say “I’ll help”. If there is a person who has a problem with this group, they can discuss it without judgment. “, says Marine Krief. “The Rendez-vous des filles” already brings together 2000 women in Poitiers and the surrounding area. “I needed a change and that helped me a lot. I met a lot of different people, people that I would never have been able to meet otherwise”, testifies Emma. A great collective adventure.
An employee teleworking from her home. (CLAIRE LEYS / RADIOFRANCE)
Betting that remote work will become the norm and face-to-face the exception, several digital companies are offering innovative solutions.
This is the case of Microsoft, which this week presented its solution for the teleworking of the future, called Viva. The American company claims to help maintain relationships and corporate culture during telecommuting. Thus, Viva will be a platform giving access to all the resources of the company, from day one even if you don’t know anyone. The solution will be marketed in the course of 2021. Microsoft is already very present in business, particularly through its Sharepoint or Teams tools. However, some functions can pose a problem such as the “productivity score” integrated into the Office 365 office solution, which has recently been controversial.
To further improve videoconferencing in the future, holograms may be used. This is what the start-up Imverse offers, for example, created by two students from the Ecole Polytechnique de Lausanne, Javier Bello and Robin Mange. It is a collaborative hologram technology, easy to implement. Using a special camera, the system films people in 3D, then software erases everything around it, and integrates the avatars into a virtual environment, for example, a meeting room. This would allow for remote collaborative work sessions.
Still imperfect in terms of image quality, the technology would however already make it possible to put a dozen people side by side. The effect is even more dramatic with a virtual reality or augmented reality headset. This startup has just joined forces with Microsoft and the Swiss brand Logitech to develop videoconferencing solutions of the future.
One of the most powerful women on the internet resigns. Wikimedia boss Katherine Maher announced in a farewell letter on the foundation’s homepage that she intends to give up her position in mid-April this year. The Wikimedia Foundation is based in San Francisco, has around 450 employees and operates the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which celebrated its 20th birthday in January. Maher was now in control of 55 million articles in almost 300 languages, on which more than 200,000 volunteers wrote.
As the head of Wikimedia, the American held a special leadership role. In that she had to accomplish the feat of leading an organization whose basic principles are flat hierarchies and swarm intelligence. Because Wikipedia is more of a movement and an infrastructure than an organization in the traditional sense.
After her predecessor, Lila Tretikov, had to resign after a long argument about her management style, Maher reunited the foundation and brought it back on track. Above all, Tretikov’s idea of transforming the foundation into a “high-tech NGO” and building a “knowledge engine” similar to the Google search engine caused anger among the employees at the time.
Maher was also successful in collecting money. So the amount of donations increased under her aegis. The non-profit organization now has foundation assets of more than 90 million US dollars. The annual budget has doubled to an estimated $ 140 million for 2021.
Not only financially, the Wikimedia boss caused an upswing, at least she says. Maher states that the encyclopedia had 30 percent more readers under her leadership. The gender issue has been preoccupying Wikipedia and Maher for a long time, and with it the realization that it is mainly men who argue and decide about the world’s online knowledge. Maher tried to increase the number of women writing articles for the online dictionary. The number of female authors has also increased by 30 percent in the past year, she writes goodbye on Twitter. This is mainly due to the fact that new volunteers from Africa, America and Oceania have come.
One of their latest projects is the “Code of Conduct” published by the foundation just a few days ago. The code of conduct is intended to set minimum standards for everyone involved in the global Wikipedia community. He outlines what behavior should be unacceptable, including insults, sexual harassment, trolling, abuse of power and also vandalism. These rules of conduct are to be checked and enforced by selected, independent bodies that already exist in some Wikipedia communities and projects.
Maher became head of the foundation in 2016. Before that, the now 37-year-old was responsible for the foundation’s public relations. She studied Arabic and Oriental Studies in Egypt and Syria, among others.
The Wikimedia Foundation has now formed a commission that is looking for a successor to Maher. The American news website Axios said the outgoing boss that she wanted someone to head the foundation who would come from the “future of knowledge”. That means that it should be a person from Africa, India or Latin America, writes Axios.
Regarding her future and her future tasks, Maher said that she would like to go back to the east coast. She is open to a new challenge.
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Sunday, January 31 was the deadline for submitting nominations for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize. In the press, several names circulated such as that of climate activist Greta Thunberg, Russian opponent Alexeï Navalny or the ‘World Health Organization. But other more divisive appointments have made some Internet users jump, who believe that the Nobel Prize loses all its credibility by proposing the names of Donald Trump or his son-in-law Jared Kushner.
These reactions ignore how nominations work. In fact, the list of people authorized to nominate candidates is very long: according to the Nobel Prize’s website, in addition to former laureates, all members of parliaments, governments, as well as university professors and many others can suggest names. Result: in 2012, a UMP deputy proposed the name of Nicolas Sarkozy. Which is handy for supposedly being in contention. Other far-fetched nominations may also appear, such as that of Adolf Hitler, proposed in 1939, by a Swedish anti-fascist MP who wanted to criticize the functioning of the prize.
From now on, the Nobel committee will restrict the many nominations to a list of about 20 serious candidates, and keep only one to be revealed in October. On the face of it, things were off to a bad start for Donald Trump, since the Norwegian MP who proposed his name believes since the attack on Capitol Hill that he does not deserve the award. Fingers crossed for Désintox: this year, a Norwegian deputy proposed to reward the international fact-checking network, the IFCN, of which Arte’s fact-checkers are members.
Find Detox in the show 28 minutes Monday to Thursday at 8 p.m. on Arte. On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/28minutes/ On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/28minutesARTE On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/artedesintox/ On the Arte website: http://28minutes.arte.tv/ On Twitter : https://twitter.com/ArteDesintox
The TikTok app claims 800 million monthly users across the world. (MANJUNATH KIRAN / AFP)
TikTok, do you know? If you are over 25, you may never have heard the name. And yet with 800 million monthly users, including 11 million in France, this application is the new El Dorado for young people.
And if teenagers are represented there, nearly one in five users is still between 25 and 49 years old. An ideal hunting ground for recruiters who are just figuring it out. In recent months, they have started to invest in this playground with unsuspected possibilities. In the midst of dance competitions, playbacks and challenges, as the Les Echos Start site notes, there are now job advertisements.
And these offers are far more successful than you might expect. They are even much more seen than on Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter or Instagram. Up to twice as many resumes are received for the same ad placed elsewhere. Recruiters say they’re hitting a type of candidate with TikTok that they wouldn’t otherwise have access to.
The positions offered on this application are more intended for young candidates. System U has for example recruited apprentice butchers. It has worked so well that they are about to repeat the experience with the butchers, pastry chefs and fishmongers.
The Paris firefighters and Leroy Merlin will do the same, via Bonanza, a start-up that is responsible for setting their announcements on the network to music. Most recently, an interim group, Synergie, also took over TikTok. For example for difficult trades such as plumber, electrician or mason. Usually, candidates did not rush to the gate, but this time a recruiter in Aveyron, received 33 CVs all at once through this social network.
But to work, ads have to be anything but “corporate”. You must use the network codes: light, quirky, funny, short, punchy … and good music. These are the essentials to create direct and simple contact with potential candidates.
For example, the communications director of a cosmetics brand danced to attract applicants. His video / recruitment advertisement / choreography has had more than 170,000 views and attracted more than 200 applications. Young people, especially 16-24 year olds, who would never have thought of applying are going into certain professions because they discovered them on TikTok. The SNCF, not such an old lady, has thus succeeded in highlighting some of its little-known jobs for which it had difficulty in recruiting.
The hedge funds wanted to cash in on the Gamestop share. But then an erratic crowd simply bet against it and rocked everything. So did the little ones win, or did they just earn some money?
From
Jannis Brühl, Harald Freiberger and Jan Schmidbauer
On January 14th, Hendrik Fürholz became an investor. Until that day, he had nothing to do with stocks, he says. But in the previous weeks he had read about Gamestop again and again on the Internet. He read about the company in a forum on the Reddit website. He saw a video on Youtube in which a man in a cat t-shirt explained why the American retail chain’s stock was worth the ridiculous four dollars it was when the video came out. Why the hedge funds could be wrong in betting that the company’s stock price will continue to fall.
Li Ziqi in one of his videos on his YouTube channel (YOUTUBE SCREENSHOT)
The record has been officially on the Guinness Book website since February 3, for the highest number of subscribers for a Chinese-language Youtube channel, a feat when you consider that Youtube is one of the blocked sites in China. 14.2 million people therefore follow the videos of Li Ziqi, 30, a star who has accumulated 2 billion views in just two years of presence on Youtube. A craze that can be explained by the atmosphere it offers, a very relaxing, bucolic, dreamlike atmosphere.
Li Ziqi films herself at her home in the countryside in Sichuan province, portraying her everyday life, and advocating for sobriety, home-made, self-sufficiency. We see her harvesting fruit in her orchard, baking her bread in an oven she made herself, making her clothes, dyeing a dress with products found in the forest, making lipstick from petals of roses. It’s fascinating, it’s very beautiful to watch, it’s like a fairy tale, all looking simple and light. Even more so as her personal touch is not speaking. Or very little. She doesn’t explain, she shows. Result: what we hear is especially the birds singing, the sound of the wind in the cherry blossoms, that of the knife which cuts, of the pestle in the mortar.
It’s calming. The complete reverse of other Chinese, ultra-consumer and high-vitamin chains. There all is order and beauty, and it is done on purpose, of course. Because, as the South China Morning Post explains, it was the frenzy of city life that inspired Li Ziqi. Orphaned at 6, she was brought up by her grandmother in the village before leaving for the city, like many young people, in Mianyang, 5 million inhabitants, to find work. There, she did odd jobs as an electrician, waitress, DJ, and after eight years of disillusionment, she ended up returning to the country. So began his other life, that of a videographer with the success we know today.
A success praised by the Chinese government as a model for young people. Which is quite absurd after all, since all of his messages go against Xi Jinping’s growth objectives: not to buy anything new, to produce locally, to manufacture what you need yourself. In Li Ziqi’s world, there are no factories, no cars, no shopping malls. And that’s probably why it likes it, to dream, to think it would be good, that it looks possible, at least for the duration of a video.
It’s winter, a complicated legal text is being published, and hardly anyone is satisfied. This is reminiscent of 2019. At that time, MEPs haggled for months over the reform of European copyright law, while powerful corporations and lobby groups tried to assert their interests. More than 100,000 people took to the streets to protest against upload filters and for the free network.
Two years later, history repeats itself at the national level, but with one crucial difference. While the EU Copyright Directive politicized young people en masse, the usual suspects are primarily interested in the German implementation: civil rights organizations, network politicians, lawyers and lobbyists. This is a shame, because the planned law affects everyone who uploads, shares or simply views content on the Internet – i.e. millions of people in Germany. The most important answers at a glance:
Who just decided what and why?
The Federal Cabinet has approved a bill to implement what the EU launched in spring 2019. The EU Copyright Directive provides a framework that all member states must translate into national law. The deadline ends on June 7, 2021, so time is of the essence. At its core, the EU reform redistributes responsibility online. Upload platforms are now themselves liable if users upload content that violates copyright law. Therefore, they must acquire licenses or make the best possible effort to prevent copyright infringement.
Why does copyright have to be reformed at all?
For many years the topic has only triggered negative emotions. Whoever you ask, almost everyone scolds. Everyone can agree on at least one thing: keeping the old copyright law is not a solution either. After all, it comes from a time when AOL was still advertising with Boris Becker. Back then you had to dial into the Internet, there were no smartphones, and instead of uploading videos to YouTube, you burned music onto CDs. Adapting the legal situation to the reality of the Internet is therefore overdue. Creatives should be able to share in the revenues of the platforms in order to be able to live from their work in the digital age.
Why do those involved argue so bitterly?
Copyright is only marginally about the rights of authors. Above all, it is about the interests of the users and large platforms. In short: there is a lot of money involved. On one side are the music and film industries, publishers and other rights holders. On the other hand, there are companies that still have an extra zero on their annual turnover: Google, Facebook and other tech companies from Silicon Valley. Their ideals are far apart: the exploiters want to see money for every use of a copyrighted work. The platforms want the most far-reaching exceptions possible.
How does Germany intend to implement the reform?
The current bill was preceded by three drafts. With each version, the federal government continued to meet the wishes of the exploiters and publishers. Now the Chancellery and the CDU-led Ministry of Economics seem to have prevailed. The “Copyright Service Provider Act” drastically reduces most of the exceptions and limitations contained in the first draft discussion that the Federal Ministry of Justice published a year ago.
What are the main changes?
Originally, minimum limits of 20 seconds were intended for video and audio snippets, 250 kilobytes for images and 1000 characters for text. 15 seconds, 125 kilobytes and 160 characters are left of that. That’s less than a tweet, the full name of the bill alone is 220 characters. In addition, a maximum of half of an entire work may be used, and the excerpt must also be combined with other content.
This limitation goes back to lobbying by publishers. They feared that generous limits could undermine ancillary copyright law. This part of the reform is intended to induce search engines like Google to pay press publishers for short excerpts that are displayed in search results or on Google News. However, the de minimis rule only applies to individuals without commercial interests and thus not to Google.
The text of the law restricts caricatures, parodies and pastiches. They are only permitted if their use is “justified by the particular purpose”. What this is supposed to mean remains unclear. Even if that purpose exists, platforms are supposed to pay for quotations and parodies. This breaks with the applicable barriers, which 19 professors criticize in an open letter (PDF). Recyclers get a “red button” with which they can block certain uploads immediately if there is a threat of significant economic damage. Only “trustworthy rights holders” are allowed to press the button, with the platforms themselves deciding who is included.
What about upload filters?
The federal government’s draft leaves many questions unanswered, but it gives a final answer: The CDU is breaking its promise to implement the copyright reform without an upload filter. Instead it should be now the coalition partner SPD be to blame – who was also against upload filters. This leads to the strange situation that two parties are promoting a law whose consequences they wanted to prevent. Because in order to meet the requirements, platform operators have no choice but to screen content before publication. These filters are already in use, but on a much smaller scale. Even so, the machines keep making mistakes and blocking legal content.
Are there any good aspects too?
In addition to points of contention such as ancillary copyright law and the upload filters, the 171 pages contain many useful changes. In fact, power and money are unevenly distributed on the internet: a handful of large platforms set the rules and earn billions, while many artists drive taxis. The law strengthens the rights of cultural workers and introduces, for example, direct payment claims for authors. Creatives should be given the right to classify in order to enforce their claims collectively. There are modern regulations for text and data mining as well as exceptions for education and science. However, the barriers for schools, universities or libraries have been reduced significantly compared to previous drafts. That could create legal uncertainty and make digital education more difficult.
What’s next?
Before the law comes into force, the Bundestag and Bundesrat must agree. This is not a sure-fire success: a number of network politicians and digital experts in the governing parties are also critical of the draft. If the Union and the SPD are in agreement and can overcome opposition resistance, it is still not clear how the law will work. It contains a number of unclear formulations that the courts will probably decide on in the end. Even the question of who is actually meant by platform could become a matter of dispute. Youtube should be included, Wikipedia not, but whether Twitter should be included is not yet agreed in the Ministry of Justice.
But judges should not only be concerned with the interpretation of the copyright reform. In autumn, the European Court of Justice will judge whether upload filters are compatible with the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. Poland had sued Article 17 of the EU Copyright Directive because the required filters violated the fundamental right to freedom of expression and information. If the European Supreme Court agrees, the copyright dispute will probably go on for a few years.
Has the controversy over sharing your personal data with Facebook convinced you to abandon WhatsApp? You are not alone in this case. One of its main competitors, Telegram, said on January 12 that it had passed the 500 million user mark. If you are one of them, be careful: with a few clicks, you can be exposed to dozens of scams.
Crooks have indeed hijacked one of the features offered by the encrypted messaging application to post classified ads. Sexual services, delivery of drugs or manifestly counterfeit goods at bargain prices are included in this “catalog”. In the overwhelming majority of cases, they are in fact scams using a system of recharging prepaid bank cards to extract several tens, even hundreds, of euros from gullible victims who find themselves without any legal means of recovering their money.
Created in 2013 by the brothers Nikolaï and Pavel Durov, Telegram acquired in mid-2019 an unprecedented feature in the market for encrypted messaging applications: the possibility of creating and joining geolocated chat rooms. . At the time, Telegram teams were touting a way to open “a new world of geolocated group chats for conferences, festivals, stadiums, campuses, or to chat with people who are used to meeting in the same cafe”.
In practice, a glance at the public groups created by users quickly reveals that their purpose is quite far from the initial promise. From the home page of the application, just open the “People nearby” section of the main menu and allow Telegram to access the geographic position of their phone. By scrolling down the screen, and provided you live in a relatively densely populated area, a handful of public groups, some of which have fairly self-explanatory names, appear on the screen..
Examples of geolocated public discussion groups in the east of Paris and around Aix-en-Provence. (TELEGRAM)
Whatever the group chosen, there is a good chance of finding an identical pattern: users innocently try to start a discussion, through messages embedded under erotic or pornographic photos of young women offering sexual services paying. Other little words relay home drug delivery services, and more rarely clothing or perfume sales.
All these illegal classifieds displayed on the application have several points in common. First, their unbeatable price:some offer baroque offers such as “15 grams of good shit at 50 euros plus 30 minutes of pipe [fellation] and fuck free [sic]”, where a gram of cannabis costs on average 10 euros for grass and 7 euros for resin, according to figures from the French Observatory for Drugs and Drug Addiction dated 2018.
Examples of scams posted on geolocated public Telegram messaging newsgroups. (TELEGRAM)
Another common denominator: the mystery surrounding the real identity of the authors of these announcements. “Me, I want to see who I’m talking to before I make a date with someone. But every time I try to make a video call with one of these people, she either refuses or asks me for money. accept to pick up “Emil * laughs. This 44-year-old Romanian worker, who arrived in France in 2006, tells franceinfo that he made contact with several people via the geolocated public groups of Telegram, hoping to meet prostitutes.
“Now, I spot scams easily: these accounts often feature portraits of porn actresses on profile photos. But I know almost all of them!”
Emil, Telegram user
to franceinfo
Finally, the requested payment method is always similar: “As soon as you are asked to pay with Transcash tickets, you can be sure it is a scam”, continues the forties, who says he takes pleasure in entering the game of crooks before exposing their lies.
Rather than a payment in cash or in cryptocurrency, the alleged prostitutes and drug sellers ask their victims to go to a tobacco shop or to a specialized site to buy a top-up allowing them to fund their funds.prepaid payment cards.
Introduced in France at the end of the 2000s, these cards are sold in tobacco bars, grocery stores and newsstands. Most of them are not linked to a real bank account on which it is possible to make transfers or withdrawals. “They are electronic money and work with a pre-load system: you can never spend more than the amount you have loaded there”, explains to franceinfo Julien Lasalle, head of the monitoring service for cashless means of payment at the Banque de France.
“This can have several advantages. For example, you can give your child a prepaid card with a specific budget for their pocket money, or use one only for your online purchases: this way you can be sure that even in the event of a hack , you will not lose more money than you put on your card “, abounds Rémi Domenge, marketing manager of Transcash, one of the companies that market these famous cards, sometimes sold without request for proof of identity. “Prepaid cards can also pose problems in the fight against fraud and money laundering, since some manage to fund their card by diverting top-ups bought by others from tobacconists”, adds Julien Lasalle.
The victims of the scams posted in the groups on Telegram are indeed systematically invited to photograph and to transmit to the seller a code, printed on the invoice of the purchased recharge.This then allows crooks to add funds to their prepaid card, before disappearing into the wild.
However, the law prevents criminals from taking too much advantage of this system. “The possibilities of recharging these cards are governed by a European directive. Beyond a certain amount, it is only possible to top them up from a nominative means of payment”, precise Julian The room. Transcash cards available without an identity document can therefore only be funded by a maximum of 150 euros per month.. What push the crooks to juggle anonymous cards to hope to rake in substantial sums.
Are these prepaid bank card scams widespread? When contacted, the police and gendarmerie services dedicated to the fight against digital crime did not respond to requests from franceinfo. According to data from the European Central Bank, around 3.7 million prepaid cards were in circulation in France in 2019, without it being possible to know the proportion of these cards used for malicious purposes. In any case, the phenomenon does not only affect France, since the German (link in English) and South African press (link in English) also report it.
In order to limit fraud, Transcash insists on the fact that “coupons are not a bargaining chip and should only be used to top up your own card”. A warning to this effect is also printed on the refills issued by tobacconists. Julien Lasalle finally recalls some basic principles: “In every transaction, the least of things is to ensure the quality of the counterparty, and to try to use a means of payment which is difficult to circumvent by malicious people. When we talk about prostitution or drug trafficking, it is unfortunately difficult to ensure that we are dealing with a person you trust! “ Unfortunately for the victims of the con artists of these couriers, “It is difficult to push the door of a police station to try to resolve a commercial dispute with an illegal service vendor.”
Also contacted, the Telegram teams did not respond to our requests. However, the application invites its users to report illegal content by e-mail when it is publicly available, which is the case with geolocated newsgroups.
In the memo, Matze writes, according to US media, that he had “encountered constant opposition to my product vision, my strong belief in free speech and my view of the moderation of the Parler site in the past few months.” He does not therefore deal with the decline of the network under his leadership.
The Twitter alternative, popular with supporters of ex-President Donald Trump, is currently largely offline, due to Parler’s lack of protection from dangerous content in connection with the siege of the US Capitol on January 6 from the app stores of Apple and Alphabet, as well Has been banned from Amazon’s cloud hosting service.
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