Loot: I was busy edition
| Published | |
| Reading time | 7 minutes |
| Licence |  |
| Tags | Tech - Société - Privacy - Communication - Accessibility - Art |
You noticed it because you follow me carefully given the numerous (zero) messages received (still zero) concerning the absence
of loot of the week last week; (you can finally breathe if you read aloud) but there was no loot of the week last week 😁.
It was Christmas so… well, I have a good excuse this time. Even if my family’s christmas was postponed for the first time in 42 years (yeah I’m 42 years old, since 42 years…), I was busy.
If you follow me carefully (I know you do), you also know that I wrote 2×4k words about Godzilla this weekend too. With real monster excerpts inside! Go read/watch right after this article: ゴジラ Godzilla (1954)
Anyway, tabs ready, go!
Society
A good article that explain well some of the problems posed by identity and age verification online.
Also go read the article by the same author that he cites at the beginning to understand what he’s talking about.
I just hope that enough people will continue to use free, reliable and accessible communication solutions.
I don’t use XMPP for example because I wouldn’t have anyone to talk to on it today. I communicate almost exclusively with proprietary services like Telegram, Discord, Signal.
Something that deeply shocked and annoyed me recently: I wasn’t responding on Whatsapp anymore (I’m no longer reachable there), and at no point did the person on the other end imagine sending an SMS. SMS wasn’t even part of their mental model of communication with a smartphone. Worse, when they finally sent an SMS (after calling me, and I reminded them of the existence of this “archaic” system), it arrived a good 12-13h later. The fact that their provider (Free I think) delivers SMS with 12h delay doesn’t seem to worry them more than that. For me it’s grounds for non-delivery of service that I pay for, and I would have changed providers right away. SMS is usually very reliable and fast. I use it every day and I have perfectly reliable and fast conversations. And I’m not even talking about SMS with RCS, but good old SMS GSM.
Anyway, this article also made me think of another one I read recently: Domains as “Internet Handles”. The author demonstrates why it is however useful and desirable to have several identities, one per platform. Whether they are free or proprietary. The need not to mix everything, or at least not to impose it.
- Miraculous : les dessins animés deviennent-ils trop politiques ? (YouTube, French)
I didn’t know about it, but now I almost want to watch 😁. (nah, let’s not push it)
- Tout ce que l’on ne veut surtout pas savoir sur le racisme (Podcast, French)
Nothing to say, go listen.
- Vous n’avez pas d’âme (et c’est pas grave) (YouTube, French)
The subject is touchy. It’s like when you arrive with big clumsy hints to say that we (probably) don’t have free will. The reactions are immediately visceral, and I understand perfectly why. Who would want to tell themselves that everything they do, think or choose is not their doing? Nobody. Not even me. But well, when you study the question seriously enough it’s difficult to arrive at other conclusions than free will doesn’t really inhabit us. Unless we revise our definition of free will. This video addresses a bit the same problem in an accessible way (well I think so, because I understood and I’m not a philosopher). I’m adding this to the list of good content about AI. As usual Monsieur Phi does an excellent job, I love it.
Art
I’ll talk about it soon, but personally (to make it simple) I’m opposed to copyright, authors’ rights, and any commodification of art (except materials themselves). I won’t expand on that today because I have in preparation a very long prose that will go into detail, especially to talk about generative AI. All with nuance, so keep your emotional reactions for later.
Why do I say that? Because this video gives me great pleasure and reminds us that precisely all these notions are purely artificial, and don’t hold up against creation and art in general. That precisely reproduction, plagiarism, adaptation, etc… is as important as original creation, if it still exists. The only place where I’ve seen what fan art can give in the material world, when it’s tolerated, is Japan. It’s normal and tolerated to sell your fan art, which means you can find beautiful art books, like those you find at Waterstones, with drawings of Mario or other manga franchises. And the revenues are not given back to the “rights holders”, but to the artists who produce these books. And the second-hand market being very developed there, you can find entire stores that offer them for sale. And there’s everything in there, like what you would find online.
Nice video about art copy and inspiration without hiding behind definitions that would make them absolutely different.
- How Rural Japanese Trains Still Exist (YouTube)
Since I was talking about Japan, here’s a super interesting little video about regional trains in Japan. Not the main lines, but the tiny, cute ones. Japan still has many of them, and it resonates a lot with what the state of French railways is today and how it got there. One of the phrases that struck me most: (I paraphrase) “Once the high cost part is made, the infrastructure, it’s relatively cheap to operate”. In France, our rails are rotting. The part that cost us a lot of money, time, and more, is rotting. Just because our urban planning and all-car policies, have decided that it wasn’t worth the cost to operate these infrastructures. And now we talk about urban/rural divide everywhere. Even urban areas of medium or low density find themselves landlocked because there’s no longer any train going there. And obviously it’s not as if bus networks or infrastructure adapted to active mobility (bike, walking) also existed for cases where it would be relevant.
Anyway, we let rot something we’re going to have to rebuild one day or another, and it’s another thing that pisses me off. Having to redo the hardest part of the job one day or another 😞.
ps: I don’t want to minimize operating costs. It’s just a question of ratio with construction. I also take urban planning into account in the equation. It’s much more expensive today to cut through territories to run trains or trams than it was a century ago. This cost isn’t necessarily only financial too.
Tech
This article could be in the “society” section. How, from a basic desire to find a good restaurant near you, we can analyze and reveal the mechanisms that algorithms hide from us. And that’s the whole problem, it’s hidden. GAFAMs are neither auditable nor transparent while they influence us from everywhere. And Google Maps is surely one of the most emblematic cases.
I wonder what the DSA (Digital Services Act) will be able to do about it, and if Europe will manage to enforce it. We all see how it goes with GDPR, right.
Ahh accessibility. The first thing I think about when I’m shown or I see a super new website all beautiful (that’s debatable), brand new, with lots of pretty things. The controversy about the french national education website shows how much we’re not asking the right questions.
I would prefer ugly services (that’s also debatable), than what they are today, that is to say slow, resource-hungry, and inaccessible. The article mainly talks about the traditional “we’ll see about that later” when you have the chance to think about it, often it’s just not thought about at all. You who are reading me, if you’re a tech person, is your employer or the service you work on accessible?
Become instrumental and impose this topic. Force it into the agendas. Make sure each sprint includes accessibility tasks. Event better, that the DOD (Definition of Done) includes accessibility criteria.
Another accessibility article. When the simplest thing is still to do nothing. Or almost. Special mention for the pentacle at the beginning of the article 😈.
Here, news about CSRF. Like the author I wouldn’t have really imagined that paradigm shifts had taken place. An essential good read for any WEB developer today, especially if they think they already know how to handle this security issue.
À l’année prochaine 😉
| Title | Loot: I was busy edition | |
| Description | You noticed it because you follow me carefully given the numerous (zero) messages received (still zero) concerning the absence
of loot of the week last week; (you can finally breathe if you read aloud) but there was no loot of the week last week 😁. | |
| Published | ||
| Updated | ||
| Type | ||
| Reading time | 7 minutes | |
| Words | 1472 | |
| Translation | English | https://blog.ztec.fr/en/2025/12/30/loot/busy_edition/ |
| Français | https://blog.ztec.fr/2025/12/30/loot/busy_edition/ | |
| Tags | Tech - Société - Privacy - Communication - Accessibility - Art | |
| Licence | Except for quoted materials, which retain their original rights and attributions, this post and its content are published under the Creative Commons(CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) liscence | |
| OpenGraph | Image |  |
| Title | Loot: I was busy edition | |
| Subtitle | Age verification, free fan art, accessible web: catching up after a busy week | |
| Description | You noticed it because you follow me carefully given the numerous (zero) messages received (still zero) concerning the absence
of loot of the week last week; (you can finally breathe if you read aloud) but there was no loot of the week last week 😁. | |
| Type | og:type = article twitter:card = summary_large_image | |
Found a typo, or something bigger that probably killed a grammar nazy ? suggest a fix via github.
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