Google's AI is getting ahead of the game by being trained with the millions of Youtube videos at its disposal. The result is VEO 3, a generative AI, months ahead the competition video generation wise.

And when these companies don’t have sufficient datas, it's really hard to resist the temptation of illegally acquiring these ressources. In February 2025, Meta admitted to pirating hundreds of thousands of books, 82 To of texts, to train its Large Language Model (LLM).

Meta’s Massive AI Training Book Heist: What Authors Need to Know - The Authors Guild

Today, The Atlantic published a search tool that allows authors to check if their works are in LibGen, an illegal pirate site AI companies copied for their AI systems. This is a similar tool to the one that journalist Alex […]

The Authors GuildHuman Authored TM

The AI war revolves around the access to the largest possible number of resources for training. Obviously this acquisition should not happen outside of the legal framework. And that's how we reach the issue at hand : defending copyright and the monetary value placed on the resources used in the process of creating and using these models. A necessary and urgent discussion, as the legal framework requires rapid adaptation to a rapidly changing technological landscape.

Because, let's face it, we don't really know today how to apply the existing rules governing the remuneration of intellectual property to the rapid emergence of AIs. The answer to this question is critical, and should be at the heart of the debate, since it determines the entire business model for generative AI services.

I previously wrote on that subject, making the point that the economic models around which these services are currently built, would not be viable if authors were fairly and justly compensated. 

The arrival of AI is likely to be challenged by the financial stakes involved in respecting copyrights - and disillusionment about the real capabilities of these tools in the near future.
– Mickaël Rémond, Ces modèles qu'on appelle IA

And it seems that all the major players in the field of AI have clearly understood this point: the future of AI lies in the existence or otherwise of regulations that promote respect for copyright and enforce the conditions for training artificial intelligence models.

But it remains to be seen whether the various governments are really willing to take their responsibility and limit the content bulimia of the big companies and defend the weight of the authors of content used in LLM training in the balance.

On the one hand, lawsuits against AI companies are springing up all over the world, as in France where Meta is being sued for copyright infringement, while on the other, some governments aim to protect companies and leave them free rein.

On November 13, 2024, Shira PERLMUTTER testified in her role as Director of the U.S. Copyright Office to the Senate Subcommittee on Intellectual Property. A few months later, when she published her report questioning the use of copyrighted content to train AI models, she received news of her dismissal by the Trump administration.

Statement on the Firing of Shira Perlmutter and the Release of the U.S. Copyright Office’s Report on Generative AI Training | Press Room

“The Guild demands the immediate reinstatement of Perlmutter as she is an employee of the legislative branch and the executive branch had no authority to fire her in the first place. We stand with Perlmutter and the U.S. Copyright Office in their fight against the theft of copyrighted works.”

Writers Guild of AmericaJason Gordon

And now, Trump's massive pet project, the bill he's trying so hard to pass in the US, contains, among other things, a 10-year moratorium on legislation to regulate AI. A measure criticized as incredibly imprudent by some, including some from his side, who see it as a dangerous precedent.

US House Passes 10-Year Moratorium on State AI Laws | TechPolicy.Press

The US House advanced a 10-year pause on state AI regulation, but its fate is uncertain in the Senate.

Tech Policy PressJustin Hendrix, Cristiano Lima-Strong

Another example, on this side of the Atlantic, the British government has announced its intention to include an exception to copyright in law for the training of AI models for commercial purposes, which has provoked backlash from the public and various artists such as Paul McCartney.

« So you know, if you're putting through a bill, make sure you protect the creative thinkers, the creative artists, or you're not going to have them. I think AI is great [...] but it shouldn't rip creative people off. There's no sense in that »
— Paul McCartney - BBC interview

Meanwhile on the creator’s side, fear is beginning to creep in. And online, it's taking over the conversation. Some authors with a more nuanced and measured stance are having to defend their position to their audience. Authors like R.J. Bennett, who is also a programmer, who speaks out on Instagram. His unique position makes him someone who understands the technology behind LLMs and can have a measured and informed technical opinion on AIs while exposing the scams around LLMs and the companies that exploit them.

He felt the need to make a video to respond to the accusations of using AI for his novels and creative writings. The accusations were made after he defended the use of AI for administrative tasks like email writing.

“You post on the internet, fire off a bunch of posts and run your mouth, you are going to take some lumps”
— R. J. Bennett - Instagram

As uncertainty grows for the people trying to make a living with their creativity, it seems mandatory for those with an online platform to adopt a public position on AI. And between hardline anti AI and those who live and die by it, the discourse is certainly polarized. 

But now that the anti-copyright position is defended amongst the powerful people in the US governments, it appears easier to take a shot at the messengers than to fight the flaws in the system. Like with any new technology, the legal framework will need to be adapted. 

If we want room for the legitimate case of AI to emerge, it's the non-legitimate ones that need to be tackled. So we need to be clear about how the models work, where the value lies in the chain, and how to distribute it in a just way.

If AI is a commodity, then the value lies in the knowledge protection

If AI is a commodity, then the value remains in protecting the knowledge that brings it to life. This is what will enable us to sort out the uses of AI. For example, the use of AI trained on one's own data, or of medical imaging data shared as part of an Open Science approach, could be considered legitimate.

However, if we give in on copyright, under the guise of a form of fair use granted to AI operators, we abandon the field of knowledge and humanity to the same logic deployed by those who overexploit the Earth's natural resources.

In the same way that mass fishing with long driftnets was banned for its environmental impact, AI needs to be monitored and regulated, not for the immediate danger it would pose to the survival of humanity, but more prosaically to protect and defend creators and their condition of living.

The companies that operate AI cannot simply and by themselves claim fair use, while appropriating the work of others without compensation.

The AI battle is being waged in the law and the courts... And it's now that we need to mobilize, if we want to defend creation, knowledge and humanity, not against AIs, which have legitimate uses, but against the bad actors; the predatory companies that steal from artists.

Apple just announced the goal of moving the production of iPhones sold in the US from China to India by 2026. News that is bound to shock everyone accustomed to reading “Designed in California, Made in China” engraved with small letters on the devices stuck in our pockets since the first iPhone. 

But in today's world, certainty and status quo are shaky and any equilibrium seems more precarious than before. Isolationists' speeches prevalent in the United States facing the consolidation of Chinese positions in the global economy seems to herald the end of an era. Between the two facing giants, Europe is seeking its place on the chessboard as well as its independence.

Designed in California, Made in China. With increasing tension, European sovereignty becomes more than ever, a major challenge, especially when Uncle Sam seems to treat long time friend and enemy alike. Many European countries and US allies seem to be waking up in a cold sweat to the hand-wringing of the man who lives in the White House.

To be clear, I am not saying blind trust to China is de rigueur (it's not). Working conditions in the Chinese sweatshops and factories that produce these technological devices are regularly talked about for good reasons. And China itself is not unfamiliar with problems coming their way. International or not. But to put it simply, when American dream turns nightmare, it becomes harder to sell it and the goods that comes with it, despite the pretty little bow.

But I would suggest it makes sense to take this opportunity to remove the middleman and kill two birds with one stone by also gaining independence on the production front. 

It is the idea behind the slogan, “Designed in Europe, Made in China”. an approach that could be an important step towards recognizing a form of economic sovereignty.

Even Apple, with its almost unlimited financial power, remains in awe of the Chinese assembly line. And it's not the Trump administration's punitive tariff measures, applied then withdrawn in awkward silence, that have done anything to change this reality. It's not patriotic speeches that keep the machines roaring.

And yet, the tariff war is here to stay, justified by the idea of bringing back manufacturing of electronic devices on the red, white and blue US soil. But if these tariffs are so good and “great” for the US tech industry, why add exemptions on key products like smartphones and computers ?

The fantasy of a new great industrial boom through the factories coming back as deeply ingrained in the US like at home. 80% of Americans claim they want factories to come back. But is that possible ? Most importantly, is that feasible ? 

This dream of factory relocations is as expensive as counter productive. China has had a decades-long head start to develop manufacturing expertise that we simply don't have. It not only has infrastructure but also know-how, talents and logistics behind it. Plans and vision. China thinks in decades, not in 4 year presidential terms.

And especially when thinking short term, it seems impossible to bring back production close to home. iPhone production is massive. Many components are made by different manufacturers spread across numerous countries.   

Rather than striving to compete with the impossible, there is another path open to us: that of disintermediation. Accept that “Made in China” will remain the norm, for a while at least, but turn “Designed in California” into “Designed in Europe”. Regain control over the thinking, the act of creation in its most political form. Freedom from the American filters that dictates, even today, our tools, GUIs and operating systems.

The fact that China presents itself quite ready to part ways with the American consumers and that the Chinese president called on Europe to resist together at the beginning of April open doors for new international relations. 

But European autonomy cannot be without security. Still today, the vast majority of critical updates, security audits, firmware patches are managed abroad. Here too, cutting out the middleman means to take back control. Developing systems locally, training talent, building teams capable of mastering the entire software chain from interface to firmware. This is not science fiction. It's common sense.

And finally, reducing American influence in sensitive and critical industries. Smart appliances, servers and critical infrastructures are a long-term priority. Trust cannot be decreed but has to be built on technological mastery. And this mastery can only come from a collective effort, shared between governments, researchers, companies and users.

Android, in its most open source version, remains a totally viable and accessible foundation that no longer relies on American software. Provided we really de-Google it. At the moment, it's the open software layer that brings us closest to the autonomy we strive for.

Mutualize efforts to create a European Android, thought right from the start with autonomy, transparency and digital sovereignty in mind. These steps lay the groundwork for a viable alternative. 

With the upheavals that occur every time the United States and China trade blows on the international stage, European sovereignty and independence in Tech are making us sit up and take notice. And yet, American-style isolationism is NOT the solution. The dream of controlling everything locally, from design to production remains only that. A dream.

And we look at the volumes necessary to produce enough to replace China on the global market, it becomes obvious. For these numbers, we are not talking in terms of factories but in production centers the size of cities. 

But it is still possible to act at our level to keep our heads high by using tech to push the world in a new and better direction. 

The Silicon Valley gives us the blueprint ; it’s written on the box.

“Designed in California, Made in China”

We have the brains, the values and the means to build a different path forward. Europe needs to invest in what they already know how to do : think, design, build tech aligned with its principle. Rather than chase after the windmills that are the imagined factories, let's invest in our intellectual autonomy. 

American giants are not asking for permission anymore. Meta, Google and their ilk aim to build a world where they don't need anyone. If we don't want to be relegated to the status of mere consumers of their visions, it's time to take back control.

If we want to change the way production is carried out in order to influence it, then we have to design our own products and control the constraints placed on the manufacture of the devices whose production we outsource.

Science fiction author. Brilliant analyst of technological trends. And creator of the term "enshittification" (yes, that's the original English term), the concept that digital platforms—whether because they serve both consumers and advertisers or because they've become near-monopolies—are destined to deteriorate over time.

A writer who really speaks to my interests.

Here’s the introduction to his book “The Internet Heist” (recently published in French as “Le Rapt d’Internet”), which perfectly captures his tone and scathing mindset:

This is a book for people who want to destroy Big Tech.

It's not a book for people who want to tame Big Tech. There's no fixing Big Tech.

It's not a book for people who want to get rid of technology itself. Technology isn't the problem. Stop thinking about what technology does and start thinking about who technology does it to and who it does it for.

This is a book about the thing Big Tech fears the most: technology operated by and for the people who use it.

History of the Destroyer Movement

In his book, Cory takes us back to the Chicago school of economics, especially Milton Friedman, the man behind the idea of the “virtuous monopoly.”

And he explains how this movement led to the rise of the billionaire clique that’s intent on running our modern world.

Take Mark Zuckerberg, for example. He now heads the Meta empire, but started in his Harvard dorm room in the 2010s. That’s where he supposedly grew Facebook from a website into the internet phenomenon we know today. At least, that’s how the story goes…

“Move fast, break things,” the iconic Tech slogan from that era is attributed to him. The philosophy that knowledge gained through experimentation matters more than the stability of what we build. You have to move quickly, iterate rapidly to outpace the rest of the world—lawmakers who can’t adapt fast enough and users who can’t take the time to properly assess a new technology. You have to move fast to dazzle.

This philosophy spread to many startup companies at that time, which rushed to follow in Facebook’s giant footsteps. Constantly adding new features, quickly moving on, never looking back. Like SpaceX, which relentlessly launches rockets often followed immediately by their explosion. All to learn, to outrun the competition, regardless of the environmental consequences.

Empires were built and Big Tech titans emerged before any discussion about their impact and responsibilities could even take place.

Mark Zuckerberg eventually acknowledged this approach was outdated, but the narrative of how these technology fortresses were built persists.

The Story vs. Reality

Legend has it that Mark Zuckerberg would change Facebook’s code during meetings.

The tech world quickly consolidated behind the myth of genius disruptor entrepreneurs. Of course I’m always wary of these stories but there is a reason behind the popularity of such tales.

We need to believe in saviors, don’t we? 

We need to have a justification for why the CEO makes X times more than the least recognized employee. We need to make them heroes because this belief justifies excesses.

The entrepreneur myth extends the American dream in Silicon Valley. It perpetuates the image of the genius disruptor who overturns markets and changes the world. Anthony Galluzzo, in his book “The Myth of the Entrepreneur,” completely dismantles this myth, exposing it as a political tool that legitimizes a conservative social hierarchy behind a meritocratic facade.

We also need to justify why a CEO earns thousands of times more than their lowest-paid employee, so we turn them into heroes.

America was built on this myth. And this myth built American soft power. But today, that power isn’t so soft anymore—it’s given way to a more brutal form of domination.

The Kings are not just content to break things, they aim to break the people in their way too. 

Adapting to the changing winds, Mark has backtracked on the progressive values he claimed to support just a few years ago.

And recently, Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former Facebook employee, was relentlessly attacked by Meta for her book “Careless People,” which exposes the toxicity surrounding the cult of personality built around Zuckerberg.

How Should We React?

How do you respond to a power that can destroy you, one that hides behind myths and statues erected to entrepreneurs who share neither our compass nor our values?

Big Tech was built as a common good, but these giants have diverted technology to serve the interests of the few.

And as monopolies consolidate behind these kings, they seem to lose whatever virtue they once had…

Back to Cory Doctorow.

At the Fediverse House Conference organized by Flipboard alongside the SXSW 2025 festival, he coined a brilliant slogan that summarizes his stance on Big Tech:

Cory proposes paths for political action.

Like imposing interoperable systems to force collaboration. Methods to prevent monopolies and liberate users.

Breaking dominant positions, escaping the system that creates singular entities. Giving back to consumers the power to choose and to citizens the power to decide.

Like a return to Tech’s roots. Rediscovering the joy of tinkering and DIY. The pleasure of creation and experimentation. There’s still time to get back to our roots. To return to creating technology that liberates people.

Stop relying on misplaced fascination with deeply flawed men who only seek to protect their empires.

Smash the kings and take down their statues. 

MOVE FAST and BREAK KINGS

As a result, I am back to posting my content in priority on the open web:

• You can find me on the Fediverse (Mastodon), with this account being dedicated to my tech posts: @mremond@process-one.net. I post mainly in English on that account, but you can always subscribe on Mastodon to only my English or French post, depending on your preferences.
• You can find me on this blog for longer posts, even if I mostly these days post in French, on topic relating to fiction writing and creativity. Ping me if you are also interesting in reading my text in English as well. If there is enough requests, I may end up translating my fiction work.

You can subscribe to my RSS feed in English here: Mickaël Rémond - RSS - English.

Thanks for reading me!

As Laurent Sansonetti posted on Twitter: ‘I feel disconnected from tech, as I have no idea what Oracle does these days, and I barely know what TikTok is all about.’

And it’s true. From what I know, Oracle is a B2B company. TikTok is a social network that is popular among teens.

I am still to read an article making sense of it.

But I will not find one.

Why? Simply because it does not make sense.

We are not talking about technology anymore but a mix of technologies used to serve a political agenda, what we could call ‘politechs’.

Large tech companies are worth small countries. They have huge revenues, tons of cash and have a bigger budget than many states. It is no wonder they moved to politics some time ago.

The recent Tiktok show is just that. Using tech as a politic leverage in a wider scheme. Oracle is playing that game to please the US government. We can’t find any synergy with Oracle business, except maybe a showcase for their lagging cloud hosting service.

Before Donald Trump became President, the tech industry was already used as a political leverage.

But it was done in a way that was not so obvious. A soft power needs to stay soft to last, as you want to avoid people to be forced to face the reality of the situation.

Trump’s presidency is not about soft power. It is about having power and showing it.

TikTok + Oracle does not make any sense, making it obvious this is just a move in a larger scheme.

No one seems to bother providing a good explanation for that move.

People are already making fun of Oracle and their infamous Java installer.

It does not matter anymore.

All this is just about ‘politechs’.

But now that this manoeuvre is done in the open, the rest of the world can’t pretend to ignore it.

Will other countries require local based operations for tech giants like Facebook, Google or Twitter?

First, iOS 13.4 beta expands the keyboard setup with new options to remap the key with modifiers. This is something I am looking forward as I always remap the caps-lock key to control key on my laptop, as I never found a use for caps-lock.

Regarding the new rumours, it seems that it is expected that Apple will release a new keyboard with a trackpad for the iPad Pro. It means that Apple would like to make a step further to make the iPad both a great tablet, but also a more general-purpose computing device, by adding a pointing device. It is clear unclear if the trackpad would be use as a mouse pointer or as a text selection and manipulation tool, for example.

I would like to put those evolutions in perspective with the release of iPadOS. While multitasking has been promoted as the main features, it still needs work. However, the real game changer has been Safari browser improvements. It is not yet perfect, and I still have issues with some websites, but it is now really close to laptop browser experience.

It seems to me that Apple is trying to cover all the bases and would like to ensure that the iPad can be a perfect lightweight terminal, as well as being a great tablet. Nearly all business applications these days are web-based, or have a web version. Having a great keyboard support, touchscreen support, an alternative pointing device to use as a laptop, and excellent browser support would make it an even greater fit for corporate use cases.

When I am not programming, I tend to primarily use my iPad these days, as it has a great battery life, is lightweight. The iPad is also great for focusing during long writing sessions, as I tend to focus more on the current tasks. To be honest, using the iPad is also a good way for me to avoid using my Mac, that I find less reliable than my previous laptop. I am regularly losing the Wifi connection, and this is driving me crazy.

Finally, I can really see how I could benefit from better web and keyboard support, as I need to deal with various business online apps daily. I also occasionally use an SSH client to manage servers and this use case would benefit as well from those improvements. Let's see what finally get announced and released in the coming weeks.

The features I would love to see added:

• Visit counter to know how many people visited the page.
• Ability to let users without a Dropbox account to comment on a page.
• Better iOS app, as currently it is a bit buggy. Sometimes, I have to move to the Web version that is more robust from my iPad.
• Dark mode on iOS.
• Integration of Paper and Dropbox into a single document hierarchy. Paper documents should be stored in the main Dropbox, a bit like Google docs. I am not using Google Docs much, as I do not like the page-oriented workflow.

Still, I use that app every day, but I would love to consolidate more of my writing use cases on it.

Update 2022: I now moved to Obsidian for all my notes and Scrivener for all my fiction writing.

However, our first tendency is frequently to hide our face as well. It is very tempting to be selective in the way we view our impact. Beyond transportation, we are still very poorly equipped to produce an objective estimate, because the evaluation tools are still lacking.

So, where do we start?

La première chose à faire pour savoir ce que l’on peut accomplir à notre échelle est de mesurer notre impact. À ce titre, je trouve que l’effort du Monde pour mesurer l’impact de sa production vidéo sur l’environnement est un excellent exemple.

The project is summarized in the article "How 'Le Monde' tracks down and reduces the carbon footprint of its videos" (In French). Le Monde has developed a grid to estimate the carbon impact of each report with the help of a few simple input keys.

For the moment, the method focuses on the production phase of the video report, including both the impact of the transport used to make the report and the electricity used to film and edit the video. In the end, the carbon impact depends mainly on the type of transportation used. Using plane or car counts for a large part in the impact of the videos. On the basis of these findings, Le Monde can thus optimize its reporting rules to limit their environmental impact.

To provide transparent communications to its readers, the carbon impact is mentioned at the end of the video.

Le Monde's approach is replicable to other fields. As managers of IT companies, it is our duty to adopt a similar approach to :

• Determine the overall carbon footprint of online service platforms and communicate it to users.
• Assess each user's share of this consumption to enable them to evaluate their use.
• To engage in a continuous improvement process and explain the gains achieved.

This exercise in carbon assessment, traceability, corporate accountability and transparency needs to become more widespread to enable us, as consumers, to make informed choices. We are still in the early phases of awaking and ProcessOne is proud to be involved in the development of a methodology to measure the carbon impact of online services.

It now remains to generalize such transparency practices. If Le Monde has done it, surely we can all make it happen.

And you, are you going to convince your company to implement this carbon transparency?

The observation

Today we are all aware of the environmental impact of the objects, tools, devices we use. We all know that when we use our car, this usage will have a "carbon" impact. A whole industry is working to reduce the energy impact of the appliances we use. Our environmental awareness leads us to moderate our use, using devices that consume less energy, or depend on a mix with more renewable energies. Finally, we even consider alternatives, such as replacing the car with a public transit, or cycling.

Taking into account the carbon footprint of our actions is more evident in the transport field. In IT, we are only at the beginning, but our massive use of computing power and data turned the Internet into a major source of energy consumption.

In 2017, Greenpeace considered Internet electricity consumption to represent 7% of the world's electricity consumption. The report is based on data from 2016. It is very likely that we are well beyond that point today. The growth in data traffic exceeds the advances in energy efficiency of network equipment. The "Low Tech Magazine" explains that situation very well: About Low Tech Magazine.

In other words, it means that all the world's IT departments, phones, data centers, etc. emit more carbon than air transport, for example.

Keeping Internet infrastructure and usage under control

Awareness of the issue is spreading, but the solutions being explored focus on only two lines of action, forgetting a third, fundamental one.

The first line of action on the energy consumption of the Internet is geared at infrastructure. The energy consumption of the infrastructure is dealt with at two levels:

1. Reducing energy consumption in data centers. One example is OVH's work on hydraulic cooling systems,replacing both the fans in the servers and the air conditioning in the data centres.
2. The source of electric supply. An effort is being made by large groups such as Facebook, or Google to buy renewable electricity, i.e. electricity produced from renewable energy.

The second line of action to reduce the energy impact is to reduce usage. From the users' point of view, we have all seen awareness campaigns recommending to reduce the use of email or even to reduce the resolution of the videos consumed to reduce bandwidth and electricity consumption. This is an important message, but today we need to go further to reduce the energy impact for a constant usage.

Designing lightweight and efficient applications

Cloud computing has changed the way applications are designed. It's an industry, with most of the major players now being business infrastructure providers. Cloud players offer increasingly sophisticated services and have simplified the use of online capabilities.

So much so that it is common today to design architecture that can scale-up automatically. It is even commonly accepted that human time is the most expensive and valuable resource. Consequently, it is better to put more and bigger servers to run one's service than to spend time optimizing it. The environmental cost of time to market pressure is real. Cloud computing has made it easy to leverage ever-increasing resources.

In this race to consume more and more, our industry has forgotten that this attitude is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. This attitude is the IT equivalent of intensive agriculture. We need a new approach.

A third line of action: Measuring and optimizing

One line of action to reduce the impact of the Internet on the planet is to rediscover this optimization know-how, to be aware of the impact of architecture decisions on our applications.

Many parameters have to be taken into account and can have a real impact on the environment:

• The type of architecture. Some architectures are more efficient than others. Intensive use of middleware and microservices can have a negative impact on the energy balance of a service.
• The panel of technologies. We have to be realistic, some technologies are convenient for development, but very energy consuming. For example, at ProcessOne, we have taken over the management of a messaging service on our infrastructure. The application was previously running on 30 servers. We now operate it on 4 servers of the same size. The choice of implementation technology makes a huge difference (Erlang, Elixir, Go).
• Choice of features. Big data, massive data exploitation, all are promising stream of wealth creation. However, it is not always the case and storing and processing gigantic volumes of data "just in case" does not seem rational. You have to think beforehand about what you want to analyze and why. Moreover, this approach is not really compatible with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Conclusion

At the end of the day, companies have an important responsibility in the energy consumption of the Internet. They cannot do this by shifting the burden to infrastructure providers and users. They have to take their share of the responsibility.

If you want to know how to tackle the problem, ProcessOne can certainly help you, by working on the whole chain, on the three axes mentioned here and by helping you benchmark your application to check its performance.

So, are you ready to tackle the challenge with me and reducing the energy footprint of your applications?

That’s my overall experience with AWS as well.

They used to be quite reliable and have good support, but I have found that over time, the overall service is not as good or as essential as before.

If you use services that are not simple base EC2 instances, the costs are very high (like for example DynamoDB) and certainly too expensive to build a platform leveraging those added-value components at scale.

As an Open Source developer, I am also annoyed by their recent new offering that consist in taking Open Source software and build a SaaS offering on top of it. The main problem is that they do so without working with the main stack developers. They do not contribute back their code change either (to my knowledge). This end up with the kind of offering like AWS Elastic Search that is both hurting Elastic Search company, Elastic Search project and end up providing a bad experience to their customers.

To be fair, this is a more general question for the governance of Open Source projects, though, as you cannot expect cloud providers to pay fees at this scale. Passed a certain point in popularity, Open Source projects likely need to be led by a mixed team of contributors from a larger range of companies. The same question would arrise on Redis or MongoDB for example.

Anyway, this race to expand AWS offering through integration of Open Source components as a service or to provide higher value APIs seems to be at the expense of quality and customer service.

There is now plenty of decent alternatives for the base hosting part.
So, I am wondering if we have passed the point where we don’t need AWS anymore.

Do you have the same experience?

However, the feature was also criticized because it was mostly based on OpenID Connect but with a few differences and variations, making it noncompliant with OpenID.

Apple worked with the OpenID Foundation to solve the compliance issue and finally, the OpenID Foundation wrote an open letter to Apple stating they are happy they made all the changes to be compliant with OpenID specifications.

This is good news for the Open Web.

Spotted via HackerNews

It is also good to see Microsoft embracing Android to replace Windows on the smaller form factor, while I wonder why it would not have been a good fits for the larger screen. Maybe they just want to test the water and avoid putting all their eggs in the same basket.

I am really looking forward to experiment with those devices to see which kind of innovations and new User Interface paradigms you can create on those.

If you want to watch Microsoft short presentations on each device: Surface Neo (the larger one) and Surface Duo (the smaller one, based on Android).

I do not use Chrome or Cloudflare service, but they also provide an Open Source implementation for both server and client in Rust: Quiche: Savoury implementation of the QUIC transport protocol and HTTP/3.

Firefox is also going to provide soon a nightly build that support HTTP/3.

HTTP/3 is becoming a reality faster than I expected.

Apple extending from being a trusted party in your computing experience to being a trusted party in your online experience.

Indeed, the online world is more and more abused, from tracking to malware. More generally today, many companies are simply opaque about what they really offer and how they do business. Your activity online or in App Store through in-app purchase is too often abused by deceptive business models. That's why Apple also should double down on tracking App Store abuses.

But, all in all, I like that focus on trust. We need more companies we can trust these days. The reign of the free services created incentive for abuses. The trend must be reversed in tech as in every other area. There use to be a split between open source versus proprietary software. It is more general than that, now. It is about ethics, transparency in every aspects of your online experience. We need to accelerate the trend toward “organic”, traceable and transparent mix of software and online experiences.

I know there is a few companies building patiently ethical offering, but we need more of them. And we need to support them if we want to that movement to amplify.

Apple will more tightly enforce the use of PushKit to make sure it is limited to only VoIP calls, as originally intended.
Some messaging app makers were using this to receive and decrypt encrypted messages in the background, saying that PushKit provided a better / more reliable service.

This has not been my experience. When implemented well, standard Apple push notifications are enough to build encrypted messaging app. It even supports push notification encryption on the server and decryption on the phone, to display the decrypted message in the notification pop-up (for example when your phone is unlocked).

PuhsKit allowed a bit more fined-grained control on the notification, in the sense that the server could push without distinction messages and meta data (like typing indicator) and let the client decide if it was requiring a notification or not. It means that now, the server needs to know what is a message that will require notification display and what is a metadata to avoid pushing it. It requires to slightly change the processing boundary, to still keep those info encrypted on the server.

However, I think that having a flag on the type of encrypted content flowing through the server to tell if it needs to be pushed or not is not a serious privacy info leak. After all, the server already needs to know with who you are exchanging messages, to be able to route the content.

The bottom line is that those developers will indeed have to reimplement a few of their stuff to adapt to the newly enforced policy. However, I personally think this is a good change that will help to limit battery consumption for some apps that have been abusing PushKit.