company:whatsapp

Go Celebrity Spotting made easy with the #twilio API for #whatsapp, #aws #rekognition and #ruby
▻https://hackernoon.com/go-celebrity-spotting-made-easy-with-the-twilio-api-for-whatsapp-aws-rek

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Did you know you can send and receive media using the Twilio API for WhatsApp? When I found out I wanted to make something fun with it, so why not combine it with AWS Rekognition to work out if I look like any celebrities?By the end of this post, you’ll know how to build an app that lets you send an image to a WhatsApp number, download the image, analyse the image with the AWS Rekognition API and respond to say whether there are any celebrities in the picture.What you’ll needTo build this application you’ll need a few things:A Twilio account, sign up for a free one hereAn AWS accountRuby and Bundler installedngrok to help us test our webhooksGot all that? Let’s get started then.Application basicsWhen Twilio receives a WhatsApp message it will send an HTTP request, a webhook, to a URL we provide. (...)

CTO #TechMind: Making Your #security “Too Expensive To Hack” Can Save You Millions
▻https://hackernoon.com/cto-techmind-making-your-security-too-expensive-to-hack-can-save-you-mil

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What is the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning? If you’re anything like me, you either turn off the alarm and go back to sleep, or you reach out to your phone and check on your social profiles. Nothing like a few likes to start your day… right?Thousands of Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp users woke up on Wednesday with that same intention: checking on their precious social profiles and messages. With one little exception: they couldn’t.While company quickly confirmed the outage was not related to malicious efforts, questions had already begun swimming around inside users’ minds… “Was Facebook hacked? Was I hacked? Is the world ending?” These questions kept me thinking.As someone who has worked with high-end technologies his entire adult life, I’ve been able to collect some (...)

#cryptocurrency #blockchain #hacking #cybersecurity

Could #facebook and #whatsapp Become Major Players in the Remittance Market with #crypto?
▻https://hackernoon.com/could-facebook-and-whatsapp-become-major-players-in-the-remittance-marke

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It is safe to assume that anyone with a working internet connection has heard of Facebook and its subsidiary, Whatsapp. Bloomberg reported on Dec 21, 2018, that Facebook is working on a cryptocurrency that will let users transfer money on its Whatsapp messaging app. Are Cryptocurrencies at the precipice of mass adoption?Facebook boasts of the largest active user base of 1.7 billion after more than a decade of existence. That number could have been more if countries like China, Iran, North Korea, and Bangladesh had not banned Facebook. On the other hand, Whatsapp has 1.5 billion users in 109 countries. The most popular countries include India, Brazil, Mexico, Russia, and many other countries. Facebook is primed to become a major player in the remittance market due to the sheer number (...)

#remittances #blockchain

Mark Zuckerberg’s Plans to Capitalize on Facebook’s Failures | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/mark-zuckerbergs-plans-to-capitalize-on-facebooks-failures

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On Wednesday, a few hours before the C.E.O. of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, published a thirty-two-hundred-word post on his site titled “A privacy-focused vision for social networking,” a new study from the market research firm Edison Research revealed that Facebook had lost fifteen million users in the United States since 2017. “Fifteen million is a lot of people, no matter which way you cut it,” Larry Rosin, the president of Edison Research, said on American Public Media’s “Marketplace.” “This is the second straight year we’ve seen this number go down.” The trend is likely related to the public’s dawning recognition that Facebook has become both an unbridled surveillance tool and a platform for propaganda and misinformation. According to a recent Harris/Axios survey of the hundred most visible companies in the U.S., Facebook’s reputation has taken a precipitous dive in the last five years, with its most acute plunge in the past year, and it scores particularly low in the categories of citizenship, ethics, and trust.

While Zuckerberg’s blog post can be read as a response to this loss of faith, it is also a strategic move to capitalize on the social-media platform’s failures. To be clear, what Zuckerberg calls “town square” Facebook, where people post updates about new jobs, and share prom pictures and erroneous information about vaccines, will continue to exist. (On Thursday, Facebook announced that it would ban anti-vaccine advertisements on the site.) His new vision is to create a separate product that merges Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram into an encrypted and interoperable communications platform that will be more like a “living room.” According to Zuckerberg, “We’ve worked hard to build privacy into all our products, including those for public sharing. But one great property of messaging services is that, even as your contacts list grows, your individual threads and groups remain private. As your friends evolve over time, messaging services evolve gracefully and remain intimate.”

This new Facebook promises to store data securely in the cloud, and delete messages after a set amount of time to reduce “the risk of your messages resurfacing and embarrassing you later.” (Apparently, Zuckerberg already uses this feature, as Tech Crunch reported, in April, 2018.) Its interoperability means, for example, that users will be able to buy something from Facebook Marketplace and communicate with the seller via WhatsApp; Zuckerberg says this will enable the buyer to avoid sharing a phone number with a stranger. Just last week, however, a user discovered that phone numbers provided for two-factor authentication on Facebook can be used to track people across the Facebook universe. Zuckerberg does not address how the new product will handle this feature, since “town square” Facebook will continue to exist.

Once Facebook has merged all of its products, the company plans to build other products on top of it, including payment portals, banking services, and, not surprisingly, advertising. In an interview with Wired’s editor-in-chief, Nicholas Thompson, Zuckerberg explained that “What I’m trying to lay out is a privacy-focused vision for this kind of platform that starts with messaging and making that as secure as possible with end-to-end encryption, and then building all of the other kinds of private and intimate ways that you would want to interact—from calling, to groups, to stories, to payments, to different forms of commerce, to sharing location, to eventually having a more open-ended system to plug in different kinds of tools for providing the interaction with people in all the ways that you would want.”

L’innovation vient maintenant de Chine, en voici une nouvelle mention

If this sounds familiar, it is. Zuckerberg’s concept borrows liberally from WeChat, the multiverse Chinese social-networking platform, popularly known as China’s “app for everything.” WeChat’s billion monthly active users employ the app for texting, video conferencing, broadcasting, money transfers, paying fines, and making medical appointments. Privacy, however, is not one of its attributes. According to a 2015 article in Quartz, WeChat’s “heat map” feature alerts Chinese authorities to unusual crowds of people, which the government can then surveil.

“I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won’t stick around forever,” Zuckerberg tells us. “This is the future I hope we will help bring about.” By announcing it now, and framing it in terms of privacy, he appears to be addressing the concerns of both users and regulators, while failing to acknowledge that a consolidated Facebook will provide advertisers with an even richer and more easily accessed database of users than the site currently offers. As Wired reported in January, when the merger of Facebook’s apps was floated in the press, “the move will unlock huge quantities of user information that was previously locked away in silos.”

Le chiffrage des messages est loin d’être une panacée pour la vie privée, ni pour la responsabilité sociale des individus.

Zuckerberg also acknowledged that an encrypted Facebook may pose problems for law enforcement and intelligence services, but promised that the company would work with authorities to root out bad guys who “misuse it for truly terrible things like child exploitation, terrorism, and extortion.” It’s unclear how, with end-to-end encryption, it will be able to do this. Facebook’s private groups have already been used to incite genocide and other acts of violence, suppress voter turnout, and disseminate misinformation. Its pivot to privacy will not only give such activities more space to operate behind the relative shelter of a digital wall but will also relieve Facebook from the responsibility of policing them. Instead of more—and more exacting—content moderation, there will be less. Instead of removing bad actors from the service, the pivot to privacy will give them a safe harbor.

#facebook #Cryptographie #Vie_privée #Médias_sociaux #Mark_Zuckerberg

Reminder: Israel is still holding a Palestinian lawmaker as political prisoner indefinitely
Haaretz.com - Palestinian lawmaker Khalida Jarrar has been incarcerated in an Israeli jail without a trial for 20 months. Another period of ‘administrative detention’ will soon expire. Will she come home?
Gideon Levy and Alex Levac Feb 14, 2019 5:20 PM
▻https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-reminder-israel-is-holding-palestinian-lawmaker-as-political-priso

https://www.haaretz.com/polopoly_fs/1.5688892.1550157544!/image/1018316866.jpg_gen/derivatives/headline_1200x630/1018316866.jpg

Ghassan Jarrar says his life is meaningless without Khalida. In his office at the children’s toys and furniture factory he owns in Beit Furik, east of Nablus, its chairs upholstered with red fake fur, the face of the grass widower lights up whenever he talks about his wife. She’s been incarcerated in an Israeli prison for 20 months, without trial, without being charged, without evidence, without anything. In two weeks, however, she could be released, at long last. Ghassan is already busy preparing himself: He knows he’s liable to be disappointed again, for the fourth successive time.

Khalida Jarrar is Israel’s No. 1 female political prisoner, the leader of the inmates in Damon Prison, on Mt. Carmel, and the most senior Palestinian woman Israel has jailed, without her ever having been convicted of any offense.

The public struggle for her release has been long and frustrating, with more resonance abroad than in Israel. Here it encounters the implacable walls of the occupation authorities and the startling indifference of Israeli public opinion: People here don’t care that they’re living under a regime in which there are political prisoners. There is also the silence of the female MKs and the muteness of the women’s organizations.

Haaretz has devoted no fewer than five editorials demanding either that evidence against her be presented or that she be released immediately. To no avail: Jarrar is still in detention and she still hasn’t been charged.

She’s been placed in administrative detention – that is, incarceration without charges or a trial – a number of times: She was arrested for the first time on April 15, 2015 and sentenced to 15 months in jail, which she served. Some 13 months after she was released from that term, she was again put under administrative detention, which kept getting extended, for 20 consecutive months, starting in mid-2017: two stints of six months each, and two of four months each.

The latest arbitrary extension of her detention is set to end on February 28. As usual, until that day no one will know whether she is going to be freed or whether her imprisonment will be extended once again, without explanation. A military prosecutor promised at the time of the previous extension that it would be the last, but there’s no way to know. Typical of the occupation and its arbitrariness.

In any event, Ghassan is repainting their house, replacing air conditioners and the water heater, hanging new curtains, planting flowers in window boxes, ordering food and sweets in commercial quantities, and organizing a reception at one checkpoint and cars to await her at two other checkpoints – you can never know where exactly she will be released. A big celebration will take place in the Catholic church of Ramallah, which Ghassan has rented for three days on the last weekend of the month. Still, it’s all very much a matter of if and when.

Reminder: On April 2, 2015, troops of the Israel Defense Forces raided the Jarrar family’s home in El Bireh, adjacent to Ramallah, and abducted Khalida, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council.

She was placed in administrative detention. In the wake of international protests over Israel’s arrest without charges of a lawmaker who was elected democratically, the occupation authorities decided to try her. She was indicted on 12 counts, all of them utterly grotesque, including suspicion of visiting the homes of prisoners’ families, suspicion of attending a book fair and suspicion of calling for the release of Ahmad Saadat, a leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who has been in prison for years.

The charge sheet against Jarrar – an opponent of the occupation, a determined feminist and a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s executive committee – will one day serve as the crushing proof that there is not even the slightest connection between “military justice” and actual law and justice.

We saw her in the military court at Ofer base in the summer of 2015, proud and impressive, as her two daughters, Yafa and Suha, who returned from their studies in Canada after their mother’s arrest, wept bitterly with their father on the back benches of the courtroom. No one remained indifferent when the guards allowed the two daughters to approach and embrace their mother, in a rare moment of grace and humanity, as their father continued to cry in the back. It was a scene not easily forgotten.

Three months ago, she was transferred, along with the other 65 female Palestinian prisoners, from the Sharon detention facility where she’d been incarcerated to Damon, where the conditions are tougher: The authorities in Damon aren’t experienced in dealing with women and their special needs, Ghassan says. The showers are separate from the cells, and when a prisoner is menstruating, the red fluid flows into the yard and embarrasses the women. But at the same time, he says, the prison authorities are treating Khalida’s health situation well: She suffers from a blood-clotting problem and needs weekly medications and tests, which she receives regularly in her cell.

“You are my sweetheart” is inscribed on some of the synthetic-fur toys in the production room in Beit Furik. There are dolls of Mickey Mouse and of other characters from the cartoon world, sporting bold colors, along with padded rocking chairs and lamps for children’s rooms, all designed by Ghassan and all bespeaking sweet innocence and creativity. He’s devoted much less time to his factory since his wife’s incarceration. Of the 19 employees he had, only seven remain, one of whom, a deaf woman, is his outstanding worker. It’s a carpentry shop, an upholstery center and a sewing workshop all under one roof. Ghassan sells most of his products to Israel, although he’s been denied entry to the country for years.

Now his mind is focused on his wife’s release. The last time he visited her in prison was a month ago, 45 minutes on a phone through armor-plated glass. During her months in prison, Jarrar became an official examiner of matriculation exams for the Palestinian Education Ministry. The exam papers are brought to the prison by the International Red Cross. Among others that she has graded were Ahed Tamimi and her mother, Nariman. Ahed called Ghassan this week to ask when Khalida’s release was expected. She calls her “my aunt.”

The clock on the wall of Ghassan’s office has stopped. “Everything is meaningless for me without Khalida,” he says. “Life has no meaning without Khalida. Time stopped when Khalida was arrested. Khalida is not only my wife. She is my father, my mother, my sister and my friend. I breathe Khalida instead of air. Twenty months without meaning. My work is also meaningless.”

A business call interrupts this love poem, which is manifestly sincere and painful. What will happen if she’s not released, again? “I will wait another four months. Nothing will break me. I don’t let anything break me. That is my philosophy in life. It has always helped me.”

Ghassan spent 10 years of his life in an Israeli prison, too. Like his wife, he was accused of being active in the PFLP.

In the meantime, their older daughter, Yafa, 33, completed her Ph.D. in law at the University of Ottawa, and is clerking in a Canadian law firm. Suha, 28, returned from Canada, after completing, there and in Britain, undergraduate and master’s degrees in environmental studies. She’s working for the Ramallah-based human rights organization Al-Haq, and living with her father.

Both daughters are mobilized in the public campaign to free their mother, particularly by means of the social networks. Khalida was in jail when Yafa married a Canadian lawyer; Ghassan invited the whole family and their friends to watch the wedding ceremony in Canada on a large screen live via the Internet. Ghassan himself is prohibited from going abroad.

During Khalida’s last arrest, recalls her husband, IDF soldiers and Shin Bet security service agents burst into the house by force in the dead of night. They entered Suha’s room and woke her up. He remembers how she shouted, panic-stricken at the sight of the rifles being brandished by strange men in her bedroom wearing black masks, and how the soldiers handcuffed her from behind. As Ghassan replays the scene in his mind and remembers his daughter’s shouts, he grows distraught, as if it had happened this week.

Not knowing know what the soldiers were doing to her there, and only hearing her shouts, he tried to come to his daughter’s rescue, he recalls. He says he was almost killed by the soldiers for trying to force his way into Suha’s bedroom.

After the soldiers took Khalida, preventing Ghassan from even kissing her goodbye, despite his request – he discovered his daughter, bound by plastic handcuffs. After he released her, she wanted to rush into the street to follow the soldiers and her captive mother. He blocked her, and she went to the balcony of the house and screamed at them hysterically, cries of unfettered fury.

Last Saturday was Khalida’s 56th birthday. It wasn’t the first birthday she’d spent in prison, maybe not the last, either. Ghassan’s face positively glows when he talks about his wife’s birthday. He belongs to a WhatsApp group called “Best Friends” that is devoted to Khalida, where they posted his favorite photograph of her, wearing a purple blouse and raising her arms high in the courtroom of the Ofer facility. The members of the group congratulated him. Umar quoted a poem about a prisoner who is sitting in his cell in complete darkness, unable even to see his own shadow. Hidaya wrote something about freedom. Khamis wrote a traditional birthday greeting, and Ghassan summed up, “You are the bride of Palestine, renewing yourself every year. You are the crown on my head, al-Khalida, eternal one.”

#Khalida_Jarrar

Zuckerberg, Going for the KILL
▻https://hackernoon.com/zuckerberg-going-for-the-kill-c8edd3ca02ec?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3---

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One for all, and all for one.It seems like Mark Zuckerberg is preparing himself for the final countdown. The final blow to end users #privacy, and not just #facebook users, but #whatsapp, and Instagram users, for all three are under his wings, his umbrella of “TRUST”, his massive data collecting empire which feeds itself from the thoughts, feelings, passions, interests, and posts of others, a Vampiric data sucking machine.Facebook has proven, time and time again, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it is more than willing to infringe on your privacy if it’s efforts brings them a little more cash.WhatsApp and Instagram are part of the Facebook companies, which means they share data with one another.If someone is concerned about how Facebook has been handling, or rather mishandling their (...)

#blockchain #cybersecurity

Socket Programming in #python : Client, Server, and Peer Examples
▻https://hackernoon.com/socket-programming-in-python-client-server-and-peer-examples-a25c9782b58

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Sockets (aka socket programming) enable programs to send and receive data, bi-directionally, at any given moment. This tutorial walks through how you can send data from device-to-device, client-to-server, and vice versa using socket programming in Python.▻https://medium.com/media/86144cd4f9efcf87701793197783133c/hrefWhy use #sockets to send data?Internet-connected applications that need to operate in realtime greatly benefit from the implementation of sockets in their networking code. Some examples of apps that use socket programming are:Web pages that show live notifications (Facebook, Twitch, eBay)Multiplayer online games (League of Legends, WoW, Counter Strike)Chat Apps (WhatsApp, WeChat, Slack)Realtime Data Dashboards (Robinhood, Coinbase)IoT devices (Nest, August Locks)Python, unlike (...)

#peer-to-peer #pubnub #socket-programming

Can We End Data Exploitation in #google and #facebook?
▻https://hackernoon.com/can-we-end-data-exploitation-in-google-and-facebook-7ee3ba888ea9?source=

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One Company Believes They CanIn the age of WhatsApp, Signal, and other messaging apps, questions over data security or sharing have arisen. True, apps like WhatApp and Signal boast end to end #encryption, chances are your data is being used in a variety of ways.One indication that WhatsApp (owned by the now bad boy of user data -Facebook) utilizes its users’ data is that it has rolled out an ads platform. If data was not being culled from messages to enhance targeting I think I and many others would be shocked.But It’s Encrypted — So Why Are You Worrying?WhatsApp and Signal and Google may be encrypted between sender and receiver, but the data is actually stored on the phone and this data is not encrypted, which leaves a back door to either the app itself using the data to sell to others or (...)

#end-data-exploitation #privacy

8 STEPS TO GETTING 2 MILLION #linkedin VIEWS IN UNDER 24 HOURS
▻https://hackernoon.com/8-steps-to-getting-2-million-linkedin-views-in-under-24-hours-7312c6b2dc

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In this article, I’m going to share some tips on how to become a LinkedIn influencer and create viral content. So, let’s get started.Friday, December 30th was a normal day for me as I was working on creating my list of goals for 2019 with my wife, Sweeta. I was scrolling through Facebook when I stumbled upon an old story in which “Facebook turned down WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton for job in 2009”. I stopped what I was doing and felt compelled to share this ten-year-old story on my Linkedin account. After posting this story, I went to bed. Then I woke up in the morning to this.24 Hours later this post had 2 million views. (post link)HOW TO GO VIRAL ON LINKEDINLinkedIn is a popular social media platform, which can yield big results when used creatively. It is an incredible source of leads. (...)

#linkedin-views #content-marketing #social-media #linkedin-viral

Facebook, WhatsApp Step Up Efforts in Brazil’s Fake News Battle
▻https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-23/facebook-whatsapp-step-up-efforts-in-brazil-s-fake-news-battle

Facebook Inc and its messaging app WhatsApp are trying to crack down on the spread of misinformation, spam and fake accounts on social media ahead of Brazil’s election runoff, according to two company representatives. Monica Guise, Facebook’s public policy manager for Brazil, told reporters at a press conference in Sao Paulo that the company is trying to weed out “bad actors” to reduce misinformation and to help users spot “bad-quality” content. Ahead of the Oct. 28 vote, both far-right (...)

#WhatsApp #élections #manipulation #publicité

##publicité

The three types of WhatsApp users getting Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro elected | World news | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/25/brazil-president-jair-bolsonaro-whatsapp-fake-news

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If the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s charge to the White House were jet-propelled by Facebook, the rise of Brazil’s likely next president, the far-right firebrand Jair Bolsonaro, owes much to WhatsApp.

The Facebook-owned messaging app is wildly popular in Brazil, with about 120 million active users, and has proved to be the ideal tool for mobilizing political support – but also for spreading fake news.

To understand the motivations, hopes and fears of Bolsonaro’s tens of millions of supporters I joined four pro-Bolsonaro WhatsApp groups.

After four months of receiving an average of 1,000 messages per group, per day, this is what I found:

There are three key clusters of members, who I classified as Ordinary Brazilians, Bolsominions, and Influencers.

They use sophisticated image and video editing software to create convincing and emotionally engaging digital content. They are smart and know how to manipulate content into memes and short texts that go viral.

They work fast to undermine any person or news outlet that criticizes Bolsonaro. For example, after the French far-right leader Marine Le Pen’s described some of Bolsonaro’s comments as “extremely unpleasant”, the Influencers quickly published a meme accusing her of being a communist.

Some of the fake news stories are simply astonishing. A group of “movers and shakers” created a bogus flyer claim that Bolsonaro’s leftist rival Fernando Haddad, planned to sign an executive order allowing men to have sex with 12-year-olds.

During the first round of votes they repeatedly circulated fake videos that showed malfunctioning electronic voting machines in order to reinforce the idea that the elections were rigged.

These three groups have different roles, but they have a lot in common: they share a total disbelief in Brazil’s representative democracy and have concluded that the system only serves those at the top.

Despite their support for the idea of military intervention, they don’t want a new dictatorship, arguing instead that Brazil needs someone to end the corruption that has benefited politicians of both the left and the right – and devastated the country’s economy.

#Whatsapp #Brésil #Infox

Une vague de vol de comptes WhatsApp liée au piratage de répondeurs
▻https://www.zdnet.fr/actualites/une-vague-de-vol-de-comptes-whatsapp-liee-au-piratage-de-repondeurs-39874639.h

Sécurité : Le gouvernement israélien a alerté les utilisateurs à propos d’une nouvelle méthode permettant de pirater les comptes WhatsApp. L’attaque exploite les répondeurs mis en place par les opérateurs de téléphonie. Suite à une vague de piratage de comptes WhatsApp, l’agence de cybersécurité israélienne a publié une alerte à l’échelle nationale mardi dernier. L’alerte provenant du Centre Israélien de Cybersécurité avertit les utilisateurs d’une nouvelle méthode de piratage des comptes WhatsApp exploitant (...)

#Facebook #hacking #répondeur

https://www.zdnet.fr/i/edit/ne/2017/01/WhatsappFacebook.jpg

Exclusive: WhatsApp Cofounder Brian Acton Gives The Inside Story On #DeleteFacebook And Why He Left $850 Million Behind
▻https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2018/09/26/exclusive-whatsapp-cofounder-brian-acton-gives-the-inside-story-on-deletefac

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By then, three years since the deal, Zuckerberg was growing impatient, Acton says, and he expressed his frustrations at an all-hands meeting for WhatsApp staffers. “The CFO projections, the ten-year outlook—they wanted and needed the WhatsApp revenues to continue to show the growth to Wall Street,” Acton recalls. Internally, Facebook had targeted a $10 billion revenue run rate within five years of monetization, but such numbers sounded too high to Acton—and reliant on advertising.

Instagram’s Co-Founders to Step Down From Company - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/24/technology/instagram-cofounders-resign.html

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Against those problems, Instagram has been one of the jewels of Facebook. The social network acquired Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion, when the photo-sharing site was used by around 30 million people. Since then, Instagram’s reach has ballooned and it has widely been seen as one of Facebook’s most successful acquisitions.

Facebook has lost other founders of businesses it has acquired. In April, Jan Koum, a Facebook board member and a founder of WhatsApp, the messaging app that the social network purchased in 2014, said he was leaving. Mr. Koum had grown increasingly concerned about Facebook’s position on user data in recent years, people with knowledge of the situation said at the time.

#Facebook #Instagram

2.3 million Venezuelans now live abroad

More than 7% of Venezuela’s population has fled the country since 2014, according to the UN. That is the equivalent of the US losing the whole population of Florida in four years (plus another 100,000 people, give or take).

The departing 2.3 million Venezuelans have mainly gone to neighboring Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, and Peru, putting tremendous pressure on those countries. “This is building to a crisis moment that we’ve seen in other parts of the world, particularly in the Mediterranean,” a spokesman for the UN’s International Organization for Migration said recently.

This week, Peru made it a bit harder for Venezuelans to get in. The small town of Aguas Verdes has seen as many as 3,000 people a day cross the border; most of the 400,000 Venezuelans in Peru arrived in the last year. So Peru now requires a valid passport. Until now, ID cards were all that was needed.

Ecuador tried to do the same thing but a judge said that such a move violated freedom-of-movement rules agreed to when Ecuador joined the Andean Community. Ecuador says 4,000 people a day have been crossing the border, a total of 500,000 so far. It has now created what it calls a “humanitarian corridor” by laying on buses to take Venezuelans across Ecuador, from the Colombian border to the Peruvian border.

Brazil’s Amazon border crossing in the state of Roraima with Venezuela gets 500 people a day. It was briefly shut down earlier this month—but that, too, was overturned by a court order.

Venezuela is suffering from severe food shortages—the UN said more than 1 million of those who had fled since 2014 are malnourished—and hyperinflation. Things could still get worse, which is really saying something for a place where prices are doubling every 26 days. The UN estimated earlier this year that 5,000 were leaving Venezuela every day; at that rate, a further 800,000 people could leave before the end of the year (paywall).

A Gallup survey from March showed that 53% of young Venezuelans want to move abroad permanently. And all this was before an alleged drone attack on president Nicolas Maduro earlier this month made the political situation even more tense, the country’s opposition-led National Assembly said that the annual inflation rate reached 83,000% in July, and the chaotic introduction of a new currency.

https://assets.weforum.org/editor/B0kg_Z925ISmk66F8lhcNm5dirWnqpGpGyLH_5-D5vY.PNG

▻https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/08/venezuela-has-lost-2-3-million-people-and-it-could-get-even-worse
#Venezuela #asile #migrations #réfugiés #cartographie #visualisation #réfugiés_vénézuéliens

Sur ce sujet, voir aussi cette longue compilation initiée en juin 2017 :
►http://seen.li/d26k

7 Key Step to Develop Chat Bot for Messenger
▻https://hackernoon.com/7-key-step-to-develop-chat-bot-for-messenger-57b1d438a30c?source=rss----

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/741/1*aDVxAkD6UXVEIML6DaCftQ.jpeg

The evolution of artificial intelligence is now in full swing and #chatbots are only a faint splash on a huge wave of progress. Today the number of users of messaging apps like WhatsApp, Slack, Skype and their analogs is skyrocketing, Facebook Messenger alone has more than 1.2 billion monthly users. With the spread of messengers, virtual chatterbots that imitate human conversations for solving various tasks are becoming increasingly in demand. Chinese WeChat #bots can already set medical appointments, call a taxi, send money to friends, check in for a flight and many many other.What is Chat bot?Chat bot is one type of computer program who design for human user ,especially over the Internet.1. Determine the target audience and required functionalityNow and again, the underlying perspective (...)

#chatbots-for-business #chatbot-design #chatbot-development

Behind the Messy, Expensive Split Between Facebook and WhatsApp’s Founders

▻https://www.wsj.com/articles/behind-the-messy-expensive-split-between-facebook-and-whatsapps-founders-152820

After a long dispute over how to produce more revenue with ads and data, the messaging app’s creators are walking away leaving about $1.3 billion on the table​
By Kirsten Grind and
Deepa Seetharaman
June 5, 2018 10:24 a.m. ET

How ugly was the breakup between Facebook Inc. FB 0.49% and the two founders of WhatsApp, its biggest acquisition? The creators of the popular messaging service are walking away leaving about $1.3 billion on the table.

The expensive exit caps a long-simmering dispute about how to wring more revenue out of WhatsApp, according to people familiar with the matter. Facebook has remained committed to its ad-based business model amid criticism, even as Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has had to defend the company before American and European lawmakers.

The WhatsApp duo of Jan Koum and Brian Acton had persistent disagreements in recent years with Mr. Zuckerberg and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, who grew impatient for a greater return on the company’s 2014 blockbuster $22 billion purchase of the messaging app, according to the people.

Many of the disputes with Facebook involved how to manage data privacy while also making money from WhatsApp’s large user base, including through the targeted ads that WhatsApp’s founders had long opposed. In the past couple of years especially, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg pushed the WhatsApp founders to be more flexible on those issues and move faster on other plans to generate revenue, the people say.

Once, after Mr. Koum said he “didn’t have enough people” to implement a project, Mr. Zuckerberg dismissed him with, “I have all the people you need,” according to one person familiar with the conversation.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified about privacy issues and the use of user data before a Senate committee in April.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified about privacy issues and the use of user data before a Senate committee in April. Photo: Alex Brandon/Press Pool

WhatsApp was an incongruous fit within Facebook from the beginning. Messrs. Acton and Koum are true believers on privacy issues and have shown disdain for the potential commercial applications of the service.

Facebook, on the other hand, has built a sprawling, lucrative advertising business that shows ads to users based on data gathered about their activities. Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg have touted how an advertising-supported product makes it free for consumers and helps bridge the digital divide.

When Facebook bought WhatsApp, it never publicly addressed how the divergent philosophies would coexist. But Mr. Zuckerberg told stock analysts that he and Mr. Koum agreed that advertising wasn’t the right way to make money from messaging apps. Mr. Zuckerberg also said he promised the co-founders the autonomy to build their own products. The sale to Facebook made the app founders both multibillionaires.

Over time, each side grew frustrated with the other, according to people in both camps. Mr. Koum announced April 30 he would leave, and Mr. Acton resigned last September.
Big Bet
Facebook paid substantially more for WhatsApp than any other deal.

Facebook’s five largest deals*

WhatsApp (2014)

$21.94 billion

Oculus VR (2014)

$2.30 billion

Instagram (2012)

$736 million

Microsoft† (2012)

$550 million

Onavo (2013)

$120 million

*price at close of deal †approximately 615 AOL patents and patent applications

Source: Dealogic

The WhatsApp co-founders didn’t confront Mr. Zuckerberg at their departures about their disagreements over where to take the business, but had concluded they were fighting a losing battle and wanted to preserve their relationship with the Facebook executive, people familiar with the matter said. One person familiar with the relationships described the environment as “very passive-aggressive.”

Small cultural disagreements between the two staffs also popped up, involving issues such as noise around the office and the size of WhatsApp’s desks and bathrooms, that took on greater significance as the split between the parent company and its acquisition persisted.

The discord broke into public view in a March tweet by Mr. Acton. During the height of the Cambridge Analytica controversy, in which the research firm was accused of misusing Facebook user data to aid the Trump campaign, Mr. Acton posted that he planned to delete his Facebook account.

Within Facebook, some executives were surprised to see Mr. Acton publicly bash the company since he didn’t seem to leave on bad terms, according to people familiar with the matter. When Mr. Acton later visited Facebook’s headquarters, David Marcus, an executive who ran Facebook’s other chat app, Messenger, confronted his former colleague. “That was low class,” Mr. Marcus said, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Acton shrugged it off. Mr. Marcus declined to comment.
Staff at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. Small cultural disagreements between Facebook and WhatsApp staffs, involving issues such as noise, size of desks and bathrooms, created friction.

Staff at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. Small cultural disagreements between Facebook and WhatsApp staffs, involving issues such as noise, size of desks and bathrooms, created friction. Photo: Kim Kulish/Corbis/Getty Images

The posts also prompted an angry call from Ms. Sandberg to Mr. Koum, who assured her that Mr. Acton didn’t mean any harm, according to a person familiar with the call.

When Mr. Acton departed Facebook, he forfeited about $900 million in potential stock awards, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Koum is expected to officially depart in mid-August, in which case he would leave behind more than two million unvested shares worth about $400 million at Facebook’s current stock price. Both men would have received all their remaining shares had they stayed until this November, when their contracts end.

The amount the two executives are leaving in unvested shares hasn’t been reported, nor have the full extent of the details around their disagreements with Facebook over the years.

“Jan has done an amazing job building WhatsApp. He has been a tireless advocate for privacy and encryption,” Mr. Zuckerberg said in May at the company’s developer conference about Mr. Koum’s departure. He added he was proud that Facebook helped WhatsApp launch end-to-end encryption a couple of years after the acquisition.

In many ways, Facebook and WhatsApp couldn’t have been more different. Facebook from its beginning in 2004 leveraged access to user information to sell targeted advertising that would be displayed as people browsed their news feeds. That business model has been hugely successful, driving Facebook’s market value past half a trillion dollars, with advertising accounting for 97% of the firm’s revenue.
A sign in WhatsApp’s offices at Facebook headquarters. Some Facebook employees mocked WhatsApp with chants of ‘Welcome to WhatsApp—Shut up!’

A sign in WhatsApp’s offices at Facebook headquarters. Some Facebook employees mocked WhatsApp with chants of ‘Welcome to WhatsApp—Shut up!’

It is also the antithesis of what WhatsApp professed to stand for. Mr. Koum, a San Jose State University dropout, grew up in Soviet-era Ukraine, where the government could track communication, and talked frequently about his commitment to privacy.

Mr. Koum, 42, and Mr. Acton, 46, became friends while working as engineers at Yahoo Inc., one of the first big tech companies to embrace digital advertising. The experience was jarring for both men, who came to regard display ads as garish, ruining the user experience and allowing advertisers to collect all kinds of data on unsuspecting individuals.

WhatsApp, which launched in 2009, was designed to be simple and secure. Messages were immediately deleted from its servers once sent. It charged some users 99 cents annually after one free year and carried no ads. In a 2012 blog post the co-founders wrote, “We wanted to make something that wasn’t just another ad clearinghouse” and called ads “insults to your intelligence.”

Text MeWorld-wide monthly active users for popularmessaging apps, in billions.Source: the companiesNote: *Across four main markets; iMessage, Google Hangoutsand Signal don’t disclose number of users.

WhatsAppFacebookMessengerWeChatTelegramLine*00.511.52

The men are also close personal friends, bonding over ultimate Frisbee, despite political differences. Mr. Koum, unlike Mr. Acton, has publicly expressed support for Donald Trump.

When Facebook bought WhatsApp in February 2014, the messaging service was growing rapidly and had already amassed 450 million monthly users, making it more popular than Twitter Inc., which had 240 million monthly users at the time and was valued at $30 billion. WhatsApp currently has 1.5 billion users.

The deal still ranks as the largest-ever purchase of a company backed by venture capital, and it was almost 10 times costlier than Facebook’s next most expensive acquisition.

Mr. Zuckerberg assured Messrs. Koum and Acton at the time that he wouldn’t place advertising in the messaging service, according to a person familiar with the matter. Messrs. Koum and Acton also negotiated an unusual clause in their contracts that said if Facebook insisted on making any “additional monetization initiatives” such as advertising in the app, it could give the executives “good reason” to leave and cause an acceleration of stock awards that hadn’t vested, according to a nonpublic portion of the companies’ merger agreement reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The provision only kicks in if a co-founder is still employed by Facebook when the company launches advertising or another moneymaking strategy.

Mr. Acton initiated the clause in his contract allowing for early vesting of his shares. But Facebook’s legal team threatened a fight, so Mr. Acton, already worth more than $3 billion, left it alone, according to people familiar with the matter.

Some analysts in the tech community said a clash was inevitable. Nate Elliott, principal of Nineteen Insights, a research and advisory firm focused on digital marketing and social media, said the WhatsApp founders are “pretty naive” for believing that Facebook wouldn’t ultimately find some way to make money from the deal, such as with advertising. “Facebook is a business, not a charity,” he said.

At the time of the sale, WhatsApp was profitable with fee revenue, although it is unclear by how much. Facebook doesn’t break out financial information for WhatsApp.
David Marcus, vice president of messaging products for Facebook, spoke during the company’s F8 Developers Conference in San Jose on May 1.

David Marcus, vice president of messaging products for Facebook, spoke during the company’s F8 Developers Conference in San Jose on May 1. Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg News

Facebook’s hands-off stance changed around 2016. WhatsApp topped one billion monthly users, and it had eliminated its 99 cent fee. Facebook told investors it would stop increasing the number of ads in Facebook’s news feed, resulting in slower advertising-revenue growth. This put pressure on Facebook’s other properties—including WhatsApp—to make money.

That August, WhatsApp announced it would start sharing phone numbers and other user data with Facebook, straying from its earlier promise to be built “around the goal of knowing as little about you as possible.”

With Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg pushing to integrate it into the larger company, WhatsApp moved its offices in January 2017 from Mountain View, Calif., to Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters about 20 minutes away. Facebook tried to make it welcoming, decorating the Building 10 office in WhatsApp’s green color scheme.

WhatsApp’s roughly 200 employees at the time remained mostly segregated from the rest of Facebook. Some of the employees were turned off by Facebook’s campus, a bustling collection of restaurants, ice cream shops and services built to mirror Disneyland.

Some Facebook staffers considered the WhatsApp unit a mystery and sometimes poked fun at it. After WhatsApp employees hung up posters over the walls instructing hallway passersby to “please keep noise to a minimum,” some Facebook employees mocked them with chants of “Welcome to WhatsApp—Shut up!” according to people familiar with the matter.

Some employees even took issue with WhatsApp’s desks, which were a holdover from the Mountain View location and larger than the standard desks in the Facebook offices. WhatsApp also negotiated for nicer bathrooms, with doors that reach the floor. WhatsApp conference rooms were off-limits to other Facebook employees.

“These little ticky-tacky things add up in a company that prides itself on egalitarianism,” said one Facebook employee.

Mr. Koum chafed at the constraints of working at a big company, sometimes quibbling with Mr. Zuckerberg and other executives over small details such as the chairs Facebook wanted WhatsApp to purchase, a person familiar with the matter said.

In response to the pressure from above to make money, Messrs. Koum and Acton proposed several ideas to bring in more revenue. One, known as “re-engagement messaging,” would let advertisers contact only users who had already been their customers. Last year, WhatsApp said it would charge companies for some future features that connect them with customers over the app.

None of the proposals were as lucrative as Facebook’s ad-based model. “Well, that doesn’t scale,” Ms. Sandberg told the WhatsApp executives of their proposals, according to a person familiar with the matter. Ms. Sandberg wanted the WhatsApp leadership to pursue advertising alongside other revenue models, another person familiar with her thinking said.

Ms. Sandberg, 48, and Mr. Zuckerberg, 34, frequently brought up their purchase of the photo-streaming app Instagram as a way to persuade Messrs. Koum and Acton to allow advertising into WhatsApp. Facebook in 2012 purchased Instagram, and the app’s founders initially tried their own advertising platform rather than Facebook’s. When Instagram fell short of its revenue targets in its first few quarters, Facebook leadership pushed the founders to adopt its targeted advertising model, and the transition was relatively seamless, according to current and former employees. Today, analysts estimate that Instagram is a key driver of Facebook’s revenue, and its founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, remain with the company. The men didn’t respond to requests for comment.

“It worked for Instagram,” Ms. Sandberg told the WhatsApp executives on at least one occasion, according to one person familiar with the matter.
Attendees used Oculus Go VR headsets during Facebook’s F8 Developers Conference.

Attendees used Oculus Go VR headsets during Facebook’s F8 Developers Conference. Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Other high-profile acquisitions such as developer platform Parse, ad tech platform LiveRail and virtual-reality company Oculus VR have fallen short of expectations, people familiar with those deals say.

The senior Facebook executives appeared to grow frustrated by the WhatsApp duo’s reasons to delay plans that would help monetize the service. Mr. Zuckerberg wanted WhatsApp executives to add more “special features” to the app, whereas Messrs. Koum and Acton liked its original simplicity.

Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg also wanted Messrs. Koum and Acton to loosen their stance on encryption to allow more “business flexibility,” according to one person familiar with the matter. One idea was to create a special channel between companies and users on WhatsApp to deal with issues such as customer-service requests, people familiar with the matter said. That setup would let companies appoint employees or bots to field inquiries from users and potentially store those messages in a decrypted state later on.

Last summer, Facebook executives discussed plans to start placing ads in WhatsApp’s “Status” feature, which allows users to post photo- and video-montages that last 24 hours. Similar features exist across Facebook’s services, including on Instagram, but WhatsApp’s version is now the most popular with 450 million users as of May.

Mr. Acton—described by one former WhatsApp employee as the “moral compass” of the team—decided to leave as the discussions to place ads in Status picked up. Mr. Koum, who also sat on Facebook’s board, tried to persuade him to stay longer.

Mr. Koum remained another eight months, before announcing in a Facebook post that he is “taking some time off to do things I enjoy outside of technology, such as collecting rare air-cooled Porsches, working on my cars and playing ultimate Frisbee.” Mr. Koum is worth about $9 billion, according to Forbes.

The next day, Mr. Koum said goodbye to WhatsApp and Facebook employees at an all-hands meeting in Menlo Park. An employee asked him about WhatsApp’s plans for advertising.

Mr. Koum responded by first alluding to his well-documented antipathy for ads, according to people familiar with his remarks. But Mr. Koum added that if ads were to happen, placing them in Status would be the least intrusive way of doing so, according to the people.

Some people who heard the remarks interpreted them as Mr. Koum saying he had made peace with the idea of advertising in WhatsApp.

In his absence, WhatsApp will be run by Chris Daniels, a longtime Facebook executive who is tasked with finding a business model that brings in revenue at a level to justify the app’s purchase price, without damaging the features that make it so popular.

Among WhatsApp’s competitors is Signal, an encrypted messaging app run by a nonprofit called the Signal Foundation and dedicated to secure communication, with strict privacy controls and without advertising. Mr. Acton donated $50 million to fund the foundation and serves as its executive chairman.

Corrections & Amplifications
Facebook Messenger has 1.3 billion monthly users. An earlier version of a chart in this article incorrectly said it had 2.13 billion users. (June 5, 2018)

Write to Kirsten Grind at kirsten.grind@wsj.com and Deepa Seetharaman at Deepa.Seetharaman@wsj.com

#Facebook #Whatsapp

La paix est un cliché : lorsque l’Occident ne peut pas contrôler le monde sans opposition, cela signifie la guerre Andre Vltchek - Traduit de l’anglais par Diane Gilliard pour Investig’Action 6 Juin 2018
▻https://www.investigaction.net/fr/la-paix-est-un-cliche-lorsque-loccident-ne-peut-pas-controler-le-mon

L’Occident aime à se penser comme une « partie du monde qui aime la paix ». Mais est-ce le cas ? Vous l’entendez partout, de l’Europe à l’Amérique du Nord puis à l’Australie, avant de revenir en Europe : « Paix, paix, paix ! » . C’est devenu un cliché, un slogan, une recette pour obtenir des financements, de la sympathie et du soutien. Vous dites « la paix » et vous ne pouvez vraiment pas vous tromper. Cela veut dire que vous êtes un être humain compatissant et raisonnable.
 
Dédié à mon ami, le philosophe John Cobb, Jr.

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Chaque année, des « conférences pour la paix » sont organisées partout où la paix est vénérée et même exigée. J’ai récemment assisté à l’une d’elles en tant qu’orateur principal, sur la côte ouest du Danemark.

Si un poids lourd des correspondants de guerre comme moi y assiste, il sera choqué. Les thèmes de discussion habituels y sont superficiels et choisis pour qu’on se sente bien.

Au mieux, « à quel point le capitalisme est mauvais » et comment « tout tient au pétrole ». Rien sur la culture génocidaire de l’Occident. Rien sur les pillages permanents et séculaires et les avantages que pratiquement tous les Occidentaux en retirent.

Au pire, il s’agit de savoir combien le monde est mauvais – le cliché « les gens sont tous les mêmes ». Il y a aussi de plus en plus de sorties bizarres et mal informées contre la Chine et la Russie, souvent qualifiées par les néocons occidentaux de « menaces » et de « puissances rivales ».

Les participants à ces rassemblements s’accordent pour dire que « la paix est bonne » et que « la guerre est mauvaise ». Ces déclarations sont suivies de grandes ovations et de petites tapes mutuelles dans le dos. Peu de larmes sincères sont versées.

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Les raisons de ces démonstrations sont cependant rarement interrogées. Après tout, qui demanderait la guerre ? Qui aurait envie de violence, de blessures horribles et de mort ? Qui voudrait voir des villes rasées et carbonisées et des bébés abandonnés en pleurs ? Tous cela semble très simple et très logique.

Mais alors pourquoi entendons-nous si rarement ce « discours de paix » de la part des pays africains dévastés et toujours colonisés de fait ou du Moyen-Orient ? Ne sont-ce pas eux qui souffrent le plus ? Ne devraient-ils pas rêver de paix ? Ou, peut-être, sommes-nous tous en train de manquer l’élément essentiel ?

Mon amie Arundhati Roy, une grande écrivaine et intellectuelle indienne, a écrit en 2001, en réaction à la « guerre contre le terrorisme » occidentale : « Lorsqu’il a annoncé les frappes aériennes, le président George Bush a dit : “Nos sommes une nation pacifique.” L’ambassadeur préféré de l’Amérique, Tony Blair (qui occupe également le poste de Premier ministre du Royaume-Uni) lui a fait écho : “Nous sommes un peuple pacifique.” Maintenant, nous savons. Les porcs sont des chevaux. Les filles sont des garçons. La guerre, c’est la paix. »

Lorsqu’elle sort de la bouche des Occidentaux, la « paix » est-elle vraiment la paix, la « guerre » est-elle vraiment une guerre ?

Les habitants de cet « Occident libre et démocratique » ont-ils encore le droit de poser ces questions ?

Ou la guerre et la paix, et la perception de la paix, ne sont-elles qu’une partie du dogme qu’il n’est pas permis de contester et qui est « protégé » par la culture occidentale et ses lois ?

Je ne vis pas en Occident et je ne veux pas y vivre. Par conséquent, je ne suis pas sûr de ce qu’ils sont autorisés à dire et à remettre en question là-bas. Mais nous, les chanceux qui sommes « à l’extérieur » et donc pas totalement conditionnés, contrôlés et endoctrinés, nous ne cesserons certainement pas de poser ces questions de sitôt ; ou, pour être précis, jamais !

https://www.investigaction.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Peace-3-years-old-Iraqi-child-with-cancer-Mohammed-in-Kos-Greece-640x360.jpg

J’ai reçu récemment par le biais de Whatsapp une chaîne de messages de mes amis et camarades d’Afrique de l’Est – pour la plupart des jeunes de gauche, des leaders révolutionnaires, des intellectuels et des militants :

« L’Afrique libre est une Afrique socialiste ! Nous sommes prêts pour la guerre ! Les jeunes Africains sont en feu ! Mort aux forces impérialistes ! Vive la Révolution bolivarienne ! Coopération Sud-Sud !

Aujourd’hui, nous menons la bataille dans les rues ! L’Afrique doit s’unir ! »

De telles déclarations pourraient paraître « violentes » et donc même être qualifiées d’« illégales » si elles étaient prononcées ouvertement en Occident. Quelqu’un pourrait finir à Guantanamo pour cela, ou dans une « prison secrète de la CIA ». Il y a quelques semaines, j’ai parlé directement à ces jeunes – des dirigeants de l’opposition de gauche en Afrique de l’Est – à l’ambassade du Venezuela à Nairobi, au Kenya. Oui, ils étaient en ébullition, ils étaient outragés, déterminés et prêts.

Pour ceux qui ne connaissent pas bien le continent, le #Kenya a été pendant des années et des décennies, un avant-poste de l’impérialisme britannique, américain et même israélien en Afrique de l’Est. Il jouait le même rôle que l’Allemagne de l’Ouest pendant la guerre froide : un paradis du lèche-vitrine, rempli de biens et de services de luxe.

https://www.investigaction.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Kibera-Slum-in-Nairobi-with-over-1-million-inhabitants-640x480.jpg

Dans le passé, le Kenya était censé éclipser l’expérience socialiste de la Tanzanie dirigée par Nyerere.

Aujourd’hui, environ 60% des Kenyans vivent dans des bidonvilles, dont certains sont parmi les plus durs d’Afrique. Certaines de ces « implantations », comme Mathare et Kibera, abritent au moins un million de personnes dans les conditions les plus abjectes et les plus terribles. Il y a quatre ans, lorsque je réalisais mon film documentaire dans ces bidonvilles, pour le réseau sud-américain TeleSur, j’ai écrit :

« … Officiellement, il y a la paix au Kenya. Pendant des décennies, le Kenya a fonctionné comme un État client de l’Occident, mettant en place un régime de marché sauvage, accueillant des bases militaires étrangères. Des milliards de dollars y ont été faits. Mais presque nulle part sur la terre la misère n’est plus brutale qu’ici. »

Deux ans plus tôt, en filmant mon « Tumaini » près de la ville de Kisumu et de la frontière ougandaise, j’ai vu des hameaux entiers, vides comme des fantômes. Les gens avaient disparu, était morts – du sida et de faim. Mais cela s’appelait encore la paix.

La paix, c’était quand les médecins militaires américains opéraient à ciel ouvert des Haïtiens désespérément pauvres et malades, dans le célèbre bidonville de Cité Soleil. J’ai vu et j’ai photographié une femme, allongée sur une table de fortune, se faire retirer sa tumeur avec seulement des anesthésiques locaux. J’ai demandé aux médecins nord-américains pourquoi c’était comme ça. Je savais qu’il y avait une installation militaire de premier ordre à deux minutes de là.

« C’est ce qui se rapproche le plus d’une situation de combat réelle », a répondu un médecin avec franchise. « Pour nous, c’est une excellente formation. »

Une fois l’intervention chirurgicale terminée, la femme s’est levée, soutenue par son mari effrayé, et a marché vers l’arrêt de bus.

Oui, tout ceci est, officiellement, la paix.

https://www.investigaction.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/US-med-experiments-in-Haiti2-640x418.jpg

À #Beyrouth, au #Liban, j’ai récemment participé à une discussion sur « Écologie de la guerre », un concept scientifique et philosophique créé par plusieurs médecins moyen-orientaux du Centre médical AUB. Le Dr Ghassan « Gus », le chef du département de chirurgie plastique de ce centre au Liban, a expliqué :

« La #misère, c’est la guerre. La destruction d’un État fort mène au conflit. Un grand nombre de gens sur notre planète vivent en fait dans un conflit ou une guerre, sans même le réaliser : dans des bidonvilles, dans des camps de réfugiés, dans des États totalement faillis ou dans des camps de réfugiés. »

Au cours de mon travail dans presque tous les coins dévastés du monde, j’ai vu des choses beaucoup plus horribles que ce que j’ai décrit ci-dessus. Peut-être en ai-je trop vu – toute cette « paix » qui a arraché les membres des victimes, toutes ces huttes en feu et toutes ces femmes hurlantes, ou ces enfants mourant de maladie et de faim avant d’atteindre l’adolescence.

J’ai écrit longuement sur la guerre et la paix dans mon livre de 840 pages, Exposing Lies Of The Empire.

Lorsque vous faites ce que je fais, vous devenez comme un médecin : vous ne pouvez qu’assister à toutes ces horreurs et ces souffrances, parce que vous êtes là pour aider, pour révéler la réalité et pour faire honte au monde. Vous n’avez pas le droit de vous décomposer, de vous effondrer, de tomber et de pleurer.

Mais ce que vous ne pouvez pas supporter, c’est l’hypocrisie. L’hypocrisie est « à l’épreuve des balles ».

Elle ne peut pas être éclairée par des arguments précis, la logique et par des exemples. L’hypocrisie en Occident est souvent ignorante, mais elle n’est qu’égoïste la plupart du temps.

https://www.investigaction.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Afghan-kid-from-slums-640x428.jpg

Alors qu’est-ce que la vraie paix pour les gens en Europe et en Amérique du Nord ? La réponse est simple : c’est un état des choses dans lequel aussi peu d’Occidentaux que possible sont tués ou blessés.

Un état de choses dans lequel le flot des ressources des pays pauvres, pillés et colonisés s’écoule sans interruption, principalement vers l’Europe et l’Amérique du Nord.

Le prix d’une telle paix ? Le nombre d’Africains, de Latino-Américains ou d’Asiatiques qui meurent à la suite de cette organisation du monde est totalement sans importance.

La paix, c’est quand les intérêts commerciaux de l’Occident ne sont pas menacés, même si des dizaines de millions d’êtres humains non blancs disparaissent au cours du processus.

La paix, c’est lorsque l’Occident peut contrôler le monde politiquement, économiquement, idéologiquement et « culturellement » sans rencontrer d’opposition.

La « guerre », c’est quand il y a rébellion. La guerre, c’est lorsque le peuple des pays pillés disent « non ! ». La guerre, c’est lorsqu’ils refusent subitement d’être violés, volés, endoctrinés et assassinés.

Lorsqu’un tel scénario se produit, la réaction immédiate de l’Occident « pour restaurer la paix » est de renverser le gouvernement du pays qui essaie de prendre soin de son peuple. De bombarder les écoles et les hôpitaux, de détruire l’approvisionnement en eau potable et en électricité et de jeter des millions de gens dans la misère et l’agonie.

C’est ce que l’Occident pourrait bientôt faire à la Corée du Nord (RPDC), à Cuba, au Venezuela, à l’Iran – des pays qui, pour l’instant, ne sont tourmentés « que » par des sanctions et une « opposition » mortelle soutenue par l’étranger. Dans le vocabulaire occidental, « paix » est synonyme de « soumission ». Une soumission totale, sans condition. Toute autre chose est la guerre ou pourrait potentiellement y conduire.

Pour les pays opprimés et dévastés, y compris les pays d’Afrique, appeler à la résistance serait, au moins dans le vocabulaire occidental, synonyme d’« appel à la violence », et par conséquent illégal. Aussi « illégal » que les appels à la résistance dans les pays occupés par les forces allemands nazies pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Il serait donc logique de qualifier l’approche et l’état d’esprit occidentaux de « fondamentalistes » et de profondément agressif.

#Paix #guerre #géopolitique #geopolitics #dogme #Occident #conférences-pour-la-paix #Occident #Haïti #médecins #formation #Écologie #Écologie-de-la-guerre

French goverment will use Matrix Riot to replace Whatsapp (http://w...
▻https://diasp.eu/p/7172792

http://www.talkplus.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/matrix.png

French goverment will use Matrix Riot to replace Whatsapp

According to a recent report, the French government is currently developing an end-to-end encrypted alternative to WhatsApp and Telegram that its officials could use without worrying about foreign spying. Although the French government’s spokesperson said that the government’s app will be ...

[ #privacy #surveillance #encryption #chat #messenger #matrix #riot ]

Sophisticated Android malware tracks all your phone activities
▻https://www.engadget.com/2018/05/07/zoopark-android-malware-exfiltration

It targets Middle East victims for cyber espionage purposes. An advanced type of malware can spy on nearly every Android smartphone function and steal passwords, photos, video, screenshots and data from WhatsApp, Telegram and other apps. “ZooPark” targets subjects in the Middle East and was likely developed by a state actor, according to Kaspersky Lab, which first spotted and identified it. ZooPark has evolved over four generations, having started as simple malware that could “only” steal (...)

#WhatsApp #Telegram #Android #malware #hacking

WhatsApp founder plans to leave after broad clashes with parent Facebook
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/whatsapp-founder-plans-to-leave-after-broad-clashes-with-parent-facebook/2018/04/30/49448dd2-4ca9-11e8-84a0-458a1aa9ac0a_story.html

The billionaire chief executive of WhatsApp, Jan Koum, is planning to leave the company after clashing with its parent, Facebook, over the popular messaging service’s strategy and Facebook’s attempts to use its personal data and weaken its encryption, according to people familiar with internal discussions. Koum, who sold WhatsApp to Facebook for more than $19 billion in 2014, also plans to step down from Facebook’s board of directors, according to these people. The date of his departure isn’t (...)

#Facebook #WhatsApp #cryptage #données

Colère en Espagne à la suite de la condamnation pour « abus sexuels » de « la Meute » de Pampelune
▻http://www.lemonde.fr/europe/article/2018/04/26/colere-en-espagne-apres-la-condamnation-pour-abus-sexuels-de-la-meute-de-pam

Ils se surnommaient « la Meute ». Cinq hommes ont été condamnés à neuf ans de prison, jeudi 26 avril en Espagne, pour « abus sexuels » et « abus de faiblesse » sur une femme de 18 ans aux fêtes de la San Fermin, à Pampelune – la capitale de la Navarre –, en juillet 2016.

Les cinq Andalous âgés de 27 à 29 ans – dont le groupe de messagerie WhatsApp était appelé « La Manada » (« la Meute ») – ont également été interdits d’approcher la victime à moins de 500 mètres et de la contacter pendant quinze ans. Ils devront par ailleurs lui verser une indemnisation de 50 000 euros.

Mais la décision du tribunal de Pampelune a provoqué la colère des associations de défense des droits des femmes, qui déplorent que l’accusation de viol n’ait pas été retenue par la justice. La condamnation est en effet très inférieure aux réquisitions du parquet, qui demandait vingt-deux ans et dix mois de réclusion contre chacun d’eux, ainsi que 100 000 euros d’indemnisation totale.

Article bizarre où tu sais quelles étaient les réquisitions, mais où tu ne vois jamais quelles sont les peines réellement jugées.

Why It’s Time to Ditch #facebook Messenger
▻https://hackernoon.com/why-its-time-to-ditch-facebook-messenger-ba8c7a65171b?source=rss----3a81

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*rALvH6u6kICFnGeaBKBoFQ.jpeg

Tech OpinionAP via Business InsiderI recently went on a trip to Taiwan, whereupon I added some business contacts to my Facebook. It locked me out of the service and as I’m not on my usual phone number, I could not get back in. I found out this extended to my Instagram and Facebook Messenger. Not cool Facebook.Facebook Messenger is not Something I will Miss in 2018You take my data and profit from it with third party harvesting and Ads, but when I need it most, I can’t even log-in. This leads me to wonder though, do I really even need Facebook Messenger?You should stop using Facebook Messenger until it proves it’s worthy of your trust.I certainly don’t trust Facebook’s trinity of #apps: Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. They don’t protect my data or #privacy and certainly don’t offer me the (...)

#social-media #communication

Wakanda year is #facebook having?
▻https://hackernoon.com/wakanda-year-is-facebook-having-bd391d52ad5c?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3-

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*UMsZcl8FhbLrsKEk0tOpQQ.png

▻https://goo.gl/Tb9zB8*Black Panther spoilers ahead*Now I’m not much of a moviegoer, but boy did I enjoy Black Panther! I especially loved the twist in the second half where T’challa rules Wakanda with the belief he the uncontested heir, only to be ousted by long-lost cousin Erik Killmonger. A similar saga seems to be taking place in US courts where #blackberry has claimed that a number of Facebook’s messaging features have been infringing Blackberry’s #patents. Be it in Black Panther, or BlackBerry, one common question sprang into my head: “Why did they wait so long?!”Blackberry’s 117-page complaint in the California District Court, alleging that Facebook and its subsidiaries, Whatsapp and Instagram, have been infringing seven of Blackberry’s patents. BlackBerry claimed that these patents were (...)

#black-panther #intellectual-property

Pourquoi sommes-nous « accro » à Facebook ? - Santé - LeVif.be
▻http://www.levif.be/actualite/sante/pourquoi-sommes-nous-accro-a-facebook/article-normal-817479.html

http://www.levif.be/medias/8654/4431043.jpg

Si Facebook est de plus en plus critiqué, peu d’utilisateurs ferment leur compte, pris entre injonction sociale et piège des algorithmes, soulignent les chercheurs qui s’inquiètent de l’opacité des plateformes de réseaux sociaux.

Pourquoi sommes-nous « accro » à Facebook ?

Face au scandale autour de l’utilisation indue de données personnelles par la firme britannique Cambridge Analytica à des fins électorales, les adeptes de Facebook « sont choqués mais pas surpris », estime Eric Baumer, professeur en sciences de l’information à Lehigh University, aux Etats-Unis.

« Est-ce que cela va les inciter à quitter Facebook définitivement, c’est une autre question... », dit-il à l’AFP.

En 2014, le groupe s’était déjà retrouvé dans la tourmente pour avoir secrètement manipulé les émotions d’utilisateurs dans le cadre d’une étude sur la « contagion émotionnelle », une affaire qui l’avait amené à changer les règles encadrant les recherches mais n’avait freiné l’expansion de la plateforme.

Sur internet, « on a presque l’habitude que nos données fassent l’objet d’une utilisation mercantile », remarque Nathalie Nadaud-Albertini, sociologue française des médias. « Mais que cela puisse servir dans le cadre de campagnes électorales nous gêne beaucoup plus, car cela touche au domaine des idéaux, des valeurs et des idées », dit-elle.

– « Réaction pulsionnelle » -

Pour autant, elle ne s’attend pas un exode des utilisateurs : « C’est devenu tellement central dans notre socialisation et nos interactions que supprimer Facebook et les autres réseaux est possible, mais suppose de se mettre un peu en marge de la société », analyse-t-elle, pointant « l’injonction sociale » à rejoindre ce site au plus de deux milliards d’inscrits.

Une étude sur l’addiction à cette plateforme « a montré que ce n’est pas forcément le lien social qui attire sur Facebook mais un phénomène d’addiction : certains utilisateurs nous disaient taper instinctivement sur la lettre F de leur clavier quand ils se connectaient », dit pour sa part Eric Baumer, auteur de cette recherche pour l’université Cornell.

Les mécanismes de cette addiction ? « Facebook joue sur la dimension émotionnelle en nous exposant à des informations qui sollicitent une réaction pulsionnelle et non rationnelle. Ils savent aussi parfaitement quel type d’info va être virale », explique Olivier Ertzscheid, chercheur français en sciences de l’information à l’Université de Nantes.

« La question que cela pose, c’est que le jour où Facebook va décider de manipuler l’opinion sur tel ou tel sujet, sera-t-on en capacité de le détecter ? Ce n’est pas évident », alerte ce spécialiste, estimant que la plateforme en est techniquement capable.

– « Point Oppenheimer » -

Un risque également soulevé par Andrew Przybylski, psychologue à l’Université d’Oxford, qui dresse une analogie avec la trilogie de Tolkien et son anneau magique qui corrompt le commun des mortels : « Aujourd’hui, quand scientifiques et chercheurs travaillent avec Facebook, ils doivent avoir conscience que c’est un peu comme donner l’anneau à Frodon ».

Selon lui, la recherche sur les données et la psychologie quantitative a franchi son « point Oppenheimer », du nom de l’un des pères de la bombe atomique américaine : maintenant qu’une arme extrêmement dangereuse existe, qu’est-ce qu’on en fait ?

« Nous devons nous assurer que les recherches sont conformes à l’éthique et menées dans l’intérêt du public », estime le chercheur, qui a remis une proposition en ce sens à Facebook — lui-même n’a plus de compte.

Si le public fait de plus en plus attention aux données privées qu’il livre publiquement, « le problème, c’est où l’on met le curseur » entre ce qu’on partage avec tous et ce qu’on réserve aux proches, signale Nathalie Nadaud-Albertini, qui prône l’éducation numérique des plus jeunes pour « sortir de ce rapport de confiance où l’on se dit que tout va bien se passer, sans trop savoir ce que l’on risque ».

Les jeunes utilisateurs ont toutefois tendance à délaisser Facebook au profit d’autres réseaux, souligne Eric Baumer, regrettant au passage « l’opacité des conglomérats de médias sociaux » (Facebook détient Instagram et WhatsApp, Google possède YouTube...) qui peut induire en erreur ceux qui pensent éviter Facebook.

Pour Olivier Ertzscheid, une solution est de développer des alternatives à Facebook car « on sait aujourd’hui construire des réseaux sociaux respectueux de la vie privée ».

#Facebook #Recherche #Médias_sociaux