Category: Technology

Franceinfo listeners, you react and you can ask us your questions. We answer it with the mediator of the Radio France antennas, Emmanuelle Daviet. We are also today with Alexis Morel, education specialist at franceinfo.

Emmanuelle Daviet: We start with this first message from a listener:

“This Tuesday, April 6, the digital tools of National Education have almost all crashed. Jean Michel Blanquer has designated the culprits: OVH (the CEO has also refuted during the day) and hackers for the platform” my class at the house “of the CNED. Now it is obvious, on the one hand that nothing has been prepared, the digital services do not support the load, and on the other hand that the hypothesis of the hackers is obviously far-fetched and allows to kick In touch. Why does your editorial staff relay Jean-Michel Blanquer’s words, without doing journalistic work of checking and seeking credibility in the minister’s words? “

Alexis Morel, what answers can you give to many listeners who have written to us on this subject?

Alexis Morel: So what can be explained is that there are several times in the processing of this information. Very quickly, when we see that the bugs are multiplying, Jean-Michel Blanquer reacts, evokes computer attacks apparently from abroad against the CNED. It also points to the responsibility, in fact, of this host. We broadcast these words of the minister at first, while quoting them, that is to say by taking our precautions, by saying “according to the minister”, “according to Jean-Michel Blanquer”, which means that we don’t take it at face value. But of course, we broadcast them because they are not trivial. They come from the Minister of National Education, so they have an informative interest.

But we didn’t stop there at all. Very quickly, the boss of this server host, OVH, refutes any responsibility, denies these accusations. Well, we talk about it from 2:10 p.m. on franceinfo, we quote it. Then then, in the evening too. And then, we do this verification work, in particular for the next morning with my colleague Boris Loumagne who, Wednesday at 8 a.m., questions and calls into question the statements of the Minister on the hosting, on the servers, on the computer attacks allegedly occurred. from abroad.

Emmanuelle Daviet: We continue with this message:

“Your journalists only relayed Jean-Michel Blanquer’s words. No counterpoint to the latter’s words was offered. It seems unprofessional to me.”

Alexis Morel, to treat such a file with balance, to whom did you choose to give the floor?

I do not believe that the word of the minister was relayed. He was just one interlocutor among many on our antenna during those Tuesday and Wednesday days. Very quickly, we put on the air testimonies of students, teachers, trade unionists who told of the galley facing the platforms in the harbor and above all, who also denounced the lack of preparation and the lack of anticipation of the ministry. That was the SNES saying in an on-air report.

I also think back, to be very concrete, to this college principal who told us on Tuesday evening on the air her annoyance, her anger at having prepared everything and that all that was stranded. She said in her testimony: “We asked if the servers were going to hold up, we were assured they would hold up.” So there you have it, this is a testimony we heard on Tuesday evening. I don’t believe it was ever claimed on the air that this whole fiasco was primarily or solely related to computer attacks. We also quickly heard of the overload of the servers.

Emmanuelle Daviet: Beyond the testimonies of parents or National Education staff, were there other experts or specialists to decipher this issue on the air?

Alexis Morel: So we invited the head of one of the main editors of digital educational platforms on Wednesday morning. Many teachers reacted to these remarks because she explained that it was also necessary to review the organization of distance education in schools. It pissed off a lot of teachers.

And then, we also had the precious decryption of our “new technologies” specialist, Jérôme Colombain, who explained what could have happened, why the servers were undoubtedly undersized. That is an expertise that I cannot have as an education specialist. So it was interesting to hear him. How was a cyberattack against the CNED more or less plausible? Etc.

Emmanuelle Daviet: How is relaying the word of the Minister of National Education during this period of pandemic a delicate or difficult exercise?

Alexis Morel: This is a very important question because it is a criticism that is often made to us: “You relay the word of the minister as it is”… This is a criticism that we are often made. So we have to hear it. What is complex for us education journalists is that the minister’s word ultimately has a dual status, especially since the start of this crisis. First, it has a somewhat institutional, even service-like status. That is to say, he is the one who will announce some of the changes in protocols at the school. And that concerns a million staff, 12 million students. So we have to relay the practical announcements, if I may say so.

But this ministerial word is also a political word that has an interest, a political agenda of its own. So we must also, at the same time, obviously take it with a lot of distance, with hindsight, whether there is the Covid or not, by the way. And then, the other difficulty in the end, on which we have to be very careful, is the announcement effect and the often discrepancy between the announcements and the field. We have experienced that on several occasions. An announcement made by the minister, but which takes time to materialize. Typically lately antigen testing, saliva testing.

The ministry announces a launch day to us, but on the day in question, there are only a few schools that are affected and the vast majority of teachers and students do not see it right away, if at all. And that we have to be aware of, of course, and say it on the air. And we try to say that yes, this test campaign, for example, it does exist, but that it does not exist everywhere, and that it is difficult to deploy, etc. that this is not a reality across the country.

This would have been a first in the United States. Employees who tried to create a union in an Amazon warehouse failed at the polls on Friday, April 9. “We are disappointed, frustrated, angry (…) because we have been lied to and manipulatedsaid Emmit Ashford, an employee of the Bessemer, Alabama site. But it was a spark that started a fire in America. “

Nearly 5,900 employees were called upon to vote by mail. The no to unionization won with 1,798 votes against 738 in favor of RWDSU, the national distribution union that employees wanted to join. Several hundred ballots were contested, but victory is already assured for the online commerce giant.

“Amazon did not win, our employees chose to vote against the union”, reacted the group in a statement, brushing aside the accusations of intimidation. “Our employees have heard a lot more anti-Amazon messages from the union, elected officials and the media than they have heard from us.”

RWDSU has vowed to file a complaint with the Federal Labor Law Agency against the group it accuses “illegal interference” in the vote. The result “is in no way a validation of working conditions at Amazon, on the contrary, it demonstrates the power of the employer and its power of intimidation and manipulation”, assenait Stuart Appelbaum, the president of the union, during a press conference.

The group has been making its case against unionization with texts, posters and weekly briefings in the warehouse for months, brandishing the scarecrow of union dues and the risk of costly strikes.

Despite everything, Bessemer’s movement took on a national dimension. It has seen backlash against backers for employees – artists, Democratic and Republican parliamentarians, and even President Joe Biden – and the second largest employer in the United States (800,000 employees), whose businesses flourished during the pandemic.

According to many experts, US labor law is biased in favor of employers, and Bessemer’s result shows the need for reform. Despite the defeat, “this is a major milestone (…) because it is one of the first attempts to unionize part of the digital economy”, points out Darrell West of the Brookings Institution.

From now on, in one click, you have free access to almost the entire world of radio: RadioPlayer France is the first platform which brings together 200 French radios and 600 webradios (the stream and podcasts), which represents 90% of the audience. total.

Never before have public and private branches entered into such a partnership, which already exists in 13 other countries. “This is a historic moment. We show that the radio medium is capable of moving, of overcoming its divisions, it is a medium of the future”, rejoices Sibyle Veil, president of Radio France, whose seven stations (franceinfo, France Inter, France Bleu, France Musique, France Culture, Fip and Mouv) are part of the project. “It’s extremely simple”, adds Jean-Eric Valli, head of Indés radios and RadioPlayer France. “When you download the app, you immediately have a screen with the logos of the radios to make your choices. The listener can thus reconstitute his usual universe. Then radios are recommended to him according to the data collected by Médiamétrie on the listening habits. “

The application is available on all smartphones, computers, tablets, TVs and connected speakers. “When our content is broadcast by aggregators, we have no control over the sound quality, over the identity of our radio stations. No statistics either on listening. We produce programs, we have no reason. to deliver them without any control “, continues Jean-Eric Valli.

The goal is also not to miss the corner of the connected cars: “We must be everywhere in all forms. Particularly in the car of tomorrow, where the risk is not to be found by our listener. No radio publisher is able to negotiate alone with car manufacturers.”

530 million Facebook users, including nearly 20 million French, were victims of a data breach on Saturday April 3. A file circulates on the Internet with names, professions, telephone numbers, but no passwords or bank details. In a blog post published on Tuesday, the social network explains that this leak was not the result of a hack and that it is an old affair.

The fact is that the story dates from before 2019. Hackers had engaged in “scratching”, that is to say a wild collection of data from the main interface of the service, without fraudulent access to the servers. To do this, they relied on a Facebook feature that scanned each user’s address book to establish relationships between people. This is how they were able to retrieve millions of names, phone numbers, locations, professions, marital statuses, etc.

This list had been circulating on the Internet for several years, in hacker circles. It has just resurfaced for free, highlighted by a cybersecurity specialist.

Where are we today? Facebook specifies that the function which used to extract the contact details of users has been deactivated and therefore that the problem can no longer arise today. The fact remains that the data sucked before 2019 remains in the wild. Contrary to what the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) provides today, no one has been warned. This data leak can be used for “phishing” campaigns or simply telephone spam, for example.

To find out if you are concerned by this case, or by any other data breach, you can go to the specialized site Have I been Pawned, type your email address or your phone number and check the list provided.

Multi-level marketing promises quick riches, especially on the internet. Everyone is their own sales manager and can make anyone a sales manager. And in the end everyone has a Porsche? Whoever believes it.

When Ole Asmus was a child, not so long ago, his mother told him that money didn’t make you happy. You have “really talked the shit,” he says today. Asmus now has his own business on the internet, a “passive income” method of supposedly getting rich quick. Money that earns itself. His business runs on Instagram and Facebook. So now he would like to take a quick photo. New content has to come from his life as a successful financial advisor.

According to a statement from the CNED (National Center for Distance Education), it is a series of cyberattacks that would be responsible for the saturation of the platform “My Class at home”, Tuesday April 6, on the first day of the resumption of distance learning. The minister first spoke of attacks “coming from abroad“, before there was no further allusion to this hypothesis. A ministry press release mentions”of malicious acts and an influx of visitors“.

If these are indeed cyber attacks, for lack of a more detailed technical explanation from the ministry at this time, we might think that these are “denial of service” (DDoS) attacks. It is a classic of cyber malware which is characterized by a massive influx of simultaneous connections which have the effect of saturating the servers. The effect is even more pronounced when added to the millions of connection requests from the students themselves. The ministry speaks of an act of malicious intent, which opens the hypothesis of people having provoked this to deliberately create chaos.

A denial of service attack is not necessarily very difficult to trigger. By means of finance, we find tools for this in the “bottomlands” of the internet. You can even give the impression that it comes from abroad. A denial of service attack is even more likely to be successful if there are insufficient protections, or if the servers are not sufficiently sized.

Another problem arose with ENT, the “digital work environments”. These are not managed directly by the national education services but are decentralized to the regional level, and entrusted to external providers. Students encountered significant difficulties in connecting to ENTs, especially in the Hauts-de-France, Île-de-France, Grand-Est, Nouvelle Aquitaine and Occitanie regions. Wednesday morning, according to a press release from the ministry, there were still slowdowns in Île de France and the Grand-Est region.

On Tuesday, Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer made the connection with the fire at a data center operated by the operator OVH several weeks ago in Strasbourg. But OVH boss Michel Paulin didn’t like it and reacted in a tweet, saying it didn’t “no link“.

All this shows how difficult it is for the National Education Department to cope with a rapid increase in distance education services. We remember that last year, during the first lockdown, the servers did not hold up either. In general, dealing with this kind of situation requires planning and budgets.

“Have the National Education servers been sufficiently sized?Laure de La Raudière asked franceinfo. The new president of the Telecoms Regulatory Authority (ARCEP) was the eco guest on Wednesday April 7 on franceinfo, for her first media intervention.

franceinfo: What is ARCEP in the daily life of the French?

Laure de La Raudière: It is an administrative authority which sets the rules of the game on markets which affect the daily life of French people: Internet access, whether fixed or mobile; access to the telephone, to ensure that these essential services for the French are well distributed everywhere and for all; but also the mail and press distribution sector.

There are big concerns about ENTs since the resumption of distance education, what is happening?

What exactly is happening, I don’t know, because it’s not ARCEP’s responsibility to find out. But it is not the networks, the operators who are responsible. Have the National Education servers been sufficiently sized to take the peak in traffic that has taken place? It is rather on the side of the servers that we must look than on the side of the operators’ networks.

Are you finally going to be able to put an end to this damn digital divide that still strikes today in France?

It is one of the objectives of the regulation, to develop the territory and to provide very high speed internet access to all French people and of high quality, whether fixed or mobile. Regulatory systems mean that we have specificities linked to rural areas to ensure that, even in areas that are not profitable for operators, there are indeed these services.

This is what is happening in the deployment of fiber today: there is specific regulation and the investment of local authorities to bring fiber back to all rural areas.

Laure de La Raudière, President of ARCEP

to franceinfo

This is also the case in the field of mobiles, with the stake of all this project which has been carried out since 2018 which is called the new deal. Today there are 24.7 million fiber deployed in France and 10 million subscribers who are on this network. All the rest of the subscribers have access to telephone and very high speed through copper. On 5G, 2020 was a record year with 6 million lines deployed in France.