Category: Technology

While the deployment of 5G has barely started in France, the telecoms world is already looking to the future. The operator Orange recently organized its Research Week. The opportunity to discover several innovations in preparation.

Franceinfo: what will 6G look like?

Nicolas Demassieux, Orange research director: 6G will not arrive until 2030. We are thinking about several things. What will our societal needs be in 2030? We may not need more speed but rather a more resilient network, more capable of coping with today’s different climatic circumstances and networks that will adapt in real time to our connectivity needs. ambient. Just what we’ll need when we need it.

What is ambient connectivity?

It starts from an observation. Today, connectivity has become very important to us for our private and professional lives and we need connectivity to communicate, which is what humans do. So that connectivity has to be there all the time, when you need it, with the quality you need. This concerns humans but also objects, which will also be more and more communicative. For example, temperature, pressure, noise reading, etc. This ambient connectivity must be fair, consume little energy and be adapted to the needs of men and machines.

What is the “digital twin” that you have developed?

It is a concept that is developing in the industry. For example, in a factory that manufactures mechanical parts or in a city, objects are moved or change state, break down, etc. The idea of ​​a digital twin is to have a synchronized digital platform, like the game Sim City, that represents the state of the physical world in real time. This makes it very easy to find parts in a warehouse or a car in a factory parking lot (sometimes you lose a badly parked vehicle for weeks). And, if a street light fails, for example, technicians can be notified immediately and easily locate the equipment for repair.

The e-commerce giant Amazon apologized at the weekend to an American elected official for denying the existence of a practice to which its employees are sometimes forced: to urinate in plastic bottles. “We know that our drivers can and do have problems finding toilets due to traffic or sometimes rural roads, and this was particularly the case with Covid-19, when many public toilets were closed.”, the company said in a statement on Friday April 2.

The controversy started last week, with a tweet from an elected Democrat in the House of Representatives, Mark Pocan. “Just because you pay your employees $ 15 an hour doesn’t make you a ‘progressive workplace’, he accused, when you make your employees urinate in plastic bottles “. An official Amazon account then responded directly to the chosen one on the same social network: “You don’t really believe that wee in bottles thing, though? If it was true, no one would work for us.”

But several media had subsequently reported numerous statements by employees testifying to the existence of this practice. The media The Intercept had also claimed to have obtained internal documents certifying that she was well known to company officials.

The testimonies point in particular to the lack of time to go to the bathroom because of the pace of work imposed by Amazon. “We owe Representative Pocan an apology, the company said in its statement. The tweet was incorrect. It did not take into account our large group of drivers, and wrongly focused on our distribution centers “, where employees can “move away from their workstation at any time” to get to “dozens of toilets“available to them. The problem with Amazon drivers is “former” and “generalized to the whole industry, sued the company. We would like to solve it. We don’t know how but we will look for solutions “.

The elected Mark Pocan reacted on Saturday to the apologies addressed to him: “Sigh, he tweeted. It’s not about me, it’s about your employees – whom you don’t treat with enough respect and dignity. Start by recognizing the inappropriate working conditions you have created for ALL of your employees. “

Sigh.

This is not about me, this is about your workers — who you don’t treat with enough respect or dignity.

Start by acknowledging the inadequate working conditions you’ve created for ALL your workers, then fix that for everyone & finally, let them unionize without interference. https://t.co/tdIns0AR66

– Rep. Mark Pocan (@repmarkpocan) April 3, 2021

Amazon is in the spotlight in the United States with the vote, completed this week, on forming a warehouse union in Alabama, which would be the first in the country. The results have not yet been announced.

Cyber ​​attacks are “quite common lately” and “not necessarily targeted”, recalls Nicolas Arpagian, teacher at the National School of Police. This cybersecurity specialist reacted Thursday April 1 on franceinfo to the attack against the pharmaceutical group Pierre Fabre, the third largest French laboratory.

For Nicolas Arpagian, it is above all a question of villainous activities of opportunity, the hacker sending “a large number of messages” and cash “on the fact that one of the recipients will click on a malware link”. Then the virus “paralyzes information systems”. To recover its computer data, the company is offered to pay a ransom.

franceinfo: What does a cyberattack consist of?

Nicolas Arpagian: These are pretty common attacks lately. These are ransomware-related extortion activities, that is, the hacker offers to release data that has been previously encrypted in exchange for paying a ransom. So indeed, it is a villainous activity that paralyzes information systems. Sometimes all or part of the company’s computer systems can be affected. In the case of the Fabre laboratory, apparently, it is the production that is achieved and not the distribution. It has to do with the fact that the systems are separate, distinct, and therefore effectively, it limits the ability of malware to spread.

Was the Fabre laboratory specifically targeted, in your opinion?

With regard to the accessibility to attack tools, we should not consider that we are on necessarily targeted attacks. That is to say that the person who carried out the operation did not necessarily deliberately target the Pierre Fabre laboratories. We are witnessing attacks that work in the form of campaigns. In recent times, these attacks have targeted both local communities and hospitals.

“The hacker will send a large number of messages, mainly by email, and therefore he will rely on the fact that one of the recipients will click on the malware link.”

Nicolas arpagian

to franceinfo

How should you react in the event of a cyber attack?

Already, we must stop the attack, that is to say make sure to technically isolate the infrastructure from the network to prevent contamination and the spread of the virus. This allows to circumscribe, that is to say to ensure that there is not a continuous infection of the systems. Then, you have to know if you have backups on other equipment. We must ensure that we have healthy copies on other platforms, possibly at service providers or in other infrastructures. This will allow the company to restore its information capital. And then you have to ensure the integrity of the equipment. There, there is a whole phase of audits, to ensure that if we have to reconnect equipment, it is done from healthy infrastructures, which do not contain any virus or dormant malware residue. We must file a complaint and not pay the ransom to avoid encouraging and stimulating this criminal economy.

With its 2.6 billion users worldwide, including 40 million in France, Facebook has an impact and a social responsibility. Its famous recommendation algorithm would promote the spread of hateful content and disinformation. The social network wants to allow its members to regain, at least in part, control.

Among the new functions that have just been announced, there is the possibility of configuring your news feed, that is to say the messages published by your “friends”, so that they are displayed in a chronological, with the most recent first. So far, it’s the famous recommendation algorithm that decides to show you what it wants based on what it knows about your interests.

This new function is first deployed on Android and will then arrive on iPhone. Another new function: the possibility to bookmark pages or profiles or, on the contrary, to hide certain pages. Finally, it will be possible to choose more precisely who can see content that is shared on Facebook.

These new functions can be compared to a lengthy blog post published on April 1 by Nick Clegg, vice president of global affairs at Facebook, titled “You and the Algorithm: Two people dance the tango.” The author defends Facebook’s oft-criticized algorithm and challenges social media to be responsible for polarizing society. Nick Clegg refers users to their responsibilities. “Your news feed is strongly influenced by your choices and actions “, he writes. In other words, the content that we consult or that we “love“ shape the similar content offered to us. According to him, the algorithm is just going with the flow.

Nick Clegg, who is also a former UK Deputy Prime Minister, puts this in a more global perspective. “Personalization is at the heart of the evolution of the Internet over the past two decades “, he explains. And we are witnessing a “democratization (…) history of speech “. We will not go back, says in substance Nick Clegg, who also calls for “democratically elected institutions “ for “establish new rules “.