My flight from Athens where I had the pleasure to attend the first
reproducible world
summit
landed at the scheduled time in Paris (CDG). While people were getting
their bags and putting their coats on, one member of the cabin crew
announced that a police control will take place outside the plane and
that we should have ready identity documents. My seat was in the back of the
plane, so I had time to wait in the cold of the
jetway while all passengers
were controlled one after the other.
Three cops were set up right at the entrance of the terminal. One was taking
cards or passports and looking at people's face. He then passed it to another
cop in front of a suitcase that seemed to contain a scanner and a computer. The
third one was just standing against the wall watching. When it was my turn,
after scanning my passport, the cop had this nice gesture where she started to
move her hand holding the passport toward me just like she had just did a
hundred times before pulling it backward when the result appeared on the
screen.
I had the confirmation that I was registered as a dangerous political
activist in 2012 when
David Dufresne published
Magasin G n ral. One
report from the interior intelligence service from
2008
was leaked to promote the book. My name had not been properly redacted
from the very first version that went online and was associated with a
political self-organized space in Dijon. Some Debian Developers had the
pleasure to visit that space in
2005,
2006, or
2007.
The report was full of mistakes, like
almost all police
files,
so I don't want to comment on it.
The good news is that since then, I have stopped being paranoid. I knew,
and thus could take appropriate precautions. Just like every time I have
to approach an airport, all my (encrypted) electronic devices were
turned off. I had shaved a couple hours before. I know a lawyer ready
to represent me. I am fully aware that
it's best to say as little as
possible.
Although it has been a while since I had such a blatant confirmation
that I was still a
registered anarchist. It should not be a surprise
though. Once you are in,
there's no way
out.
I was then asked to step aside while they proceeded with the rest of the
queue. I put my backpack down and leaned against the wall. Once they
were over, one of the cops asked me to follow him. We walked through the
corridors to reach the office of the border police. While we were
walking, they asked me a series of questions. I'm not mentioning the
pauses in between, but here's what I can remember:
Do you have a connection?
No.
Are you going to Paris?
To my parents' in the suburbs.
How long have you been staying in Greece?
5 days.
flipping the pages of my passport And you come back from the U.S. in Feb. 2015?
No, that was the maximum stay. I was there in August 2014.
Why were you in Greece? Vacations?
Work. I was at a meeting.
What do you do?
Free software.
What is that?
I am a developper.
Oh, computers.
Yes.
Is that why you also were in the US?
Yes, it was another conference.
And so you travel because of that. That's nice.
Are you a freelancer?
I work with a coop, but yes.
The cop also commented that they had to do some simple checks and that
they would then let me go as I was coming back. I did not trust this but
said nothing.
When then passed through a door where the cop had to use their badge to
unlock it. I was asked to sit on a chair in the corridor between two
offices (as far as I could see). I could hear one cop explaining the
situation to the next: Il a une fiche. Ah, une fiche. They seemed
quite puzzled that I was not controlled when I flew out on Monday.
After some minutes, another cop came back asking me for my boarding
pass. Some more minutes later, he came back asking me if the address on
my passport was still valid. I replied no . They gave me a piece of
paper asking me for my current address, a phone number and an email
address. As these information are all easy to find, I thought it was
easier to comply. I gave my
@irq7.fr address that I use for all public
administrations. When the cop saw it, he asked:
What is it?
I don't understand.
Is it your company?
It is a non-profit.
He gave me my passport back and showed me the way out.
(I will spare you details on the discussion I had to listen while
waiting between two cops about how one loved to build models of military
weapons used in
wars against communism because of
his origins. And
that he was pissed off because
fucking Europe disallowed some
(toxic) paints he was used to.)
To the best of my understanding, what happened is that they made a phone
call and were just asked to update my personal details by the
intelligence service.
I don't know, but I'm left to wonder if all these people might just have
been controlled because I was on the flight.
All-in-all this didn't take too long: one hour after leaving the plane I
was on the platform for the regional trains. The cops stayed polite the
whole time. I am privileged: French citizen, white, able to speak French
with a teacher accent. I am pretty sure it would have not been that good
if I had been displaying a long beard or a djellaba.
I took the time to document this because I know too many people who
think that what the French government is doing doesn't concern them. It
does. It's been a couple of years now that antiterrorism is how
governments keep people in check. But we are reaching a whole new level
now. We are talking about
cops keeping their guns while off
duties,
house searches at
any hours without judge
oversight,
and the government wants to
change the constitution to make the state
of emergency permanent. We've seen
so many
abuses in
just two weeks. It will not go well. Meanwhile, instead of asking
themselves why young people are killing others and themselves, state
officials prefer dropping bombs. Which will surely prevent people ready
to die from using suicidal tactics, right?
We are at the dawn of an environmental crisis that will end humanity.
Every human on this planet is concerned.
People get beaten
up when
they march to pressure governments to do something about it. We need to
unite and resist. And yes,
we are going to get
hurt but freedom is not
free.
As announced earlier, I will try to publish weekly reports on contributing to the phpMyAdmin. Here comes the first one.
Last week I've focused on some pain points with deploying phpMyAdmin and improved these a bit. The installation using PHP Composer is now documented. It's far from being perfect (you have to add our repository), but it seems to work fine.
What was more challenging for me is Docker support. I've never really used it so far, so I had to learn some things about the filesystem layering (to avoid too big image), but now it's there. You can get the sources from GitHub, it's available on Docker Hub and of course it is covered by our documentation.
Bugs fixed:
The second update to the 
Cookies are an important part of the Web since they are the primary
mechanism that websites use to maintain user sessions. Unfortunately, they
are also abused by surveillance marketing companies to follow you around the
Web. Here are a few things you can do in Firefox to protect your privacy.
In 
Hello dear readers and attendees,
This is the post that I will be/ will have been referencing during my presentation to the Seattle Central Community College s Byte club on Thursday, December 10th at 1500-1630.
I will begin with a bit of an autobio and find out what kind of students we have in attendance. Please feel free to comment if you d like to keep in touch before or after the presentation. I will discuss some of the bits and pieces of some industry standard platforms which I ve developed, deployed, maintained, managed, co-operated, administered and replaced. We can discuss some of the patterns that work well in the industry, and some that are a bit harder to tame.
Once we have touched most of the areas of specialization represented at the meeting, I will dive in to an AngularJS demo I am developing in github here:
Debian LTS
November was the seventh month I contributed to 
During the last few days, I found several references to a beautiful just-published paper, which I hope everybody reads: 
Today I had the honour to hold my first invited talk: I was the keynote speaker at the 
Like everybody else on the internet today was the day I started rolling out SSL certificates, via 
The regular monthly upstream 
Particularly noteworthy is the addition of support for intra-daily times in 