The great Jason Snell, about Apple and Google decision to encrypt user’s phones:

Law enforcement officials usually play on our fears whenever their powers are limited, but those limitations are what keep our society from being a police state. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Miranda v. Arizona in 1966 led to catastrophic predictions that many criminals would go free and society would be harmed if all arrested people were informed of their rights. Didn’t happen.

Those argument against privacy always seem ridiculous for me. The U.S government, as the French one and many others, seems to forget that their goal is to protect theirs citizen, and not to know everything, and, to reach it, they can’t do whatever they want to. And privacy is a price they shouldn’t afford.

Anyways, Apple’s decision was the good one, but, the response of the government official may be just smoke and mirrors. This is what Micah Lee, from The Intercept, is saying, remembering us that Apple still have the Golden Keys for iCloud backups:

But despite these nods to privacy-conscious consumers, Apple still strongly encourages all its users to sign up for and use iCloud, the internet syncing and storage service where Apple has the capability to unlock key data like backups, documents, contacts, and calendar information in response to a government demand.

iCloud is also used to sync photos, as a slew of celebrities learned in recent weeks when hackers reaped nude photos from the Apple service.

So, Apple is moving in the right direction, but the Patriot Act may be in the way.

OK, so, this is not a very original way to start a blog about technology, but I’m not a very original guy so, why not? Those are the first words of the Fma16 blog, which, indeed, is not a very original name for a blog, as would be Hypercritical, Daring Fireball, or the wonderful Liss Is More (kudos to Casey Liss for this one, very funny).

What is this?

This is a blog mainly about technology, which is not something that I work in, but is something that I love. I’m mostly interested in Apple things, but I’m still a PC guy, and an old Android user (I have a Nexus 5 in one of my drawer) so I’m not very biased (I know both sides).

Who is this guy?

I might need to introduce myself to the many people who might not know about me. My name is Paul-Henri Laugier, I study Law at the Aix-Marseille Université, I’m a technology enthusiast (an another term for geek) and I’m French.

Yep, I’m French. So, what does it implies?

It implies that English is not my native language, and, since I live in France, is not my main language. So, you might frequently stumble on grammar and vocabulary errors, even if I try my best to avoid them. So, it also means that if you see one of those, giving me feedback would be very much appreciated. I try to proofread my work, but it might be not enough. Also, I might also publish some bytes of text in French, but I’ll try my best to translate it in English, or to keep them separated from the main feed.

Why doing this?

Anyways, since I’m here, I might also try to explain my motivations for writing there. Those are quite simple:

1. I want to improve my writing level in English. This blog is a way to force me to write something, and also to make mistakes, and to learn from these.
2. I want to say what I think in more than 160 characters. Twitter is a great way to find and publish information, but sometimes, could be very restricted. Here, I’m free to do what I want, and say what I need to say.
3. I want to learn Markdown. Markdown is a great language for blogging and to write on the web, and is used on website like GitHub and many more. Since I’m curious, I though that learning it would be very cool (and way simpler than learning to code… I wish I could find some time to learn C, or Java, or Swift, or… . This post was written in Markup with MarkdownPad.
4. I want to play with blogging software. I’ll talk about this more extensively in an another post.
5. Others motivations that I’ve didn’t found yet.

I’ll not post here everyday, but just when I’ve found something worth talking about, or that I’ll like to talk about (which is not the same ;) ).

You can subscribe to the RSS and also follow me on Twitter if you like to be keep updated about the blog.

I’ll also make some tweaks to the website during the week, this is still a work in progress!

Have a nice day,

Paul-Henri