🇫🇷 The French government is sending a message about digital independence by ditching Microsoft Teams and Zoom for its own platform, Visio. This move is not about a lack of features but a calculated push for digital sovereignty. By 2027, every government department in France will communicate via this sovereign stack, ensuring that sensitive data remains subject to European law. The shift addresses a growing concern that relying on foreign cloud giants creates a strategic vulnerability. France is opting for an open-source architecture built on Django and React, hosted on the domestic Outscale cloud. This infrastructure removes the risk of external service disruptions while fostering a local tech ecosystem.
🧠 The Visio platform integrates with Tchap, a secure messaging app based on the Matrix protocol.
⚡ French startup Pyannote provides the AI backbone for meeting transcripts and speaker identification.
🎓 The administration expects to save millions in annual licensing fees by using in-house software.
🔍 Data remains strictly within French jurisdiction to bypass foreign data access laws.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladys_West
"Before GPS became an everyday utility, it was a hard mathematical problem.
In the 1950s–70s, Gladys West, a mathematician at the U.S. Naval Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren, Virginia, worked on one of the most difficult challenges in satellite navigation: accurately modeling the Earth itself.
Modern GPS accuracy depends on:
• Precise satellite ephemerides
• Accurate gravitational field modeling
• Correct Earth reference frames
West’s work directly advanced all three.
Her contributions weren’t widely recognized at the time. In fact, it wasn’t until 2018 that she was inducted into the U.S. Air Force Space and Missile Pioneers Hall of Fame—decades after GPS reshaped global navigation, logistics, finance, defense, and mobile computing...
Before GPS could tell us where we are, someone had to define what the Earth actually looks like—mathematically…” #Engineering#GPS#Geodesy#STEM#TechHistory#WomenInTech#DataScience#Infrastructure#WomenInGeoSpatial
H/T Evan Kirstel
photo with caption - Gladys West at her desk, no (!) computer, working on a geodesy problem...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladys_West
❄️ ’Tis the season to celebrate with Sierra On-Line’s 1986 "A Computer Christmas." ❄️ Thanks to #softwarepreservation, this retro holiday classic is now a perennial gift for new generations of holiday revelers. 🎄