Pathetic show a few days ago, when the Olympic torch was passed around in the streets of Paris. Watched a little footage on the evening news on the telly, with scenes of police forces snatching away Tibetan flags from demonstrators.

Really makes one wonder how much of a symbol the torch really is, when it becomes a flagship product for propaganda. While the IOC panel has the hardest difficulties admitting they pushed the Chinese candidacy for political reasons, Chinese officials have no difficulty rebuking requests that the Olympic truce be respected…

Journalists were turned away from filming crews, in spite of having all credentials, on grounds that they filmed the Chinese who were not filming the demonstrations (which was considered “dangerous”). Three rings of bodyguards shielded the flame from a mob of demonstrators, while the French police forces came out to snatch away Tibetan flags… As though the Tibetan flag (arguably “illegal”, since Tibet isn’t recognized as a country…) were less worthy a symbol than the Olympic torch, or rather, that the symbol of Olympic goodwill, in China’s responsibility, could not suffer the competition. And by the way, it seems French products have been boycotted in China since…

Expect lots of medals this summer. And a few raised fists. And some odd live coverage interruptions. Organizers will be torn between the need to show their best face and the imperious necessity to make the world forget the Tibetan, the result should be interesting…

Five years after France’s refusal to participate in the Iraqi adventure — which I believe prevented to a great extent the full-fledged clash of civilizations neo-conservatives yearned for — it was a sad day to watch French PM Fillon endorse the return of France in NATO, and justify sending more troops in Afghanistan by using Bush’s usual tryptic: “we can’t afford to lose / our security is at stake / our freedom is at stake.” Opposing MPs were even charged with “raw anti-Americanism” for challenging the government over the decision.

More than a sharp swerve in French foreign policy (a 50-year heritage of independence), the return of France in the Northern Alliance also most likely spells the end of the (admittedly unborn) European defense project.

While trying to figure out why my Mom’s iPod wouldn’t update to 1.3, I fired up Wireshark hoping to find out if iTunes was communicating with the old Win2K laptop. It turned out it wasn’t, so it looks like I’m going to have to plug it into the WinXP box to update it (worked last time, cross your fingers for me, please).

But the interesting fact is this: while looking at the updating list of requests and responses, I noticed a call to a Google domain was made, namely sb.l.google.com, in spite of the fact I wasn’t making a search, nor using GMail at the time. The request, of the form GET /safebrowsing/update?client=… came up again a few times.

It turns out Firefox makes use of the Google SafeBrowsing API (sb stands for SafeBrowsing), and calls it at intervals (in the first 5mn after browser launch, then within 15-20mn, then every 25-30mn is recommended) to update a database of domains suspected of phishing. It appears no request is made to the server while you’re browsing, Firefox stores the list locally and checks against it when you request an URL, then adds a warning just under the tabs if a domain is considered untrustworthy. It also pushes data to Google SB when it encounters a website that might be missing in the database.

This isn’t new. The inclusion of the API was introduced in Firefox’s code trunk in 2006, and back then, the Mozilla team pondered whether it would end up serving as a base for anti-phishing. Well, it did. And that’s news to me.

Personally, I have a little issue with this feature. Even if Google does the right thing and totally separates data, Firefox on all my computers essentially tells Google whenever I open and close a browser window. This information is marginal as far as privacy, but it’s yet another piece of personal information that ends up on Google servers.

Moreover, I usually can tell phishing requests rather easily on my own without requiring assistance. I disabled the tool by unchecking the “Tell me if the site I’m visiting is a forgery” option in Tools – Options – Security.

By the way, Wireshark 1.0 has just been released. A great tool to peek into the innards of your system’s communications.