About

We are two retired IT and education professionals living in Quebec, Canada. We discovered the web in its very early days, at a time when you hand-coded HTML pages line by line, with the sincere hope that these new inventions would transform democracy and open up access to knowledge. Those hopes met with repeated disillusionment, but they never left us.

Pioneers, by accident

Our first project was dedicated to French-speaking teenagers around the world. Adomonde francophone — a community website active from 1995 to 2003 — was part of the first generation of web communities for young people, before Facebook, before popular blogs. It was well-known enough to be referenced in educational resources and had about forty partner schools across the French-speaking world.

Because proprietary solutions were sold at exorbitant prices, we turned to open source software — Linux, Apache, MySQL, Qmail, PHP, Perl. Every new need meant learning, installing, debugging, mastering. That is how Michel specialized in Linux server administration.

In 2001, while installing machines at a data center, he received a proposal. That was the beginning of Webcargo.net, an application for securely transferring large files. This was before Dropbox and all the others that followed. At the time, you had to modify the PHP source code and recompile it entirely just to get a simple progress bar.

In 2003, Michael Moore's website was suffering massive DDoS attacks after he received the Palme d'Or at Cannes for Fahrenheit 9/11. The load balancer Michel had developed for Webcargo proved invaluable for filtering that type of attack.

Anne's path

In 2005, Anne joined UQAM — Université du Québec à Montréal — as administrative support at the School of Management, serving professors with their IT and publication needs. In 2009, she moved to ÉTS — École de Technologie Supérieure — where she built an intranet for human resources and a website for the Occupational Health and Safety office.

The turn toward education

A contact in the school system drew Michel into the world of LMS — Learning Management Systems. From Claroline to Moodle, through Dokeos and Chamilo, he spent fifteen years supporting pedagogical advisors and teachers at several vocational training centers in integrating these tools. That is where he understood something essential: technology is only as good as the understanding of the person using it.

Why AI changes everything

Drawing on what we experienced over all those years, we began to reflect on the upheavals AI would bring — and on the consequences it would have on people's consciousness.

Generative AI is the most powerful tool we have seen emerge since the early days of the web. It can amplify human intelligence in extraordinary ways, or short-circuit it in equally extraordinary ways.

The difference between the two does not lie in the technology. It lies in the awareness of whoever uses it.

HUMANITY.NET exists for precisely this reason: to help every user stay in control of their interactions with AI — to ask the right questions, to recognize problematic responses, and to never mistake the fluency of an answer for its truth. Hum_ID lets you define your ethical rules once and apply them to any AI conversation. Hum_SCAN lets you analyze any text — or improve your own writing — according to those same values. Together, they form a practical toolkit for epistemic sovereignty.