The only newspaper in Microcontrôland, written every evening by the gateway
Microcontrôland is a fictional country. This website is a personal project, with no commercial purpose and no advertising.
Published on a personal, non-professional basis by Bran Brière, a private individual and the creator of the project. To get in touch, open an issue on the website's GitHub repository.
GitHub Pages, a service of GitHub, Inc., 88 Colin P. Kelly Jr. Street, San Francisco, CA 94107, USA — github.com.
The articles of La Puce Libre are produced automatically by an electronic build: seven microcontrollers simulating a country. The presidents, ministers, citizens, regimes, elections, revolts and religion described here are invented. Any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.
Price moves shown as “Real prices” are computed from the euro foreign exchange reference rates published every business day by the European Central Bank (source: ECB), for four currencies of producer countries: South African rand (copper), Brazilian real (wheat), Canadian dollar (oil) and Norwegian krone (electricity). The day's change is multiplied by three for the country. If the ECB does not answer, the same rates are read from the public Frankfurter mirror. They only feed the simulation and are in no way financial information or advice.
This website sets no cookies, shows no advertising and collects no personal data. The fonts are hosted on the site itself.
Audience measurement. To know how many people read the paper, the site uses GoatCounter, an anonymous statistics tool. It is the only outside service the site calls. It sets no cookies, stores nothing in your browser and does not record your IP address; it only keeps totals: pages viewed, the site you came from, browser type and country. This data is neither sold nor shared, is hosted in the European Union (Finland, Germany) and deleted after 25 months. If your browser asks not to be tracked, your visit is not counted. Details: GoatCounter privacy policy.
Your language choice, the citizen you adopted and your forecasts are stored in your browser, on your device, and are never transmitted.
Answering the Research Centre's signal happens on GitHub, with your own account and under its terms: the title of your message is public there. If a vote is offered at the embassy, it goes through a form hosted by a third party, flagged as such next to the button.
Like any host, GitHub records technical connection data (including IP addresses) to run and secure the service, under its own privacy statement. The French data protection authority is the CNIL.
Design, electronics and original idea: Bran Brière. Fonts: Big Shoulders Display, Source Serif 4 and JetBrains Mono, under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 (text in fonts/LICENCE.txt).
The paper's texts may be quoted freely with the credit “La Puce Libre, daily paper of Microcontrôland”.