Chief scribe
Caernarfon‘s Business Improvement District (BID) has secured £20,000 of funding for improvements, today’s Daily Post reports. Of this total, some £10,000 “will pay to develop a town wi-fi which would give visitors a chance to get online“. Measured against the town’s population, the wi-fi scheme represents an investment of just over £1 per head.
There’s a fair bit going on in Bristol at the moment as regards the Internet of Things (IoT) and these were reported on earlier this week by Nigel Legg, under the headline “Smart City done Smarter?“. Nigel’s post is reproduced in full below with his kind permission (with a couple of links added. Ed.). My […]
There’s a lot of formal collaboration going on out there in the world of free and open source software. Hard on the heels of news of the link-up between The Document Foundation and the Free Software Foundation Europe (news passim), comes the announcement that Canonical, the company behind the very popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, has […]
This year the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) celebrates its 15th birthday (timeline here) and has released a short video to mark this milestone. Learn more about the FSFE’s campaigning work over the years.
Stephen Hilton, Futures Director at Bristol City Council and an old friend of Bristol Wireless, is moving on from the Counts Louse (as Bristolians still call the local authority’s HQ, now renamed City Hall. Ed.) to set up his own consultancy. Stephen announced his decision to the world earlier this week via LinkedIn, as shown […]
It’s been announced today that the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is joining the Advisory Board of The Document Foundation, the body behind the very successful free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite. At the same time, The Document Foundation is becoming an associate of the FSFE. The FSFE’s aim is to help people control […]
VMware is to be using some parts of the Linux kernel code in its ESXi hypervisor and will therefore be infringing the GPL. A kernel developer has brought an action against this. However, the Hamburg District Court is not dealing with the content of the action.
Two days ago, Tony Scott, the U.S. Chief Information Officer, wrote on the White House blog that the Federal government was releasing the Federal Source Code policy (PDF) to support improved access to custom-developed Federal source code. The policy, which incorporates feedback from the public, requires any new custom-developed source code developed specifically by or […]
Free software advocates from all over Europe will be meeting in Berlin from the 2nd to the 4th of September at the FSFE Summit 2016. Apart from working on furthering the adoption of free software in Europe, the event will also be celebrating the FSFE’s 15th anniversary. One of the main missions of the free […]
Residents of the Somerset villages and hamlets of Ashton, Badgworth and Stone and Chapel Allerton are currently enduring “broadband” speeds as low as 1 Mbps. The Weston Mercury reports that the villagers recently held a meeting to discuss the situation and discovered they were eligible to apply for a grant scheme to improve their connectivity. […]
Hackers have succeeded in retrieving part of the Ubuntu Forums database by exploiting a security flaw in the Forum Runner extension for vBulletin. Some 2 million user names and associated email and IP addresses were stolen, Le Monde Informatique reports, although the attackers failed to obtain users’ passwords. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, announced […]
Thanks to a partnership between Nextcloud and Collabora there is now a great solution for self-hosting Online Office. Nextcloud has worked with Collabora to provide an easy-to-use Online Office solution for the first time for home users which is easily integrated into Nextcloud. At the same time, Nextcloud and Collabora have announced the of enterprise […]
The Advocate General of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled that bulk data collection in the UK – as enabled under the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (Dripa) 2014 is illegal, except in the fight against serious crime, yesterday’s Guardian reports. The case had been brought by Labour deputy leader Tom Watson […]
First the good news. Yesterday’s Sentinel reports that the north Staffordshire villages of Talke (home of Reginald Mitchell, creator of the Spitfire. Ed.) and Talke Pits will be amongst the next 30 communities to benefit from 200 Mbps ultrafast broadband as part of Virgin Media’s £3 bn. network expansion in the UK. Commenting on the […]
Some 2,000 homes and businesses in South Gloucestershire are set to benefit from an investment of £1.49 mn. in so-called “superfast” broadband up to 2017. The South Gloucestershire villages are likely to benefit from this cash injection include Tytherington, Dyrham, Hinton, Littleton-upon-Severn, Oldbury-on-Severn, Cromhall, Elberton, Codrington and Little Sodbury, although surveys will need to be […]
German company ownCloud GmbH is receiving new money and taking over the business of ownCloud Inc. in the USA, German IT news site heise reports. In addition, there will also be management changes due to the financing deal. A group of investors featuring the Frankfurt-based entrepreneur Tobias Gerlinger will be providing ownCloud GmbH with “growth […]
Telford & Wrekin Council’s cabinet is set to approve a scheme to apply for European funding to provide better broadband for business, today’s Shropshire Star reports. If the bid is successful, the funding will be used to give eligible businesses grants for fibre optic broadband through the Marches Broadband Grant project. Telford & Wrekin Council […]
Broadband network providers are expected to bid for six contracts worth a total of £39.5 mn. to improve broadband connections in Somerset and Devon, yesterday’s Somerset Live (formerly the Western Daily Press. Ed.) reports. The investment will provide broadband services between 30 Mbps (sometimes termed “superfast”) and “ultrafast” 100 Mbps to customers, mostly to rural […]
Yesterday Inria, the French National Institute for computer science and applied mathematics, announced (French press release. Ed.) the launch of Software Heritage, an initiative collect, organise, preserve and make easily accessible the source code of all software that is publicly available. Sending messages to family and friends, paying bills, purchasing goods, accessing entertainment, interacting with […]
The largest CiviCRM meet-up in Europe will be taking place in London on 6th and 7th October 2016. This year’s CiviCon promises to be packed with great presentations, interactive workshops, expert speakers and panels that highlight people putting CiviCRM, the leading open source CRM software for the voluntary and community sector, to use within their […]