Show Sidebar Log in

Category Archives: Comment

Pound falls post Brexit, MS to up prices

Microsoft announced “important changes for customers buying enterprise software and cloud services in British pound [sic]” in a blog post yesterday. However, private individuals buying MS products will not be affected as these pricing changes will not apply to consumer software or consumer cloud services. Furthermore, these changes will not affect business customers existing orders […]

Labour commits to open source

Yesterday the Labour Party’s digital democracy manifesto (PDF) was launched by embattled party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, The Register reports. For ordinary citizens perhaps the most significant feature is its universal service commitment. We will deliver high speed broadband and mobile connectivity for every household, company and organisation in Britain from the inner city neighbourhoods to […]

Bristol IoT developments

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 […]

Latest version of Snoopers’ Charter before Parliament this week

This week the House of Commons is due to debate the Investigatory Powers Bill, the latest version of the Snoopers’ Charter (news passim), that will allow the United Kingdom’s police and services to regard the entire UK population as potential organised criminals, suspected terrorists and other assorted ne’er-do-wells and enable those same services to monitor […]

Free software is our Valentine

Tomorrow is 14th February. Most people know this as Saint Valentine’s Day, when traditionally florists are overworked, restaurants overcharge and a gentleman generally has his motives questioned should he happen to buy lingerie for his lady love. 😉 However, every year 14th February is also I Love Free Software Day. It’s the day when free […]

UK government still wants to have its encrypted cake and eat it

When the UK government started to prepare the ground for the latest version of the Snoopers’ Charter, the Investigatory Powers Bill, Prime Minister David Cameron was quite adamant that the government should be able to decipher encrypted material. According to The Guardian, the technologically ignorant PM is on record as saying: “In extremis, it has […]

Free wi-fi coming to Shrewsbury and Telford hospitals

Today’s Shropshire Star reports that free wi-fi will be provided at Shropshire’s two main hospitals – the Royal Shrewsbury in the county town and the Princess Royal Hospital in Telford. The overall scheme will cost some £400,000 with funding provided by the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust and Telford and Wrekin Clinical Commissioning Group. […]

OpenStack Debian image available

Debian developer Thomas Goirand has announced on his blog that a Debian disk image of the free and open source OpenStack cloud computing software platform is now available from cdimage.debian.org. Thomas writes: About a year and a half after I started writing the openstack-debian-images package, I’m very happy to announce to everyone that, thanks to […]

New FSFE stickers explain cloud computing, simply

As with all other fields of human activity, IT is not immune from fads and fashion. One of the recent fads has been for so-called cloud computing. Wikipedia describes cloud computing (often truncated to just the cloud. Ed.) as follows: Cloud computing is a recently evolved computing terminology or metaphor based on utility and consumption […]

Britain’s Superfast Broadband Future – pure fantasy?

In December 2010, 7 months after it assumed power, the UK’s coalition government issued a document (PDF) entitled Britain’s Superfast Broadband Future. In that document’s introduction, the then Culture Minister Jeremy Hunt and Minister for Culture Communications & the Creative Industries Ed Vaizey stated: Broadband is one of our top priorities. We took office earlier […]