News from around the world
At the end of last week, The Document Foundation blog announced the call for papers for the 2013 LibreOffice Conference, which will be held from 25th to 27th September at the Department of Computer Science of Milan State University in Italy. The Document Foundation is inviting members and volunteers to submit proposals for papers and […]
Following recent revelations about massive extent of telecommunications and internet traffic surveillance carried on by the USA’s NSA and the UK’s GCHQ (news passim), revelations have now emerged in Le Monde, one of France’s leading national newspapers. In a post today entitled “Revelations about the French Big Brother”, Le Monde reveals that France has a […]
A study of emails carried out between 1st and 30th June 2013 and covering 200,000 mail accounts generating 8.5 mn. emails a day has revealed that over 80% of email traffic is spam and only 9% is legitimate traffic, according to today’s Le Monde Informatique. The study’s authors – email security specialists Vade Retro – […]
The Senate and the National Assembly, the two houses of the French parliament, have agreed to make free software a priority for education, according to Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news website. This Wednesday last the National Assembly confirmed a proposal by the Senate urging higher education institutions to give preference to free […]
Le Monde Informatique reports that the Mozilla Foundation has published a shoot ’em up game – BananaBread – to demonstrate the capabilities of its Javascript libraries. If it works in Mozilla’s Firefox browser, all Javascript-compatible browsers are affected by these developments. No plug-in needs to be downloaded since everything is implemented in the browser. The […]
As an organisation, Bristol Wireless has been closely involved in campaigning against the UK government’s plans for mass communications surveillance under the Communications Data Bill, also known as the “Snooper’s Charter” by its opponents (news passim). It now appears that all this work might have been in vain. Amongst the revelations that have come to […]
In the midst of all the recent revelations about the US National Security Agency’s Prism surveillance programme and GCHQ’s Tempora snooping on telecommunications and internet traffic, comes a small but welcome bit of good news. the Sydney Morning Herald reports that a controversial Australian government data retention scheme that would have required Australians’ internet and […]
With the migration from MS Office to LibreOffice, public sector organisations in Italy’s mostly German-speaking South Tyrol region are making their first major steps towards using freien software. Over the coming 3 years, will convert 7,000 PC workstations and thus save some €600,000 in licensing fees. Free software gained entry to Italian public sector organisations […]
Yesterday, in the final stage of the EU approval process, the European Parliament formally adopted updated EU rules on the re-use of public sector information. The Council of Ministers had already agreed to the new rules at last week’s Telecoms Council. European Commission Vice-President Neelie Kroes said: “Today we can celebrate our efforts to bring […]
French computing news site Le Monde Informatique reports that online tat merchants eBay will be organising a tour of French beaches from 22nd July to 17th August 2013, during which holidaymakers will be able to benefit from free wifi, as well as a space dedicated to this well-known auction site. On each of the tour […]
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) reports that on 7th June the German Parliament (Bundestag) passed a joint motion to limit software patents (PDF, German). The Bundestag is urging the German Government to take steps to limit the granting of patents on computer programs. Software should be covered exclusively by copyright and the rights of […]
The Guardian reports exclusively today that Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo! and Twitter have dismissed the UK government’s Communications Data Bill (aka the Snooper’s Charter. Ed.) and its plans to track the email, internet and social media of everyone in the UK as “expensive to implement and highly contentious”. The revelation comes from a letter dated […]
On Wednesday this week the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a formal objection to the inclusion of digital rights management (DRM) in HTML5, arguing that a draft proposal from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) could stymie Web innovation and block access to content for people across the globe. The W3C’s HTML working group is […]
Some time ago we drew attention to the possible eavesdropping problems in using Skype, which is now owned by Microsoft (news passim). This has now been confirmed by German technology news website, Heise. Anyone who uses Skype, has agreed that Skype may also read too. Heise Security has found out that Microsoft actually avails itself […]
Laptops for crew use on the International Space Station (ISS) are being migrated from Windows to Linux, the Linux Foundation reports. The reason for the migration, given by Keith Chuvala of United Space Alliance, a NASA contractor deeply involved in Space Shuttle and ISS operations was as follows: We migrated key functions from Windows to […]
The W3C, the organisation responsible for web standards (which have so far been open standards. Ed.), has taken a step away from openness now that the HTML Working Group has announced their decision to release a First Public Working Draft of the Encrypted Media Extension (EME) specification and a statement has also been released by […]
Wikimedia Commons is a great resource: nearly 17 mn. freely usable media files that anyone can use for any purpose and to which anyone can contribute too! Contributing to Wikimedia Commons is also getting easier: it’s now possible to transfer images to the Commons database from an Android or iOS smartphone using a free and […]
On 27th April the administrative court of Almada, Portugal, declared a €550,000 contract between Microsoft and the Municipality of Almada to be illegal. The technical specifications of the competition launched by the municipality prevented any company other than Microsoft and their partners from submitting a bid. This ruling is especially significant as it clarifies that […]
In honour of the 20th anniversary of the release of libwww into the public domain (news passim), CERN has resurrected the first ever website at http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html As screenshot of the front page of this historic site is shown below, as seen by the text-based lynx web browser. This very first website at CERN – and […]
The H Online reminds us that 20 years ago CERN in Geneva gave Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau official permission to release the libwww library free of charge, according to Berners-Lee, “to create a server or a browser, to give it away or sell it, without any royalty or other constraint”. Since then this act […]