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Slow progress to superfast broadband

The small village of Adderley sits just inside north Shropshire, barely a mile from the Cheshire border. Nothing has really changed there for years (the chief scribe grew up nearby. Ed.). And for the last 6 years, residents have been frustrated by slow local broadband speeds. However, there’s now been one major change. Saturday’s Shropshire […]

More on open standards at Bristol City Council

The Secretary has just blogged again about Bristol City Council and open standards on account of fresh information that came to light over the weekend. It is reproduced verbatim below: Following the post on Friday on Bristol City Council‘s response to my open standards FoI request (posts passim), more information has come to light. It […]

Open standards at Bristol City Council

Bristol Wireless’ secretary has just published the post below on his blog concerning his recent Freedom of Information Act request to Bristol City Council on the local authority’s use of open standards: A response has been received today to my FoI request to Bristol City Council on open standards (posts passim). The reply was received […]

City of Light makes enlightened move

The City of Paris has become a member of April, the leading French free and open source advocacy organisation. Making the announcement, April reported that the council wants to intensify its commitment in favour of free and open source. Following a resolution in December 2014 from the council’s Green group and subsequent negotiations conducted by […]

Somerset villages to get satellite internet connection

Luxembourg-based satellite operator SES has announced that its Astra Connect for Communities solution will be used in a UK government-funded market test pilot (MTP) project to assess which technologies and commercial models are best suited to provide superfast broadband (download speeds of at least 24 Mbps. Ed.) to the final 5% of UK households that […]

Auntie to give away 1 mn. ‘Micro Bit’ computers

Readers of more mature years will remember the BBC Micro, which was launched in the early 1980s. It was originally designed and built by the Acorn Computer company for the BBC’s then Computer Literacy Project. This machine is reputed to have inspired many of the UK’s leading programmers and games developers. News now arrives via […]

GnuPG can now employ second developer

GnuPG, the most important free encryption program, will in future be developed by two paid employees, German IT news site heise reports. After a flood of donations he has been able to employ a second developer, programmer Werner Koch stated in a blog post. “The financial crisis of The GnuPG Project is over”, he wrote. […]

Wikimedia Foundation takes NSA to court

The Wikimedia blog reports that yesterday the Wikimedia Foundation filed suit against the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the Department of Justice (DOJ). The lawsuit challenges the NSA’s mass surveillance programme and more specifically its large-scale search and seizure of internet communications — frequently referred to as “upstream” surveillance. The Foundation’s aim in filing […]

Free wifi on trains from 2017?

At Prime Minister’s questions today, David Cameron (he’s a prime minister impersonator, isn’t he? Ed. 😉 ) informed MPs that the ability to access wifi was vital for rail travellers and promised investment of £50mn. to provide more wifi on the railway from 2017, today’s Western Daily Press reports. The investment in wifi the PM […]

Bristol Is Open approved by city council

Bristol Is Open, the collaborative high-performance, high-speed networking project between Bristol City Council and the University of Bristol (news passim), received unanimous approval from the council’s cabinet earlier this week, the University reports. Bristol Is Open will manage the Open Programmable City project, a city-scale research infrastructure using fibre optic and wireless connectivity and high […]

France: internet connection available on trains by end of 2016

Libération reports that the entire French railway network will be connected to the internet between now and the end of 2016, according to French train operator SNCF, alluding to forthcoming works to be conducted with mobile operators and Arcep, the French telecommunications regulator. “We shall work in full cooperation with the operators and what we […]

‘Superfast’ broadband arrives in parts of Staffordshire

Today’s Stoke Sentinel reports that faster internet speeds can be expected today in parts of Staffordshire. However, the Sentinel’s piece does not mention any expected connection speeds. 🙁 The localities concerned are parts of Kidsgrove, Werrington, Stone and Blackshaw Moor, which have been connected to the fibre network following a link-up between Staffordshire County Council […]

Successful crowdfunding secures GnuPG’s future

When it comes to encryption, GnuPG is the de facto standard implementation of the PGP standard. Any private individual currently encrypting their emails is almost always using a software package that has GnuPG under its bonnet. Since the middle of December GnuPG’s main developer has been collecting donations to enable financing of his work on […]

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 […]

City Council and Bristol Uni to develop high-performance, high-speed network

The first joint venture between Bristol City Council and the University of Bristol has been announced (press release). In a move to combine University research and advanced technology with council owned infrastructure, the company will develop an innovative high-performance, high-speed network in Bristol. The company, known as Bristol Is Open, will be established by the […]

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 […]

The City of Munich joins The Document Foundation Advisory Board

It’s been announced that the City of Munich has joined the Advisory Board of The Document Foundation (TDF) the non-profit foundation steering the development of LibreOffice, the leading free and open source office productivity suite. On the TDF’s Advisory Board, Munich’s city council will be represented by Florian Haftmann. Back in 2003, the city of […]

Introducing the Tegra K1 Linux mini PC

Liliputing reports that leading Hong Kong electronics manufacturer PC Partner has introduced a small form-factor computer with a fanless case that measures 5″ x 5″ x 1.8″. Its model number is the N2581N1-F and it is powered by NVIDIA’s Tegra K1 quad-core processor with 192-core Kepler graphics. It’s currently on sale in Japan and may […]

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 […]

FSF releases User Liberation video

Most people interact with free software every day, but many of those people don’t know what free software is or why they should go out of their way to use it. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) wants to remedy that so it commissioned a short video that makes free software easy for everyone to understand. […]