Chief scribe
The LibreOffice project has been offered a project weekend from Friday 22nd March to Sunday 24th March at Dresden Technical University which will focus specifically on Impress, LibreOffice’s presentation tool (an open source alternative to death by PowerPoint. Ed.). The main aims of the weekend will be to: get into the code that is on […]
Today event registration opens for Document Freedom Day 2013 which will be held on Wednesday, 27th March. Local event teams can add details of their activities to the Document Freedom website and have them marked on the global campaign map. Last week 50 promotional packs were dispatched to hackerspaces to kick start event preparations. They […]
A couple of dates for your diaries, readers: 16th and 17th March 2013. On those dates env[:hack] will be taking place all day in Bristol. According to the blurb, env[:hack] is a Hack Day organised by the Environment Agency with help from Geeks of London and the Ordnance Survey. The Agency will be bringing together […]
An Open Data Insitute blog post of the first ever survey* into civil servants’ awareness of open data reveals an astonishing level of ignorance. Among the survey’s main findings were the following: 78% of civil servants do not know about government plans for open data and the benefits that follow; 75% say they don’t know […]
If you run a Linux system using the RPM-based package management system, you might like to give your system a security check following news from the Internet Storm Center (ISC) of a SSHD rootkit affecting such distributions. To quote from the ISC article: The rootkit is actually a trojanized library that links with SSHD and […]
Bristol Mayor George Ferguson would appear to favour getting as much as Bristol online if we read the tweet below correctly. You’re right @samdownie. Must see how we can get #Bristol on-line as possible – with increased computer literacy training via job clubs etc. — George Ferguson (@GeorgeFergusonx) February 23, 2013 As can be seen […]
Many groups of research scientists around the world are trying to build a quantum computer to run algorithms that take advantage of the strange effects of quantum mechanics such as entanglement and superposition. A quantum computer could solve problems in chemistry by simulating many body quantum systems, or break modern cryptographic schemes by quickly factorising […]
The email below has been received from CiviCRMInfo for a meet-up in London next week. The venue is Gamesys, 10 Piccadilly, 4th Floor Reception, London, W1J 0DD (map) and the event will be held on Wednesday 27th February from 6.00 pm to 8.30 pm. Hi UK CiviCRM folks, I thought you might be interested in […]
Richard Stallman, aka rms, the Founder and President of the Free Software Foundation, will be giving at talk entitled “Copyright vs Community” at 6.00 pm on Thursday 21st March at the University of Bath as part of this year’s Bath Digital Festival. Admission is free, but booking is essential. More details are available on the […]
The use of the term Python for free and open source software is at risk in the EU due to a Community trade mark application by a UK company, as is explained in the post below from the Python Software Foundation News blog. There is a company in the UK that is trying to trademark […]
The City of Munich has responded on its IT blog to a report commissioned from HP by Microsoft alleging that migrating to open source had cost the city millions of Euro more than opting for proprietary software. The following paragraphs are a translation of the relevant blog post. The City has only had a short […]
From France’s Gendarmerie Nationale (news passim) to an Irishman with 6 machines, using free and open source operating systems and software is saving businesses of all sizes money. The Irishman appears in a report in today’s Meath Chronicle of how an 11 year-old boy saved him €3,000. Sean Mullen’s 3 laptops and 3 desktop computers […]
The BBC website posted an article today highlighting the concerns expressed in a report by the National Audit Office (NAO) that a lack of skilled workers is hampering the UK’s fight against cyber crime and that it could take up to 2 decades to fill the skills gap. The internet economy in the UK accounts […]
The whiff of romance is in the air as restaurants, the cards business and florist gird their loins for Valentine’s Day on February 14th. The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is asking all free software romantics to do something different on Valentine’s Day: use the day as an opportunity to say “thank you” to one […]
One of the major developments of recent years has been the growth in mobile internet-capable devices and a new mobile traffic forecast update by Cisco now predicts that the human population of planet Earth will be outnumbered by internet-connected mobile devices – smartphones, laptops and tablets – by the end of the current year. That […]
Online tech news website The H reports that the developers of LibreOffice, whose version 4.0 is due for release within days (posts passim), are also planning to release the “Impress Android Remote” application that will enable the office suite’s presentations to be controlled from Android smartphones. Communication between the phone and the presentation rendering system […]
“What has the EU ever done for us?” is a popular question raised by the right-wing print media in the UK. Well, in addition to the exhaustive list supplied by Simon Sweeney of the University of York in a recent letter to The Guardian, the EU has in recent years developed the EUPL – European […]
Over the years, MySociety, an e-democracy project of the charity UK Citizens Online Democracy, whose aim is to build “socially focused tools with offline impacts”, has designed some great online tools. By way of an example, these include: TheyWorkForYou to enable electors to track the work of their constituency MPs; WriteToThem to help electors write […]
After a delay of 14 years since it was first released for proprietary operating systems, the first version of Half Life, one of the most popular and influential first person shooter games of recent times, has now been released for the Linux platform, according to Softpedia. Half Life is based on a heavily modified Quake […]
While the UK government is content with ensuring UK ‘broadband’ customers are guaranteed a modest 2 MB/s over their domestic connections, news arrives of blistering data transmission rates being achieved in Germany. IT news site Heise Online reports today that the Chinese network technology group Huawei and the ISP Vodafone have been able to transmit […]