News from around the world
Cryptography is vital today to protect information online and keep it secure, whether that’s for ordinary folks doing online banking and shopping or for commercial organisations and governments wishing to keep commercial and state secrets confidential. However, the advent of powerful quantum computers might leave such information vulnerable to attack. To counter such a threat […]
Germany’s Federal Government wants to make administrative data accessible as the “raw material of the future” and has published a draft for an open data law. Unprocessed electronically stored data from federal authorities should be made available to the public free of charge, transparently and in a machine-readable format. The Federal Cabinet also wants to […]
A Raspberry Pi is a low-priced base for IoT projects. However, with these computers attackers also find systems that are easy to capture for botnets. An update for Raspbian should make attacks more difficult in future.
Russian security software company Kaspersky has announced the development of a secure operating system. Installed on a network switch, this K-OS has been designed from scratch without borrowing from Linux, yesterday’s Le Monde Informatique reports In security as doubtless elsewhere we are never better looked after than by ourselves. That’s what Kaspersky must be thinking […]
Russia’s legislators have drafted a bill (PDF – in Russian) that will boost free software on many levels within the country’s public sector. The draft, approved by the Duma (lower house of parliament) in mid-October, requires the public sector to prioritise free software over proprietary alternatives, gives priority to local IT businesses offering free software […]
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) has announced that Alessandro Rubini has stepped down as Vice-president of the FSFE. Alessandro, an electronic engineer with Ph. D. in a computer science, brought invaluable insight to the internal discussions within the FSFE and has worked tirelessly to push the Free Software envelope in Italy and the rest […]
French railway company SNCF has announced that free and unlimited wifi is available at 180 French railway stations and deployment is currently underway at stations in the Ile-de-France region. Wifi access is available in station passenger buildings; this excludes platforms, subways and station forecourts). It will also be available at underground stations in the Ile-de-France […]
Today Collabora announced that Pydio 7, the latest release of the popular open source synchronisation & sharing platform, includes LibreOffice Online functionality created by Collabora Productivity. Collabora Productivity is the driving force behind putting LibreOffice in the cloud, providing a range of products and consulting to enterprise and government. It’s a leading contributor to the […]
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 […]
A report (PDF) produced by Opendata France and sent to Axelle Lemaire, the Secretary of State for Digital Affairs and the Secretary of State for Local Authorities reveals that the use of open data in average size towns is still far from being widespread, today’s Le Monde Informatique reports. Bringing together the local authorities committed […]
A Bristol academic is to chair a major augmented reality conference, the University of Bristol reports. Professor Walterio Mayol-Cuevas of Bristol University’s Department of Computer Science is to chair the 2016 ISMAR conference, the most prominent academic conference on augmented and mixed reality, which is being held from 19th-23rd September in Mérida, Mexico. Augmented and […]
Next week, demonstrators will gather at a meeting of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in Lisbon, Portugal to make the same demand as was made at the last major W3C meeting in March: stop streaming companies from inserting DRM into the HTML standard on which the Web is based. The protest is being organised […]
As part of the strategy to create a single European digital market, the European Commission is preparing to invest €120 mn. to promote access to wireless connectivity in public places under the heading of Wifi4EU. According to Le Monde Informatique, this could see up to 6,000 publicly accessible wifi access points deployed, whilst the Commission’s […]
Speculation about the demise of Apache OpenOffice may be premature (news passim). German IT news site heise reports that a mailing list for new developers has been set up. By establishing this new list, the OpenOffice team wants to make entry to the open source project easier for programmers. After recent discussion of a possible […]
Pirate Party MEP Julia Reda ended this year’s QtCon, free software community conference with a keynote speech on, inter alia, free software in the European public sector. Ms Reda explained how proprietary software has often left regulators in the dark, becoming a liability for (and often a threat to) citizens’ health and well-being. As an […]
When your ‘umble scribe first started using the GNU/Linux operating system over a decade ago, the default office suite for most Linux distributions was OpenOffice. However, it now looks as if OpenOffice just could be heading towards the software graveyard if other members of the development team concur with an email from the chairman of […]
Web Africa reports that Uganda’s ICT Ministry has recently developed a free and open source software (FOSS) policy. The aim of the policy is to regulate the deployment of open source software and use of open standards to accelerate innovation and develop local content. Commenting on the use of FOSS, Frank Tumwebaze, Uganda’s Minister of […]
Twenty-five years ago today, 25th August, an unknown Finnish computer science student called Linus Torvalds wrote the following email to the comp.os.minix mailing list. Hello everybody out there using minix – I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing […]
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.