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Category Archives: International IT News

News from around the world

China’s Inspur forms partnership with Red Hat

A strategic deal has been announced between Chinese technology manufacturer Inspur and the open sourcerers of Red Hat to combine the latter’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 operating system with Inspur’s x86 platform products, according to the China Tech News website. Inspur and Red Hat will become OEM partners under the agreement. As the first […]

Quantum computing comes a step closer

A new way to run a quantum algorithm using much simpler methods than previously thought has been discovered by a team of researchers at the University of Bristol, according to a university press release. These findings could dramatically bring forward the development of a ‘quantum computer’ capable of beating a conventional computer. Theories show how […]

Less than a week to SFD 2014

It’s under a week to Software Freedom Day (SFD) 2014, which is being held this year on Saturday, 20th September. SFD is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). The organisers’ goal in this celebration is to educate the public all over the world about the benefits of using high quality FOSS […]

Welcome LibreItalia!

Earlier today the foundation was announced of LibreItalia, which has been founded by Italian members of The Document Foundation and has the objective of bringing together all the Italian users of the free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite to speed up the adoption and promotion of the suite that is meant to be a […]

China to launch a sovereign OS to counter Windows

According to the official Xinhua news agency, China is hoping to launch a sovereign operating system in October in order to “wean” itself off operating systems developed abroad such as Windows, Le Monde Informatique reports. The Chinese OS, which still has no official name according to Xinhua, will be offered initially for desktop PCs, before […]

Netherlands: PSV Eindhoven introduces wifi at stadium; fans protest

PSV Eindhoven supporters launched a vehement protest against the introduction of wifi at the their Philips Stadion ground during their side’s 6-1 home victory over NAC Breda in their opening game of the season, according to today’s Guardian. Fans displayed one banner reading: “F*ck Wi-Fi, support the team”. Placards with crosses running through the wifi […]

LibreOffice 4.3 ready for download

Via its blog, The Document Foundation has announced the release of LibreOffice 4.3; this is the 8th major release of the free and open source office suite since the birth of the project in September 2010. LibreOffice 4.3 offers a large number of improvements and new features, including: Document interoperability: support for MS’ OOXML Strict, […]

Congratulations from FSF to UK government

Writing yesterday on the Free Software Foundation (FSF) blog, Libby Reinish states that UK citizens will soon be able to fill out government paperwork with their freedoms intact. The British government announced last week (news passim) that Open Document Format (ODF), HTML and PDF will be the official file formats used by all government agencies. […]

goTenna, the personal antenna which takes over in network outages

A New York-based start-up has produced a portable antenna which can take over communications networks in the event of mobile services outages. The device, which is connected to by Bluetooth Low Energy to a smartphone, enables encrypted messages to be exchanged over distances from 1 to 80 kilometres.

Companies House takes open data route

Yesterday, while David Cameron was rearranging his Cabinet, one significant piece of news (apart from the DRIP Bill. Ed.) seems to have escaped the personality-obsessed British media. The news was the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills announced that Companies House is to make all of its digital data available free of charge. It has […]

EU Commission: we support vendor lock-in

The European Commission has recently renewed its commitment to a proprietary desktop and secret file formats, the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) writes. The Commission is refusing to make a serious effort to break free from vendor lock-in and is ignoring all available alternatives. In doing so, the EU’s civil service fails to practice what […]

FSF condemns partnership between Mozilla and Adobe to support DRM

In response to Mozilla’s announcement that it is reluctantly adopting DRM in its Firefox Web browser, Free Software Foundation executive director John Sullivan made the following statement: “Only a week after the International Day Against DRM, Mozilla has announced that it will partner with proprietary software company Adobe to implement support for Web-based Digital Restrictions […]

Computing to get slimy?

Were you aware that Bristol’s University of the West of England (UWE) has a Professor of Unconventional Computing? Professor Andrew Adamatzky (for it is he! Ed.) and a German colleague have recently been engaged in some interesting research according to a UWE press release. Professor Andrew Adamatzky and Theresa Schubert (Bauhaus-University Weimar, Germany) have constructed […]

Happy DFD 2014

Today is Document Freedom Day (DFD) 2014. DFD is an annual celebration of and opportunity to promote the use of open formats and standards for digital documents and takes place on the last Wednesday in March each year. Document freedom means documents that are free can be used in any way that the author intends. […]

New round of Gnome OPW internships now accepting applications

The Gnome Outreach Program for Women (OPW) helps women get involved in free and open source software and has just announced the opening of a new round of internship applications. Women can apply for an internship to contribute to an open source project from May to August; and OPW is not just asking for applications […]

Open data site running on open source: Malta gets it right

Malta’s new open data website is running on open source software, according to Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news site. The site, which is run by the Maltese Local Councils Association, uses Centos Linux as its underlying operating system, the MySQL database management system, the Nginx web server and WordPress as its content […]

Online safety webchat with Avon & Somerset police

Today is Safer Internet Day, which is organised in February of each year to promote the safe and responsible use of online technology and mobile phones by children and young people. In conjunction with Safer Internet Day, Avon & Somerset Police are organising an online safety webchat tomorrow, 12th February, from 7.00 pm to 8.30 […]

German state charged with internet spying by Chaos Computer Club

Germany’s Chaos Computer Club (CCC) has filed a lawsuit against the German Federal government and other agencies in conjunction with human rights organisation the Liga für Menschenrechte e. V. (League for Human Rights). The government and its agencies are being charged with violating citizens’ personal lives by security services surveillance and toleration of such surveillance, […]