With about an hour to go before the shutters came down on Friday afternoon, Bristol Wireless responded to the Cabinet Office’s consultation on file formats for sharing and collaborating on documents with government. Our response is reproduced below. Background: we are a volunteer-run IT co-operative which has been active in the west of England for […]
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, […]
An international research group of scientists and engineers led by the University of Bristol has made an important advance towards a quantum computer by shrinking key components and integrating them into a microchip.
On Wednesday last week, the UK’s Government Digital Service (GDS) held an event called Sprint 14, in which it invited Ministers, civil servants, suppliers and the media along to showcase some major new digital public services for the first time. Among the speakers was Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude, who in his speech made some […]
Coming soon: the fair city of Manchester is holding its first Free Software festival between Monday 3rd February and Saturday, 8th February 2014. To quote from the FSFE Manchester website: We are delighted to announce that FSFE-mcr and friends will be running a whole week of Free Software fun in Manchester’s very first Free Software […]
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS proved to be the most secure product in a client operating system investigation by British security body Communications Electronics Security Group (CESG), which is part of GCHQ and provides assistance to government departments on their own communications security, according to a report today in Germany’s Linux-Magazin. The test field consisted of 11 […]
Today’s Bristol Post reports that First Great Western (FGW) will be offering free wifi on its services between Bristol and London within one year. Wifi provision on trains is part of the deal agreed with the government under which First will continue operating the Great Western franchise for an additional two years. All 53 of […]
So great is the grip of proprietary operating systems and software on the UK that open source success stories are hard to find. However, the UK isn’t a complete desert for open source. Last week Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news site, reported that hospitals in the UK and beyond are showing interest […]
Bath University’s press office reports that computing student Robin Lee single-handedly solved 9 out of 11 computing problems to win the first ever United Kingdom & Ireland Programming Contest (UKIEPC) held on Saturday 5th October. Robin, a final year Computer Science degree student, worked alone during the five-hour contest which saw 55 teams in five […]
After our last post, about our training course coming up in November, and with the scent of knowledge ringing in their nostrils, fiery fervorous enquiries have begun streaming in. ‘What are these courses?’ ‘What the actual contents?’ they ask. To sate this need for knowledge, we’ve decided to put out some basic details of the […]
This November Bristol Wireless is offering a week of training days in its lab at Windmill Hill City Farm, Bedminster, Bristol. One topic will be covered each day of the week of the 25-29 November and there are four places available for each topic. The course topic for each day is: Monday 25th November: Hosting […]
Wedged between the M4, M5 and M32 on the northern fringe of the Bristol built-up area, Bradley Stoke has never enjoyed an exactly wonderful reputation locally or even nationally. Started in 1987, the development got caught up in the fall-out from the bursting of the housing bubble in the early 1990s, leading to it being […]
Earlier this week the Prime Minister was making a lot of noise in the press and elsewhere about filtering the internet (under the dubious cover of protecting children. Ed.). His pronouncements have been met with almost universal condemnation from anyone with a bit of technical knowledge, as well as those concerned with online freedom, including […]
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 […]
The British National Archives announced last week that it has released version 2.0 of the Open Government Licence (OGL) following consultation on how the licence could be developed further to reflect new and emerging thinking on the licensing of public sector information. The OGL is an open licence allowing information to be used and re-used […]
The Bank of England recently announced that social and prison reformer Elizabeth Fry, who currently graces the English five pound note, is to be replaced by Sir Winston Churchill, leaving Elizabeth Windsor as the only woman shown on an English bank note – and that’s merely due to an accident of birth. Since the announcement, […]
Dr Martin Poulter, Senior Web Developer for Bristol University’s Economics Network and New Media Manager for the Children of the 90s project, has been appointed Jisc-Wikimedia Ambassador to facilitate a project to bring the academic world and Wikipedia closer together. Based at the University of Bristol, this joint project between UK education charity Jisc, which […]
Have you ever heard of Socmint? No? Neither had we until reading a report posted yesterday on Wired.co.uk. Socmint is an abbreviation of Social Media Intelligence and is a unit within the Metropolitan Police that has been conducting blanket surveillance of British citizens’ public social media conversations for the past 2 years. During this time […]
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 […]
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 […]