Category Archives: Open Source News
Bristol Wireless is pleased to announce that funding has been secured for 2 years to keep the network running courtesy of the University of the West of England (UWE) and High Tech Bristol & Bath CIC. The funding will be used to ensure the Bristol Wireless volunteers can continue to operate the network – including […]
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 […]
Bristol Wireless member Nigel Legg writes: The focus of the fourth Bristol & Bath IoT meetup on Monday 21st November was security – making your things secure. There have been some DDoS attacks that used insecure internet-connected consumer goods to create botnets, and Carl Shaw from Cerberus Security Labs talked us through a process to […]
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 […]
MTL Group company NfP Services are hosting a free CiviCRM seminar at their offices at 340 Gray’s Inn Road London, WC1X 8BG (map). The seminar will also include refreshments and lunch and will run from 10.00 a.m. to 1.30 p.m. During this session the organisers will be demonstrating CiviCRM’s amazing functionality and flexibility and explaining […]
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 […]
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 […]
German IT news website heise and our old friends The Register are joint sponsors of the Building IoT London event to be held in March 2017. The former reported at the end of last week that software developers doing professional work on the Internet of Things have until 7th October to suggest proposals for presentations […]
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 […]
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 […]
Billed as “Europe’s biggest event for the leading third sector CRM“, it’s now less than a month until CiviCRM’s Civicon 2016 in London, which is being held on 6th and 7th October. CiviCRM is the leading open source CRM for the voluntary and community sectors. CiviCon is now in its sixth year and the event […]
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 […]
This afternoon, our members Nigel Legg and Benedict Gaster turned up at the lab with the piece of hardware shown below that’s going to be tested on the Bristol Wireless network. It’s an IoT gateway configured under LoRaWAN, a Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) specification, that’s fully open source. Not only is it open […]
Yesterday the Labour Party’s digital democracy manifesto (PDF) was launched by embattled party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, The Register reports. For ordinary citizens perhaps the most significant feature is its universal service commitment. We will deliver high speed broadband and mobile connectivity for every household, company and organisation in Britain from the inner city neighbourhoods to […]
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 fair bit going on in Bristol at the moment as regards the Internet of Things (IoT) and these were reported on earlier this week by Nigel Legg, under the headline “Smart City done Smarter?“. Nigel’s post is reproduced in full below with his kind permission (with a couple of links added. Ed.). My […]