The Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organisation that exists to support and collectively lead the open source Mozilla project (the purveyors of the Firefox web browser. Ed.), is supporting a series of open source projects to the tune of US $0.5 mn., German IT news site heise reports. The Mozilla Foundation announced a promotional programme for […]
Bristol boffins have developed a pair of socks embedded with miniaturised microbial fuel cells (MFCs) and fuelled with urine pumped by the wearer’s footsteps that have powered a wireless transmitter to send a signal to a PC. This is the first self-sufficient system powered by a wearable energy generator based on microbial fuel cell technology, […]
Linux distribution bug reports are not a place one expects to find stuff to make one smile: they’re normally places where the faults and failings of software are described in normally boring detail. However, today proved an exception to the rule, courtesy of one filed a short while ago for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, codenamed “Trusty […]
GUADEC – the GNOME User and Developer European Conference – 2016 will be held in Karlsruhe in Germany, the GNOME Foundation has announced. GUADEC brings together hundreds of users and developers every year to further the GNOME project. It is anticipated that GUADEC 2016 will take place around July-August and the definitive dates will be […]
It’s that time of year again when summer daylight saving time has just ended in Europe and the developers of the NTP time synchronisation service are responding to a series of new attacks with an update, German IT news site heise reports. With these attacks communication between servers and clients can be manipulated so that […]
Earlier this week academics from the University of Bristol presented new breakthroughs on two fundamental problems in computer science. These results were presented at the 56th annual IEEE symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2015) in California earlier this week, the University reports. One of the most challenging questions in computer science is whether […]
Writing on The Document Foundation blog, Italo Vignoli has announced that a bug hunting session will take place from 30th October to 1st November for LibreOffice 5.1, the next planned major release of this popular open source office productivity suite. Over those 3 days, volunteers and members of the LibreOffice community will check the first […]
UWE’s press office reports that the university is hosting a training camp designed for students interested in careers in cyber security. The camp, which takes place from 10-12th October, offers an opportunity to learn about cyber defence from experienced professionals. Around 40 candidates will spend three days living on site where they will get an […]
A new generation of digital devices that will protect consumers from cyber-attacks could be a step closer thanks to a grant of over £1 million from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) awarded to the University of Bristol for a research project to protect consumers’ sensitive data.
The weekend just gone saw another anniversary that ought not be forgotten: the Free Software Foundation (FSF) passed the 30 years milestone. German IT news website heise reports that the FSF was founded by Richard Stallman (aka rms. Ed.) on 4th October 1985. At that time the organisation’s goal was fully consistent with the then […]
Although Linus Torvalds, the originator of the Linux kernel, announced his initial work on the kernel on 25th August 1991, it was not until 5th October 1991 that Linus actually released his code: Linux kernel 0.01. With this October anniversary in mind, it’s worth taking a bit of time to review what’s changed to the […]
Last weekend saw the staging of BarnCamp 2015 (in which Bristol Wireless’ volunteers have been involved since its inception. Ed.). Running from Friday 19th June to Sunday 21st, BarnCamp was as usual a low-cost rural DIY skillsharing event open to everyone, including UK activists, campaigners, people involved in social and community groups and anybody else […]
Like a boomerang curry, the Snoopers’ Charter (news passim) is back – and with a vengeance this time. Wired UK reports that this morning’s Queen’s Speech setting out the government’s legislative programme for the next year. In her speech in the House of Lords, the Queen said new legislation would “modernise the law on communications […]
Safecast is a global project to map radiation data from around the world and release this information openly. When the project had just started, they used modified hardware, together with their own custom software and a few clever tweaks, to allow anyone to participate in the project. This kind of ingenuity, the ability to re-purpose […]
An app designed by Computer Science students at the University of Bristol has won a top prize, University Business reports today. The European Space Agency App Camp was held in Barcelona from 25th February to 4th March, attracting more than 170 participants from 30 countries. The camp’s purpose was to find innovative ways to use […]
Bristol University reports that one of its students is co-author on a paper to be presented at The Theory of Cryptography Conference (TCC-2015), one of the world’s top cryptography conferences being held in Warsaw this week between 23rd and 25th March. Sophie Stevens, a mathematics undergraduate, is co-author on the paper “Key-Homomorphic Constrained Pseudorandom Functions” […]
Readers of more mature years will remember the BBC Micro, which was launched in the early 1980s. It was originally designed and built by the Acorn Computer company for the BBC’s then Computer Literacy Project. This machine is reputed to have inspired many of the UK’s leading programmers and games developers. News now arrives via […]
A group of developers has developed a DIY laptop kit, heise reports. All components can be assembled in a way that’s friendly for beginners and without soldering. With the Pi-Top you’ll be learning DIY both for hardware and software. Jesse Lonzano and Ryan Dunwoody had the idea of developing the Raspberry Pi-based Pi-Top DIY laptop […]
Ada Lovelace Day, that annual celebration of women in science, technology, engineering and medicine, may be gone for another year (news passim), but that doesn’t mean it’s forgotten. Earlier today local news site Bristol 24/7 carried a comment piece by Ujima Radio presenter Cheryl Morgan entitled “Women deserve to be part of the IT crowd“. […]
Tomorrow, 14th October, is Ada Lovelace Day, an annual an international celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths. As part of the celebrations, Bristol University is organising a free public lecture focussing on Ada Lovelace’s life and pioneering work. Ada Lovelace – the first programmer’ by Professor Philipp Welch from […]