A study of emails carried out between 1st and 30th June 2013 and covering 200,000 mail accounts generating 8.5 mn. emails a day has revealed that over 80% of email traffic is spam and only 9% is legitimate traffic, according to today’s Le Monde Informatique. The study’s authors – email security specialists Vade Retro – […]
The Senate and the National Assembly, the two houses of the French parliament, have agreed to make free software a priority for education, according to Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news website. This Wednesday last the National Assembly confirmed a proposal by the Senate urging higher education institutions to give preference to free […]
Le Monde Informatique reports that the Mozilla Foundation has published a shoot ’em up game – BananaBread – to demonstrate the capabilities of its Javascript libraries. If it works in Mozilla’s Firefox browser, all Javascript-compatible browsers are affected by these developments. No plug-in needs to be downloaded since everything is implemented in the browser. The […]
With the migration from MS Office to LibreOffice, public sector organisations in Italy’s mostly German-speaking South Tyrol region are making their first major steps towards using freien software. Over the coming 3 years, will convert 7,000 PC workstations and thus save some €600,000 in licensing fees. Free software gained entry to Italian public sector organisations […]
On Wednesday this week the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a formal objection to the inclusion of digital rights management (DRM) in HTML5, arguing that a draft proposal from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) could stymie Web innovation and block access to content for people across the globe. The W3C’s HTML working group is […]
In honour of the 20th anniversary of the release of libwww into the public domain (news passim), CERN has resurrected the first ever website at http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html As screenshot of the front page of this historic site is shown below, as seen by the text-based lynx web browser. This very first website at CERN – and […]
The H Online reminds us that 20 years ago CERN in Geneva gave Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau official permission to release the libwww library free of charge, according to Berners-Lee, “to create a server or a browser, to give it away or sell it, without any royalty or other constraint”. Since then this act […]
As reported yesterday, Bristol Wireless is a signatory of the letter below that was submitted to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) on 24th April 2013 (news passim). Dear Sir Berners-Lee [sic], We write to implore the World Wide Web Consortium and its member organizations to reject the Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) proposal. As prominent […]
Germany’s Bundestag (Parliament) has adopted a joint motion against software patents, urging the German government to take steps to limit the granting of patents on computer programs. In the resolution (German, PDF), the Parliament says software patents restrict developers from exercising their copyright privileges, including the right to distribute their programs as free software. Patents […]
Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news website, reports that the Croatian government is establishing open source and open standards working group. The working group will provide advice to government ministries and other public sector organisations wishing to adopt open source software and open file formats. The group will offer guidance for the procurement […]
According to its website, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community where its member organisations, a full-time staff and the public work together to develop web standards, whose mission is to lead the Web to its full potential. These standards have so far been characterised by complete openness: all web standards are […]
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) have awarded this year’s Document Freedom Germany Award to German newspaper taz.die tageszeitung (TAZ) in recognition of TAZ’s exemplary use of open standards. TAZ is receiving the Document Freedom award because it delivers its electronic paper to its subscribers in […]
Here’s something that’s bound to appeal to our friends at Bristol Hackspace and Dorkbot Bristol: 20th April has been announced as the date for Hardware Freedom Day 2013. Hardware Freedom Day (HFD) is an annual celebration of Open Hardware. Open Hardware Day was initiated in 2012 by the Digital Freedom Foundation, the organisation responsible for […]
A group of technology activists gathered in front of the Cabinet office in Cairo on Sunday 30th December to protest an Egyptian governmental deal with software giant Microsoft to buy software for the public sector, the English language Egypt Independent news site reports. On 26 December, the official Facebook page of Hesham Qandil, the Egyptian […]
Courtesy of a news report today on governmental lists of open source alternatives to proprietary software on EU public sector open source news website Joinup, the chief scribe duly downloaded and read the Open Source Software Options for Government publication (pdf), which forms the basis for a Joinup case study. A quick glance through the […]
Regular readers will be aware that Bristol Wireless is deeply concerned about the implications of the Government’s proposed Communications Data Bill (news passim). Yesterday the secretary (aka the chief scribe. Ed.) has had the article below posted on local news website on Bristol24/7. In June of this year, the Government published its draft Communications Data […]
Today the Free Software Federation Europe (FSFE) reports that the European Parliament has adopted a proposal to create a patent with unitary effect for Europe (posts passim). This decision will leave Europe with a patent system that is both deeply flawed and prone to overreach. It also ends democratic control of Europe’s innovation policy. “We […]
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) reports that the European Parliament is about to vote on a “unitary patent” for Europe in its plenary session on 11th December. The proposal currently on the table is widely acknowledged to have serious legal and practical problems. In the light of these problems, Free Software Foundation Europe is […]
The Document Foundation has announced the release of LibreOffice 3.6.4 for Linux and other popular operating systems. LibreOffice is the main office suite that comes bundled with most major Linux distributions. According to the Foundation, this new release of the free and open source office suite is another step forward in the process of improving […]
Yesterday evening the chief scribe attended the launch of Accessible Bristol down at Bristol’s City Hall (formerly the Counts Louse). Accessible Bristol’s aim is “bringing together digital and strategic knowledge to champion inclusion in Bristol and the South West”. We were welcomed to the event Stephen Hilton, the council’s Director of Futures (the man with […]