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LibreOffice 5.0.2 announced at LibreOffice Conference

Steve Woods International Events, International IT News, Open Source News September 24, 2015 Comments Off

To underline the importance of the event for the community, The Document Foundation (TDF) yesterday announced the release of LibreOffice 5.0.2 during the opening session of the 2015 LibreOffice Conference in Aarhus, which runs until Friday 25th September.

LibreOffice 5.0.2 is the second minor release of the LibreOffice 5.0 family, with a large number of fixes over the first minor (5.0.1) release announced in August. Based on feedback from the marketplace, the LibreOffice 5.0 family has so far proved the most popular LibreOffice release ever.

LibreOffice 5 banner

LibreOffice 5.02 will offer OpenGL rendering by default on Windows for the first time for those with the very latest Windows drivers. In the event of problems, this functionality is easy to disable by accessing Tools > Options.

LibreOffice 5.0.2 is aimed at technology enthusiasts, early adopters and power users. For more conservative users and for enterprise deployments, TDF recommends the “still” version: LibreOffice 4.4.5. For commercial deployments, The Document Foundation recommends the backing of professional support by certified people.

People interested in technical details about the release can access the change logs via the following links: bugs fixed in RC1 and bugs fixed in RC2.

LibreOffice 5.0.2 is available for immediate download from http://www.libreoffice.org/download/.

Reposted from the author’s own blog.

Bristol Uni buys kit for 5G research

Steve Woods Local IT News, National IT News, Training September 24, 2015 Comments Off

Following closely on the announcement that the University of Bristol in a consortium to research 5G mobile wireless systems within the European 5G-XHaul project (news passim), the university reported yesterday that its 5G research has been given a boost thanks to a grant of £540,000 from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) for a state-of-the-art upgrade to Bristol’s wireless channel emulation facility.

training group photo — Anite training session group photo, courtesy of University of Bristol

Researchers and collaborators associated with Bristol University’s Communication Systems and Networks (CSN) Group now have a pair of Anite F8 channel emulators and duplexing filters to augment the test and measurement equipment in their laboratory. The funding, through an EPSRC equipment award, also included training event from Anite to ensure the equipment is used effectively.

The new hardware can be rapidly configured to support up to 16 independent streams with a bandwidth of 160MHz, thereby facilitating the testing and optimisation of the latest proposals for WiFi and long-term evolution (LTE) enhancements. What is unique about Bristol’s configuration is that the multiple channels can be ‘stacked’ in the frequency domain facilitating the test and optimisation of antenna array and beamforming techniques for millimetre wave wireless access technologies.

Professor Andrew Nix, Dean of Bristol’s Faculty of Engineering and the leader of the Bristol CSN Group, said: “Anite’s Propsim F8 channel emulators with enhanced bandwidth capability will open a new avenue in our 5G research projects, such as mmMAGIC and 5G-XHaul, part of the Horizon 2020 programme, as well as collaborative projects with industry.”

FSFE elects new top brass

Steve Woods International IT News, Open Source News September 22, 2015 Comments Off

Matthias Kirschner and Alessandro Rubini are the new President and Vice-President respectively of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). They were elected last week in Bucharest during FSFE’s General Assembly, while Reinhard Müller was re-elected as Financial Officer. They will serve FSFE in those capacities for the next 2 years.

Matthias Kirschner has been an FSFE employee since 2009. He started using GNU/Linux in 1999 and realised that software is deeply involved in all aspects of our lives. Matthias is convinced that this technology has to empower society rather than restrict it. While studying Political and Administrative Science, he convinced the FSFE to accept him as its first intern in 2004. Since then he has been helping other organisations, companies and governments to understand how they can benefit from Free Software and how those rights help to support freedom of speech, freedom of the press and privacy.

Alessandro Rubini is an electronic engineer and holds a Ph.D. in computer science. He was an early Linux adopter, installing Linux 0.99.14, is an active Free Software user and developer, and author of the book “Linux Device Drivers”. After his doctorate, he left the university as he did not want to just write academic papers and now works as an independent consultant in the industrial use of GNU/Linux, mainly on device drivers and embedded system as well as on micro-controllers and PCB design. Recently he has been working with CERN within the White Rabbit project, aimed at sub-nanosecond synchronisation of I/O cards. One reason he enjoys working with CERN is the organisation’s policy of releasing all their work as Free Software and Free Hardware.

Alessandro was previously a member of the Free Software Foundation Europe from 2001 to 2006 and recently rejoined. He felt that FSFE is the right place for positive and constructive discussions about Free Software.

“I am happy to welcome both Matthias and Alessandro to their new roles,” says Executive Director Jonas Öberg, “both have been instrumental in shaping the organisation into its current form and I look forward to the expertise they will bring as we go about empowering users to control technology.”

Dutch public sector to adopt ODF as standard?

Steve Woods International IT News, Open Data, Open Source News September 20, 2015 Comments Off

ODF logo The Dutch Standardisation Board would like to see the mandatory use of Open Document Format (ODF) for the country’s public sector organisations, according to a report on Joinup giving details of a presentation made by Nico Westpalm van Hoorn to the recent ODF Plugfest held in The Hague.

Van Hoorn stated that over 450,000 documents are transferred each day between the Dutch central
government and citizens or companies.

His presentation contained 3 main messages:

The only way reuse of document content is achievable for open data is by using the ODF format;
The only way to ensure sustainable access is by using the ODF format; and
“This format cannot be opened,” as a remark by a public servant is not acceptable when somebody sends an ODF document.

Within the Dutch government, ODF is used as the default format for editable documents that are posted online. Documents are by default shared as HTML, PDF (for archiving) and as ODF. Furthermore, all central government workstations are capable of working with ODF, suggesting that civil servants who cannot open the format need some IT training.

Speaking at the same event, Steven Luitjes, director of Logius – an agency assisting government organisations in building e-government services, admitted that ODF is often ignored by public sector organisations and that a failure to standardise on formats is increasing the cost of public sector IT.

If the Dutch government does adopt ODF as a standard, this would follow on from the recent announcement of the standard’s adoption by the Italian Ministry of Defence (news passim) and the UK government’s publication of guidance for the introduction of ODF.

Reposted from the author’s own blog.

Tomorrow is Software Freedom Day 2015

Steve Woods International Events, National IT News September 18, 2015 Comments Off

Ooh aargh me hearties! Besides being International Talk Like a Pirate Day (hat tip: Rich), 19th September 2015 is also a date for the diaries of people advocating free and open source software; it’s Software Freedom Day 2015.

The idea of Software Freedom Day (SFD) is for everyone without a vested interest in proprietary software to unite and educate the world about the ideals of Software Freedom and the practical benefits of Free Software. August 28th 2004 was the first ever Software Freedom Day and was initiated group of FOSS believers – Matt Oquist, Henrik Omma and Phil Harper – with the idea of distributing The OpenCD – a collection of free and open source software for Windows – to everyone.

SFD has now extended around the world with events being organised on every continent.

Why is software freedom important?

The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a set of basic human rights that most people would agree would be a bare minimum. Not often are our basic rights thought of in the context of technology, but as more and more our lives are dependent on technology, it is a rapidly growing concern. Technologies that matter to our freedom are used in our voting systems, our leisure, our work, education, art and our communication. What does this mean to you? It means that the basic human freedoms you take for granted are only as free as the technologies you use.

Transparent and sustainable technologies are vital to ensuring we can protect our freedoms.

Think about any software you use everyday that is proprietary and the consider that you can’t be sure what it is actually doing. Does your email system send copies of your mail to a third party? Is your web browser, logging and automatically sending your browsing history to someone?

As more and more of the world’s population starts using technology, getting online and developing the next major life-changing event of the future (such as the internet was for many of us), ensuring open, transparent and sustainable approaches are considered best practice is important; i.e. important to a future where technology empowers everyone equally, where knowledge is forever and where our basic human freedoms are strengthened, not hampered, by technology.

Bristol Uni involved in 5G – high-speed internet for future

Steve Woods International IT News, Local IT News September 18, 2015 1 Comment »

The next generation of mobile wireless systems, known as “5G”, will ensure that the internet is always accessible and if a new European project, 5G-XHaul, achieves its ambitious goals then so-called “notspots” with no coverage will be a thing of the past.

5G XHaul team. Photo courtesy of University of Bristol

The aim of the 5G-XHaul project is to find effective solutions to the rapidly growing demand for broadband and Bristol University is one of the project partners. The consortium includes industrial companies, research institutes and universities from four European countries. The actual partners are: Huawei, Telefonica I+D, i2CAT, Blu Wireless Technology, ADVA Optical Networking, COSMOTE, Airrays, TES Electronic Solutions, University of Bristol, TU Dresden, University of Thessaly and IHP.

New powerful, cost-effective networks are required to connect the base stations with the core telecommunications network. The network connection must be dynamically adapted to local and time-related needs, especially at transport hubs, such as railway stations and airports, or during major events.

Professor Andrew Nix, Dean of Bristol’s Faculty of Engineering and leader the Communication Systems & Networks (CSN) Group at Bristol, said: “This three-year project will provide a unique platform for collaborative research and validation of new optical and wireless architectures and methodologies for the ultra-fast and seamless delivery of 5G and beyond connectivity.”

Professor Dimitra Simeonidou, Head of the Bristol’s High Performance Networks (HPN) group and who is leading the Bristol part of the project, commented: “5G-XHaul is one of several projects facilitating novel experimentation and new methods of conducting advanced research on the Bristol Is Open (BIO) test bed. The project will drive forward enabling technologies for 5G connectivity and beyond.”

At the end of the project, a large field trial in Bristol will demonstrate its results.

The 5G-XHaul project is part of the 5G-PPP, a joint initiative by the European information and communications sector and the European Commission, which will examine current infrastructure and its limitations and specify requirements for next generation of communication networks and services. Technical solutions will be investigated and tested based on those requirements, .

The ‎€7.3 mn. project, funded by the EU’s “Horizon 20202 programme, will run for 3 years until June 2018. ‎

LibreOffice & ODF to be adopted by Italian military

Steve Woods International IT News, Open Source News, Training September 18, 2015 1 Comment »

The Italian military is moving to LibreOffice and Open Document Format (ODF), according to Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news website. This will be Europe’s second largest migration to a free and open source office suite and open standards since the Italian Defence Ministry will be installing LibreOffice on 150,000 machines.

The migration will begin in October 2015 and is expected to be completed at the end of 2016.

The deployment of LibreOffice will be jointly managed by Libreitalia and the Italian Defence Ministry, with the former providing trainers and the Ministry devising course materials, which will later be released under a Creative Commons licence.

An agreement between the Ministry and LibreItalia was signed on 15th September in Rome by Rear Admiral Ruggiero Di Biase, General Manager of the Italian Ministry of Defence’s Information Systems and LibreItalia president Sonia Montegiove.

Sonia Montegiove and Rear Admiral Ruggiero Di Biase

The Ministry of Defence is the first Italian central government organisation to migrate to open source software for office productivity. On the other hand, many regional public sector organisations have already made this move, such as the Emilia-Romagna region, the provinces of Perugia, Cremona, Macerata, Bolzano and Trento, the cities of Bologna, Piacenza and Reggio Emilia, the Galliera Hospital in Genoa and healthcare ASL 5 in Veneto, to name but a few.

The Italian Defence Ministry project is also one of Europe’s largest migrations to date to a free and open source office suite. The largest European public sector organisation using free software office suites is currently the French Interior Ministry with some 240,000 desktops. Many French ministries use open source office suites including the Tax Agency, the Finance Ministry, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Agriculture. LibreOffice is deployed on some 72,000 PCs within the French Gendarmerie, which also uses Ubuntu Linux as its operating system of choice.

In June 2014, the autonomous regional government of Extremadura (Spain) confirmed that 10,000 PCs in its healthcare organisation are running open source office applications and that the same is planned for its own 22,000 PCs. In Germany the city of Munich runs also runs LibreOffice on over 17,000 Linux workstations.

Reposted from the author’s blog.

Russia opts for ReactOS as Windows alternative

Steve Woods International IT News, Open Source News June 26, 2015 Comments Off

After the Russian Communications Minister Nikolai Nikiforov suggested a common approach by the BRICS states – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – to solving the dependency on imported software earlier this year, Russia recently announced a list of possible options, German IT news site heise reports. There is to be a concerted promotion of open source projects as a part of the national programme to ensure economic development. In addition to two Linux distributions developed by Russian companies, the ReactOS project has also been chosen as a Windows alternative worthy of promotion. However, what that actually means remains unclear for the time being. The Russian programme is only envisaging software alternatives being made available within 10 years.

Although the ReactOS project has no announced any major technical progress since the integration of rudimentary support for NTFS, the developers have nevertheless not been inactive: “Over 750 bug reports filed by the community have been processed, resulting in appreciably better software compatibility,” ReactOS developer Colin Finck remarked in a discussion with heise. In particular, the emulation implemented in the last year for executing 16-bit applications (NTVDM) and Java support have been improved.

ReactOS logo

Thus not only can the installation routine of Oracle’s Java Runtime Environment be executed with the current build of ReactOS, but also ancient software such as the FreeGEM desktop or previously barred applications such as Skype. Support for the UDF file system for reading optical data carriers is also new.

Grant showing results

Initial results are also being produced by the student scholarship system which had been selected by Verein ReactOS Deutschland e.V. after a successful funding campaign over the last year on fundraising site Indiegogo. “With the completion of the new Explorers and Shell32 with theme support, which has been rebuilt from the ground up, the system interface works more nimbly and is also more comfortable to use as regards Explorer,” Finck explains. He has now started work on a printer stack which should be ready by December 2015 and could become a component of ReactOS 0.4.0.

No deadline for new release

Although there is no definite deadline for a new release of ReactOS with all new features, the project is nevertheless making automatic daily build versions available for download. The ReactOS developers themselves classify both the daily builds and previous releases as alpha versions which are only recommended for testing.

The ReactOS community is hoping for a further surge in development from the first ReactOS Hackfest, which is taking place in Aachen, Germany from 7th to 12th August 2015. According to the organisers, more than half of the current ReactOS developers have already registered for the event. According to current plans, improving ReactOS’ hardware support and working on the forthcoming version 0.4.0 shall form the focus of the event.

BarnCamp burns the nerd gag

Steve Woods Bristol Wireless Events, Bristol Wireless News, National Events, National IT News, Training, Volunteering June 25, 2015 Comments Off

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 with an interest in technology and how to subvert it to put it to good use.

According to the sales pitch: “All skill levels are invited and we promise that workshops are not too geeky due to our infamous nerd gag” (of which more later. Ed.).

Once again we were the guests of Highbury Farm, a housing co-operative set in some 30 acres of unimproved but rather steep grassland at Redbrook in the beautiful Wye Valley south of Monmouth.

Looking north towards Monmouth from Highbury Farm

Your correspondent formed part of the forward crew who went to site on Wednesday to set up the event. This year a few more of us were on hand to ensure that all the essential infrastructure – large tents for workshops, signage, kitchen, other refreshment facilities, camp fire, showers and the like – was all in place for the first arrivals. Indeed it was more or less complete by lunchtime on Thursday. Well done all!

Once into the event proper, each day started with breakfast, followed by a plenary session, then workshops, lunch, more workshops and concluding with supper and socialising.

The workshops this year had the usual variety: an introduction to satellite communications, basic electronics, using WordPress and OpenStreetMap, to mention but a few. There were even sessions on basic self defence, whilst Ben’s ever-popular wild food walk took place on no fewer than 3 occasions.

Your correspondent was in charge of building the nightly campfire, a duty that occasionally involved some sheltering of the previous night’s embers from the rain, whilst even the woodpile showed its geeky side.

sign on woodpile reading session locked; enter password — The pyromaniac’s equivalent of the locked screen

The woodpile geeking out wasn’t the only bit of strangeness occurring on site during BarnCamp. There was also the the intriguing sounding shamanic laptop massage that happened somewhere in the surrounding woodland, for which scant photographic evidence exists.

Shamanic laptop massage montage — Shamanic laptop massage

What’s happened to the nerd gag? And what is it in the first place? This was a standard implemented some years ago to stop the less technical becoming too intimidated to the use of too much jargon by the more technically adept. Workshop presenters are encouraged to explain things properly if anyone so asks; this year there was even a space on the information wall where BarnCampers could share the jargon they had just acquired.

Nevertheless, there was one workshop – Sunday morning’s session on server optimisation – that not only ripped off the nerd gag, but set light to it and threw it away! (And that was just with the first slide of the presentation! That one slide contained more technical acronyms than the rest of the programme put together. Ed.) However, this was perhaps the most jargon-laden session of the weekend and the most geeky, but it did come with lots of laughs… as long as you could get the jokes.

I hope all my fellow BarnCampers had as good a weekend as I did and once again my thanks go out to the good folk at Highbury Farm for their friendliness and hospitality. See you at the next one! 🙂

Originally posted on the author’s own blog.

Ford using Ubuntu in its driverless car

Steve Woods International IT News, Open Source News June 25, 2015 Comments Off

La Mirada del Replicante reports that Ford is signing up for the revolution in driverless cars and there’s no-one better in whose company to do so than Tux and one of the most popular GNU/Linux distributions – Ubuntu.

It has therefore launched a development plan for the next 5 years in which it plans to achieve a higher level of connectivity in its next models and to improve the capabilities of detection and automatic driving technology.

image of driverless car powered by Ubuntu — Look no hands! Ubuntu in the driving seat

Ford’s press release does not tell us what the hell the Ubuntu laptop connected to the car is doing, but it seems to be heavily involved in the autonomous driving system and the sensors entrusted with avoiding a possible collision.

This is not the only car with Ubuntu; we recently saw some Tesla electric cars hacked by Bosch which also showed the characteristic Unity interface favoured by Ubuntu.

In another vein, it will be interesting to see how these autonomous vehicles resolve certain ethical questions, such as having to choose at a certain time between sacrificing their driver by colliding with a tree or wiping out half a dozen innocent persons.

We shall see if that dilemma causes a kernel panic!

Bulgaria releases first open data sets

Steve Woods International IT News, Open Data, Open Source News June 1, 2015 Comments Off

Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news site, reports that Bulgaria has just published the first datasets on its open data portal. Some 36 datasets from 26 public sector organisations have now been made available online.

Furthermore, the Bulgarian Council of Ministers has also established a dedicated team to overcome public sector resistance to releasing public sector data as open data and help them to extract and cleanse the data from the databases. The ambition is to publish another 100 datasets before the end of 2015.

Some of the public agencies that have provided datasets for the portal are:

Geodesy, Cartography and Cadastre* (AGCC), part of the Ministry of Regional Development & Public Works;
Bulgarian National Metrology Institute;
the Bulgarian Post Office;
the State Agency for Bulgarians Abroad;
the Executive Environment Agency (EEA), part of the Ministry of Environment & Water;
the Ministry of Economy;
the Council of Ministers;
the Bulgarian National Statistical Institute; and
the National Revenue Agency, part of the Ministry of Finance.

Screenshot of Bulgarian government's open data site — Screenshot of Bulgarian government’s open data site.

The establishing of the Bulgarian open data portal was announced in September 2014. It was originally launched by the Obshtestvo.bg Foundation. The portal is built on the popular CKAN (Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network) open data platform, which is available as open source software under the Affero GPL licence.

* = The Cadastre is the equivalent of the Land Registry in the UK.

OpenMandriva’s next release to pay homage to its Mandrake heritage

Steve Woods International IT News, Open Source News May 29, 2015 Comments Off

The sad news arrived earlier this week that French Linux gurus Madriva were being wound up (news passim).

One of its community spin-offs, OpenMandriva, has now announced that its next release will be a tribute to its Mandrake heritage.

OpenMandriva’s history is well known. It was born at the end of 2012 with the help of the community and Mandriva SA to continue the work on the distribution after Mandriva SA could not continue to do so.

OpenMandriva

OpenMandriva has expressed its thanks to Mandriva SA for the latter’s initial support and it has wished former Mandriva employees well for the future.

The OpenMandriva Association was created to unite the distribution formerly known as Mandriva (aka Mandrake) and to return it to its roots through listening to peoples needs and getting closer to its users and developers. Since then OpenMandriva has been independent (though it still remains open to cooperative effort). It will continue to do this and will be releasing a new release of OpenMandriva Lx 3 (2015) in the near future that will include new features and an update of many of the core components.

OpenMandriva states that Mandrake was the first Linux distribution to make a free operating system available which could be installed and configured by anyone who could use a keyboard and a mouse. When many people first entered the “Linux” world, there were two types of distro: the ones that gave you headaches as soon as you put the CD in the drive; and Mandrake. The vision of Mandrake’s founder Gaël Duval created an operating system which undoubtedly allowed many, many people access to modern technology and in doing so added greatly to the strength of the free software community.

LibreOffice Viewer for Android released

Steve Woods International IT News, Open Source News, Volunteering May 29, 2015 Comments Off

The Document Foundation, the organisation behind LibreOffice, the most popular free and open source office suite, has announced the release of a native application for viewing ODF documents on Android devices.

The app can be installed from the Google Play Store, whilst direct download of the APK will be made available at http://www.libreoffice.org/download/android-viewer.

LibreOffice Viewer also offers basic editing capabilities, like modifying words in existing paragraphs and changing font styles such as bold and italics.

LibreOffice Viewer screenshot Editing is still an experimental feature which has to be enabled separately in the settings, and is not stable enough for mission critical tasks. Full-blown editing will be enabled in the future with
the help of LibreOffice’s steadily growing developer community. The editing features provided in the current release have been developed thanks to donations to The Document Foundation.

Feedback and bug reports for the app are very welcome to help developers improve its quality en route to a fully-fledged editor. Users are invited to report problems, using the bug tracker and attaching files that have triggered the issue at http://documentfoundation.hosted.phplist.com/lists/lt.php?id=N09VVkUAB00ABgsI.

LibreOffice Viewer uses the same engine as LibreOffice for Linux, OS X and Windows. This, combined with a new front-end based on Firefox for Android, reads documents similarly to a desktop version of LibreOffice.

LibreOffice Viewer has been developed by Collabora and Igalia, backed by Smoose, with contributions from Google Summer of Code students, together with The Document Foundation and the LibreOffice community. SUSE provided a key foundation of cross-platform support, whilst the Mozilla Corporation – makers of Firefox – made several core components available.

Reposted from the author’s own blog.

Don’t let the Snoopers’ Charter bounce back

Steve Woods National IT News May 29, 2015 Comments Off

online surveillance image In the Queen’s Speech the Government announced it’s going to introduce an Investigatory Powers Bill (news passim). This is the new Snoopers’ Charter and will more than likely comprise even greater powers for the police and GCHQ to spy on British citizens. (Will the Government’s longer term aim of a British Bill of Rights comprise the right to be spied upon by the State? Ed.)

This is the fifth time a UK Government has tried to bring in a Snoopers’ Charter. The Home Office wants to give the police and intelligence services even more powers to look at what Brits do and who they talk to.

Do Britons really want to live in a country where all their communications are monitored by the State?

Precise details of the Home Office’s plans but there might be an attack on the encryption technology that helps keep our emails and online banking and shopping secure.

The police and intelligence services should concentrate on targeting people suspected of crimes instead of collecting everyone’s data all of the time.

It’s unclear whether the Home Office’s collect-it-all approach is effective or giving taxpayers value for money. The perpetrators of heinous crimes like the murder of Lee Rigby and the Charlie Hebdo attack were already known to the British and French intelligence services respectively, but those services decided to stop monitoring them due to lack of resources.

ORG logo Our friends over at the Open Rights Group (ORG) have set up a petition to campaign against the revived Snoopers’ Charter.

The text of the petition reads:

We demand an end to indiscriminate retention, collection and analysis of everyone’s Internet communications, regardless of whether they are suspected of a crime.

We want the police and intelligence agencies to have powers that are effective and genuinely protect our privacy and freedom of speech.

Sign the petition.

The ORG will also be organising a lobby day soon so supporters can go to Parliament, get a briefing about the Bill and then talk to their MPs.

The return of the Snoopers’ Charter

Steve Woods National IT News May 27, 2015 1 Comment »

Like a boomerang curry, the Snoopers’ Charter (news passim) is back – and with a vengeance this time.

image of Home Secretary Theresa May — Home Secretary Theresa May, the woman who wants her minions to read everyone’s emails

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 data.”

The new legislation will be known as the Investigatory Powers Bill and will not only cover everything included in the previously-blocked charter, but also allow security services to intercept the content of communications in bulk.

The Bill will allegedly “provide police and intelligence agencies with the tools” to keep people safe, whilst changes will also be made to close “ongoing capability gaps” that the government believes prevent law enforcement and intelligence services from tackling terrorism and serious crime. The new bill would also introduce “appropriate oversight and safeguard arrangements.” The latter are long overdue.

Goodbye Mandriva

Steve Woods International IT News, Open Source News May 27, 2015 1 Comment »

Things were never easy for Mandriva, which was founded in 1999 as MandrakeSoft: with Mandrake Linux the company was originally aiming for a user-friendly desktop Linux. However, the major breakthrough for Linux on the desktop failed to appear and thus financial squeezes run like a strand through the company’s history in spite of the rapid expansion of the product portfolio for commercial solutions, German technology website heise reports.

Mandriva logo

The company did achieve a successful launch on the French stock market in 2001. However, MandrakeSoft had to apply for creditor protection only two years later. The company’s renaming as Mandriva took place in 2005 in the wake of the merger with Brazil’s Conectiva; Mandrake’s founder Gaël Duval left the company shortly afterwards due to a dispute.

There were financial problems once again in 2010 and Mandriva (at that time the company had over 70 employees) was looking for a buyer. Though an investor was eventually found, some 30 former Mandriva employees , developers and community members nevertheless founded the Mandriva fork Mageia at the end of that year. The fork was intended to ensure the continuity of Mandriva Linux since Mandriva’s commitment to its desktop Linux distribution had declined sharply. Insolvency loomed once again at the end of 2011, but was able to be repulsed ultimately with a recapitalisation.

The idea for OpenMandriva arose from the realisation that there was no money to be made with Linux for the desktop: an independent association was to continue producing Mandriva Linux as a community project. With Mageia and OpenMandriva there are now two community distributions, both of which have nevertheless lost some of their verve: the current Mageia 4 was released at the start of 2014; and OpenMandriva LX 2014.1 from September 2014. However, work is continuing on new versions of both distributions.

Mandriva is now in liquidation according to French company register societe.com. Lawyer Frédérique Lévy has been appointed as the administrator. The mandriva.fr and mandriva.com are no longer available.

Reposted from the author’s own blog.

Registration for Barncamp 2015 now open

Steve Woods Bristol Wireless Events, Bristol Wireless News, Local Events, Local IT News, National Events, National IT News May 21, 2015 Comments Off

Barncamp is a low-cost, rural DIY skills sharing event open to everyone, including UK activists, campaigners, people involved in social and community groups, and anybody else with an interest in technology and how to subvert it to put it to good use.

All skill levels are welcome and the organisers promise that workshops are not too geeky due to the infamous nerd gag implemented at every Barncamp

Barncamp was last held in 2013 (news passim). Once again we’ll be heading up the beautiful Wye Valley.

BarnCamp 2015 is taking place on the 19th, 20th and 21st June and, as mentioned above, registration for Barncamp has now opened.

The event will cost £40 (on the gate) or £35 in advance (if you book and pay before 15th June 2015); concessions will be available upon request and via pre-booking.

The cost includes 4 nights’ camping and breakfast, lunch and dinner from Thursday evening to Sunday afternoon included (9 meals). The food will be primarily vegan with some dairy as optional extras.

Details of this year’s workshops are also being finalised.

As usual, Bristol Wireless volunteers will be assisting in crewing Barncamp. How can we resist playing with technology in such stunning surroundings? 🙂

For news and updates about BarnCamp 2015 and other HacktionLab events, please sign-up to the low-traffic announcements mailing list.

The right to install other software on your devices

Steve Woods International Events, International IT News, Open Source News May 6, 2015 Comments Off

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 or adapt existing technology by replacing or supplementing its software, should be permitted and encouraged by the law. In the example of Safecast, fortunately nobody prevented them from being innovative.

However, we all depend on the possibility to install or replace programs that we use every day, to increase our security, privacy or convenience – or just because we happen to like using a different program on our device(s) of choice.

Today, on the International Day Against DRM (news passim), the undersigned organisations are calling on lawmakers to safeguard the right to tinker for everyone. To make sure that the owner of every device is allowed to replace or supplement the software in that device if they so choose, thereby empowering owners to control their own property. Many manufacturers today add technological restrictions that prevent device owners from changing their devices, or having someone do so for them. This can be in breach of the licences on the devices (as with Free Software/Open Source Software licences, which grant the rights to use, study, share and improve the software for any purpose). It is clear that any right to tinker must also be coupled with a legal provision that prevents technological restrictions of the same right.

To successfully guarantee that device owners are in control of their own technology, the following organisations are asking for the right to tinker be guaranteed for everyone, and that technological restrictions that interfere with this right be limited by law.

Droning on with Ubuntu?

Steve Woods International IT News, Open Source News May 4, 2015 Comments Off

The world’s first drone powered by the Ubuntu Linux distribution has arrived, Softpedia reports.

Erle Robotics, a Spanish company known for all types of robots powered by Linux, launched the world’s first Ubuntu-powered drone on 3rd May.

The Erle-Copter has a flight time of some 20 minutes and can handle a payload of 2 kg.

As regards price, the Erle-Copter Ubuntu Core special edition drone costs €399 for the very basic version, which won’t fly. If you want to buy an Erle-Copter that flies and has the basic components, you will have to pay at least €574.

“Erle-Copter Ubuntu Core special edition drone is a Ubuntu-powered quadcopter that includes official support for new app store for drones and robots. It has official ROS support, capable of the different flight modes and [is] ideal for outdoor operations,” says Erle Robotics’ Alejandro Hernández.

The version of Ubuntu used by the Erle-Copter is Snappy Ubuntu Core, a new version of Ubuntu for clouds and devices comprising a minimal server image with the same libraries as the conventional Ubuntu distribution, but applications are provided through a simpler mechanism.

Reposted from the author’s blog.

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