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Today is Document Freedom Day

27/03/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Standards, Tech

The last day of March each year is Document Freedom Day, a worldwide celebration of open standards for document and information exchange.

In 30 countries around the world, activists from more than 50 groups are hosting events from Brussels to Nicaragua to Taiwan.

DFD – an annual celebration of open standards

Open standards are crucial to ensure that different computer systems can work together and users can access documents irrespective of the computing platform or device they use.

Sam Tuke, Campaign Manager at the Free Software Foundation Europe said: “Markets for digital products such as audio books and cloud documents have grown dramatically. Open standards let users break free from vendor lock-in and corporate control.”

This year’s campaign focuses on web-streaming technologies, such as Adobe’s closed, proprietary and insecure Flash. “This time, we are encouraging people to switch to HTML5 technologies,” said FSFE Community Manager Erik Albers.

Do you use open document formats? Examples include HTML (what the web is built upon), Open Document Format (the native file format used by office suites such as LibreOffice and OpenOffice), PDF and plain text (.txt).
Weak crypto keys in NetBSD

25/03/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

A serious error has occurred in the random number generator in free Unix derivative NetBSD, which can result in the system’s cryptographic keys being too weak and allowing them to be cracked, German IT news website Heise reports. The cause is misplaced brackets in the program code of the NetBSD kernel. The developers have made a kernel update available to preclude the problem in future. In addition, they are recommending that users of keys produced with either NetBSD 6.0 or the current version of NetBSD change these as a matter of urgency.

The programming error can result in the system producing random numbers which are not particularly random. This danger is especially great if the system is just booting as the system has very little entropy available at this time. The problem has particularly serious effects on 32 bit platforms where cryptographic keys containing only some 32 bits entropy are produced under these circumstances. The resulting 4 billion possibilities can be tried in turn. NetBSD 6.1 will remedy the error.

In particular, keys for SSH servers (which are normally produced at system start-up) are definitely affected. All SSH server keys which have been produced on NetBSD 6 systems should be changed as a matter of urgency. Since the ECDSA algorithm was first introduced with version 6, the relevant keys are very likely to be weak.

Full details of the problem can be found in this NetBSD security advisory notice.
Ubuntu Kylin is to become reference system in China

24/03/2013 Steve WoodsLanguage, Linux, Open Source, Tech

According to German IT news website Heise, the Chinese Ministry for Industry & Information Technology has selected Ubuntu as the basis for its reference architecture for operating systems. The China Software and Integrated Chip Promotions Centre (CSIP), part of the Industry & IT Ministry, Ubuntu manufacturer Canonical and the Chinese National University of Defence Technology (NUDT) are working to adapt the Chinese Kylin variant of Ubuntu to the requirements of the Chinese markets under the aegis of the CCN Open Source Innovation Joint Lab.

Ubuntu Kylin is to appear in April this year together with Ubuntu 13.04 with support for the input of Chinese symbols and the Chinese calendar and will integrate Chinese web services. The integration of Baidu Maps, the Chinese Amazon competitor Taobao, payment processes for Chinese banks and Chinese timetables and flight schedules is planned for subsequent versions. In addition, the WPS office suite, which is popular in China, is to be adapted for Kylin.

Ubuntu Kylin is to be widely used as the reference for a flexible, open operating system. The announcement of is part of a Chinese five year plan which should promote the use of open source software and speed up the development of an open source ecosystem.
Ministry of Justice and Capita breach Magna Carta

24/03/2013 Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

The administration of justice in England has a long history. Nearly 800 years ago, on 15th June 1215, King John and 25 barons of the realm signed the Magna Carta Libertatum or The Great Charter of the Liberties of England (otherwise simply known as Magna Carta) in a field on an island in the Thames at Runnymede with 12 bishops and 20 abbots as witnesses.

If you’ve ever read it, you’ll know that Magna Carta is a curious hybrid of a document whose content ranges from the seemingly mundane, such as the removal of fish weirs on the rivers Thames and Medway, to such major legal concepts as trial by a jury of one’s peers and various rules for the administration of justice, which have been implemented by many other jurisdictions around the world, particularly those based on common law.

Parts of Magna Carta are still in force today: you can see which (with relevant amendments) by reading the text in the UK Statute Database.

One of 4 surviving original copies of Magna Carta, now in the British Library

What has Magna Carta to do with the Ministry of Justice and Capita? The answer is the disastrous contract for interpreting in courts and tribunals which the Ministry of Justice – in its limited wisdom – handed over to Capita Translating & Interpreting/ALS (posts passim).

An English translation (the original text was drafted in Latin. Ed.) of Clause 40 of the original 1215 text reads:

To no one will we sell, to no one will we refuse or delay, right or justice.

If court proceedings cannot take place due to unqualified interpreters being sent to court by Capita T&I, or interpreters not showing up for court assignments, that sounds very much like justice being delayed and could even be bordering on refusal. By their cavalier attitude to the administration of justice, the Ministry of Justice (perhaps it should be renamed the Ministry of Injustice. Ed.) and Capita T&I are showing their contempt for eight centuries of English law.
Capita sends unqualified interpreter to Old Bailey

24/03/2013 Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

This blog never ceases to be amazed at the mismanagement of the courts and tribunals interpreting service by Capita Translating & Interpreting/ALS (posts passim).

Under the title ‘Judge corrects a Capita Interpreter’, Linguist Lounge recently published the post by ‘Stranger’ quoted below, which is reposted here with the kind permission of the site administrators.

At court I fall into conversation with a Capita interpreter. She is North African and does Arabic. Prepared to do French too but only in simple cases. She tells Capita this but still gets sent to do a job at Bailey. The judge was French speaker and, she said, corrected her translation several times. She was greatly embarrassed and told Capita they shouldn’t have sent her. They told her that she should withdraw her name for French in that case. But they knew she wasn’t qualified for French, yet sent her to the court that deals with the most serious criminal matters.

If you are sending someone to the Bailey you know it is not to interpret for a defendant who has been caught speeding. She says that the admin staff at Capita didn’t have a clue what they were doing. She seemed very unhappy with her “employers”.

As pointed out by the original author, the Old Bailey doesn’t handle speeding offences. It is better known under its official title of the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales and deals with major criminal cases from Greater London and, in exceptional cases, from other parts of England and Wales. Were I the judge in that case, I would have had Capita Translating & Interpreting charged with contempt of court for not respecting the court’s authority.
UK Parliament: no open standards here

21/03/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Standards, Politics, Social Media, Tech

Did you know House of Commons Select Committees only accept submissions in Microsoft’s proprietary formats?

Today in my Twitter feed I read a tweet announcing the deadline for submissions to the Transport Select Committee for a new inquiry on local authority parking enforcement.

Reading through the notes on the submission of written evidence, I was struck by the following:

2. Evidence should be submitted by e-mail to transev@parliament.uk in Word or Rich Text format, with as little use of colour and images as possible. If you wish to submit written evidence to the Committee in another format you must contact a member of staff to discuss this.

Parliament: we’re a Microsoft-only shop.
Both Word and Rich Text format are Microsoft proprietary file formats. How long they remain readable is totally in the hands of a private American corporation whose first concern is making a return for its shareholders, not preserving the proceedings of Parliament and its committees for the benefit of future generations.

For those future generations, I’d recommend that parliamentary select committees start accepting submissions in other, non-proprietary formats, such as plain text or open standards such as Open Document Format. The latter is an internationally accepted standard (ISO/IEC 26300:2006/Amd 1:2012) and is being widely adopted by other governments and official bodies (such as NATO, where ODF use is mandatory. Ed.) around the world for official document exchanges.

Finally, the notes give no details any member of staff for the public to contact for submissions in other formats.

Update: Since alerting the Transport Select Committee to this post via Twitter, I’ve received the following reply from them:

Interesting post. We’re happy to accept other formats- and do – as long as we can process them using the software we have. We will certainly pass your points up the Committee Office chain to see if more can be done to accommodate this.

Thanks, very much folks. I’ll await developments with interest.
Budget shocker: “one pence”

20/03/2013 Steve WoodsPolitics, Social Media, Tech

Today was a momentous day for George Gideon Oliver Osborne (aged 41 and three-quarters), a man who does Chancellor of the Exchequer impressions. Firstly, he joined Twitter. Needless to say, there was the usual warm Twitter welcome for politicians, as evidenced by the use of the hashtag #gidiot. Those using the hashtag were slightly more polite than other reactions to George’s embracing of Twitter.

Secondly, it was also the day of the Budget. In summary there was very little to cheer about, except the abolition of the beer duty escalator.

However, what made me cringe while listening to the Chancellor’s speech live on radio (apart from his whining, grating tone. Ed.) was his language: at one point near the end, I distinctly heard him refer to the amount of “one pence“.

Now, George isn’t exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer, but one would at least expect the Chancellor of the Exchequer to know the difference between penny and pence.

Since the end of the budget speech itself, BBC Radio 4 news readers have also reiterated Osborne’s ‘one pence’ blunder – repeatedly. 🙁
Confused by translators and interpreters? You too can write for the Post!

20/03/2013 Steve WoodsBristol, Language

To paraphrase the Duke of Edinburgh’s famous retort from 1962, the Bristol Post is a bloody awful newspaper. Every day it manages to show its ignorance of the districts of Bristol, greengrocer’s apostrophes are not unknown and the command of terminology shown by its journalists is abysmal.

As regards the latter, there was a prime example in this article about cannabis farms, as follows:

Gardeners often appear in court with a translator and cases regularly detail how electricity at the grow houses is bypassed from the mains.

In court with a translator? My heart sank. The writer has clearly not been following this blog or other sources about the interpreting fiasco in the English courts (posts passim). Moreover, he has clearly never read my early post on the BBC’s never-ending confusion of interpreters with translators.

For the benefit of passing Post journalists, I shall once again quote from that article about the difference between the two:

…here’s a brief explanation of the difference between interpreting and translation: interpreting deals with the spoken word, translation with the written word.

Simple isn’t it? So simple on would think even a Bristol Post hack would be able to understand the difference. 🙂
Python Software Foundation reaches settlement in trademark dispute

19/03/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

Python – saved for software in the EU
The Python Software Foundation blog announced yesterday that an amicable settlement had been reached in the dispute over the Python trade mark in Europe (posts passim) between the Foundation and PO Box Hosting Limited, which trades as Veber.

The dispute centred around Veber’s use of the Python name for its cloud hosting services and its application for a figurative trademark incorporating the word “Python”. While the Foundation is the trademark owner for Python in the USA, it did not have a filing within the EU. According to the terms of the settlement, Veber has withdrawn its trademark filing and has agreed to support the Python Software Foundation’s use of the term.

The amicable agreement reached between the two sides will result in a rebranding of Veber’s Python cloud server and backup services, which continue to be available at http://www.veber.co.uk. Veber will rebrand the Python services later under a yet to be determined name.

“We are happy to come to an agreement with Veber,” said Van Lindberg, chairman of the Python Software Foundation. “What the PSF wants most is to support the global community of Python developers. To Veber’s credit, they were willing to recognise the Python brand without protracted negotiations. We are grateful for Veber’s support and we wish them luck in their business.”

The Python Software Foundation expressed its thanks the Python community for its support throughout the dispute, both financially and through their campaigning across EU member states.

This is a repost from Bristol Wireless.
My two homes united – by a medieval clerk

18/03/2013 Steve WoodsBristol, Language

The two places where I’ve lived the longest are Bristol (where I’ve lived since graduation) and Market Drayton (where I grew up). These 2 places are ones I’d call home.

It’s therefore quite a surprise for me to find the two of them brought into close contact by a writer who lived 6 centuries ago.

I’m currently reading ‘The Maire of Bristowe is Kalendar’ by Richard Ricart, who became clerk to the Mayor of Bristol in 1478 in the reign of Edward IV, (re)printed in 1872 by the Camden Society and available from the Internet Archive.

Bristol as seen by Robert Ricart, clerk to the mayor

Ricart recorded Bristol’s history from 1217, mentioning the name of the mayor and other chief officers of the town (Bristol did not become a city until the reign of Henry VIII. Ed.), along with major national or local events.

Imagine my surprise at the following text – in the original Middle English – appearing at the end of the entry for 1459:

And the Sondaye by fore Mighelmas, James Lorde of Audeley was slayne at Blourehethe besides Drayton in the countee of Stafford.

In modern English: “And the Sunday before Michaelmas, James, Lord of Audley was slain at Blore Heath near Drayton in the county of Stafford”.

The Battle of Blore Heath, which was fought on 23rd September 1459, was an echo from my childhood: as a child I’d looked for Audley’s Cross – marking the spot where Audley allegedly fell – from the tops of buses, whilst a popular childhood haunt was Salisbury Hill just outside Market Drayton, so called because it was where Lord Salisbury’s troops had apparently spent the night before the battle.

Besides exhaustive detail, the Blore Heath 1459 website has a brief introduction to the battle, as follows:

In September 1459 the armies of the House of Lancaster and the House of York met on a damp Sunday morning at Blore Heath and fought the battle which would begin the English Wars of the Roses. Thousands of men from across England fought and died in a bloody battle, which lasted for the rest of that day.

Legend has it that Queen Margaret of Anjou watched the battle from the nearby Mucklestone church tower, only to flee when she realised her army had lost. A stone cross still stands on Blore Heath to this day, to mark the spot where the Lancastrian leader is said to have been killed.

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