Politics

  • Today is DFD 2014

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech

    logo for Document Freedom Day 2014Today is Document Freedom Day (DFD) 2014. DFD is an annual celebration of and opportunity to promote the use of open formats and standards for digital documents and takes place on the last Wednesday in March each year.

    Document freedom means documents that are free can be used in any way that the author intends. They can be read, transmitted, edited, and transformed using a variety of tools.

    Open standards are formats which everybody can use free of charge and restriction. They come with compatibility “built-in” – the way they work is shared publicly and any organisation or person can use them in their products and services without asking for permission. Open Standards are the foundation of co-operation and modern society.

    However, don’t just take my word for it.

    Below are some testimonials for open standards and document freedom from people with a bit more influence than your ‘umble scribe.

    Neelie Kroes, Vice-President, European Commission

    I know a smart business decision when I see one – choosing open standards is a very smart business decision indeed.

    Stephen Fry, actor, screenwriter, author, playwright, journalist, poet, comedian, television presenter and film director

    Open standards make sense. What makes no sense is that large companies in the field still do not understand this. It is time once and for all to end the pointless nonsense of one document sent on one platform being incomprehensible to the user of another.

    Chris DiBona, Open Source Manager, Google

    Over time, files that have been saved in closed formats tend to be less and less accessible to their creators. We prefer people to use modern and truly open formats like ODF whenever possible to ensure that they can continue to access and enjoy their work today and into the far future.

    Happy DFD 2014!

  • Canary Islands government to adopt OpenOffice

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech

    The autonomous government of Spain’s Canary Islands has announced in a press release (Spanish) that the Directorate General of Telecommunications and New Technologies has proposed that the free and open source OpenOffice 4.0 office suite be adopted by the government of the islands as its corporate office productivity software.

    screenshot of OpenOffice splash screen

    At the same time it also announced a standard for web site content management systems to be preferred by all Canary Islands government departments. It decided on “Portal web Tipo”, a package built in-house as part of the islands’ Platino e-government services platform. Platino and its components are being made available as open source to other Spanish public sector organisations via the CTT (Centro de Transferencia de Tecnología – Technology Transfer Centre) software repository.

  • South Tyrol region to save €1 mn. with free software

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Politics

    Südtirol coat of armsThe government of Italy’s Autonomous Province of South Tyrol wants to save &euro 1 mn. per year by using free software, according to a press release issued last week.

    Public sector organisations took the first step towards the use of free software nearly one year ago with the change to the LibreOffice productivity suite (news passim). On 11th March 2014 the regional government decided to continue to pursue this route and to resort to the use of open source where possible. “We are expecting savings of one million Euro per year through free software,” declares governor Arno Kompatscher.

    “The use of proprietary or free software has in the meantime degenerated into almost a religious war, not only in the public sector, but also in private businesses,” Kompatscher continued, speaking after a regional government meeting.

    During the preceding legislature period the region and regional government had already made a decision in principle to opt for the use of free software. In June last year the first major step towards free software was made with the change from MS Office to LibreOffice. The regional government alone migrated 7,000 to the open source office suite.

    Governor Kompatscher stressed that it was not a matter of using free software exclusively, but to find the best solution as regards citizens: “We’re standing by using free software. However, it’s not a matter of deciding between free and proprietary software, but between requirements.” Free software, according to Kompatscher, is not always suitable, but: “Citizens must always have access to public sector documents without having to resort to paid-for software as well. That is the key issue”.

    The city of Munich is acting as an example for the use of free software in government. “For example, Munich’s city council is using free software; in spite of this ten per cent of its computers are still running proprietary programs. We’re aligning ourselves with this. There will be no either or; the principal objective is friendliness towards citizens,” Kompatscher emphasises.

    The governor also refers to the potential savings arising from free software: “A very, very large amount of money is involved. The target is savings of one million euro per year.” Just from its first major step, switching to LibreOffice should save the regional government paying Microsoft some €600,000 in licence fees in the next few years.

  • Parking meters arrive in Easton

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Politics

    On 1st April – April Fool’s Day – Bristol City Council’s Easton & St Philips Residents’ Parking Scheme comes into operation. (Some would consider the choice of date most apposite. Ed.)

    road sign announcing works for Easton RPZ
    Does Easton have one resident? Do you proof-read your signs, Bristol City Council?
    This is just one of many Residents’ parking schemes being introduced by the council at the instigation of the autocratic elected Mayor, George Ferguson, the man in red trousers (posts passim).

    Needless to say, the schemes haven’t exactly received universal support from the residents of a city with a high level of car ownership and an abysmal level of public transport provision. Overall, it’s been condemned by residents as a ‘parking tax’ as residents will have to acquire permits, both for their own vehicles, as well as for visitors arriving by motor vehicle.

    There has been consultation, of course. However, as is usual with Bristol City Council, consultation is a portmanteau word, a crafty elision of ‘confidence trick’ and ‘insult’. With a city council consultation, the stress is always firmly on the first syllable. When something goes out to consultation, what the council wants to do is usually a fait accompli.

    There have been howls of protest about the Residents’ Parking Schemes in the local press, particularly the car-loving Bristol Post, which has even enlisted the odd high-profile petrolhead to trash the Mayor’s plans.

    image of parking meter on Stapleton Road
    A new parking meter on Stapleton Road
    As this post is being written, the streets of Easton are being prepared for the arrival of the new parking regime. New double yellow lines and parking bays marked on the streets. In addition, there’ll be parking charges for visitors and parking meters have started to make their appearance both on main thoroughfares like Stapleton Road and the backstreets.

    Bristol’s residents’ parking schemes programme is very flawed.

    One of the justifications for implementing them is to dissuade the thousands of daily commuters from outside the local authority area clogging up residential roads by parking there all day. As the scheme doesn’t cover the whole city, the thousands of commuting motorists will just park a bit further out in districts not covered by residents’ parking schemes, such as the area where your ‘umble scribe happens to live.

    Where I live, it’s the residents that are guilty of problem parking; the streets are Victorian, narrow and were intended for use by horse and cart, not 21st century motor vehicles. Pavement parking is rife in the backstreets, making pavements impassable to wheelchair users and parents with children in prams and pushchairs. There’s minimal enforcement to combat such anti-social parking. Indeed, the police often contribute to the problem themselves (posts passim).

    If Mayor Ferguson really wanted to stop Bristol being choked by out of town commuting motorists, his counterpart in London came up with an alternative that was introduced 11 years ago. It’s called the London Congestion Charge Zone.

  • Powerful virus targets Ukraine

    Steve WoodsPolitics, Tech

    malware symbolFrance’s Le Monde reports that a very powerful computer virus has infected computers in Ukraine, where 22 instances of infection has been recorded since 2013, the year that country’s political crisis started, according to a report from BAE Systems.

    This virus, baptised Snake, but also known as Ouroboros after the serpent in Greek mythology, is “one of the most sophisticated and persistent threats that we track,” states BAE Systems Applied Intelligence, in a report published on Friday, 7th March.

    Although it appeared as early as 2006, Snake appears to have been deployed more aggressively since 2013, according to the same source: of the 56 instances identified since 2010 throughout the world, 44 have been recorded since last year. Ukraine is the main target with 22 instances since 2013, of which 14 alone have been confirmed since the start of 2014 when that country’s political crisis accelerated with the fall of its pro-Russian president at the end of February.

    Lithuania, Britain and Georgia are amongst the other countries where Snake has also shown up.

    Snake’s operators act on weekdays and operate mainly from a time zone corresponding to Moscow, BAE Systems states. “Our report shows that a technically sophisticated and well-organised group has been developing and using these tools for the last eight years,” said David Garfield, the managing director of cyber security at BAE Systems Applied Intelligence.

    “There is some evidence that links these tools to previous breaches connected to Russian threat actors but it is not possible to say exactly who is behind this campaign.”

    Snake’s controllers can access all of the computer systems they have infiltrated, in addition to which the virus’ capacity to hibernate by remaining completely inactive for many days makes its detection complex.

    According to Saturday’s Financial Times (paywall), the virus has in particular infiltrated the Kiev government’s computer systems and those of major Ukrainian organisations.

  • It’s Bristol Radical Film Festival week

    Steve WoodsBristol, Media, Politics

    Bristol Radical Film Festival logoBristol Radical Film Festival is on this week with a wide choice of events from today, 3rd March until 8th March. The films will be screened in a wide range of venues, which include and have in the past included digital outreach projects, social centres, political squats, radical bookshops, community bicycle hubs, trade union buildings, etc.

    The Festival first took place in 2011 and showcases contemporary and historical works of overtly political documentary and fiction film-making. Organised by staff, students and alumni from the Centre for Moving Image Research and the Film team at the University of the West of England (UWE), the Festival also aims to draw attention to a range of other progressive, community-based initiatives in the city.

    Two of this year’s offerings in particular take my fancy.

    Firstly, there’s a screening of McLibel, the David and Goliath story of two people who fought back against one of the most powerful corporations on the planet. Ronald McDonald may have won their libel case against Helen Morris and Dave Steel, but it was very much a Pyrrhic victory. McLibel is being shown at Knowle West Media Centre, Leinster Avenue, Knowle West, Bristol BS4 1NL (map) on Thursday, 6th March at 7 pm. Entry is free.

    The second offering to take my fancy is Uomini contro (English title: Many Wars Ago), produced in 1970. The film is set in Italy in 1917. Society is violently split down the middle over the question of whether to continue intervention in the war. Anarchists and socialists are intent on causing so much trouble that continued intervention is impossible. Railway lines are ripped up, battle lines are drawn. On the Isonzo front a General smells socialism behind the troops reaction to his orders and a disastrous Italian attack upon the Austrian positions leads to a mutiny among the decimated troops. The screening is being hosted by Bristol Radical History Group as part of its World War 1 series of events. The film will be screened at 5.00 pm on Saturday 8th March and the venue will be 2nd Floor, The Arc, 27 Broad Street, BS1 2HG (map) and there’ll be a £4 admission charge.

  • Let Bristol be Bristol

    Steve WoodsBristol, Politics

    Within 2 days last week, we had the latest pair of proposals from a member Bristol’s great and good and a London property developer to try and turn the city into somewhere else.

    On Monday last week Bristol 24/7 carried a story entitled “Bristol… the ‘New Orleans of the UK’?”.

    According to the article, local businesses are being urged to help elevate Bristol to a world-class centre for jazz and blues music as part of Mayor George Ferguson’s ambitions to make the city the ‘New Orleans of the UK’.

    By the end of the week, apparently plans had shifted from trying to turn Bristol into a city founded by French colonists in 1718 on the banks of the Mississippi to property developers and their scheme to convert some of the city into Shoreditch, now an inner city part of London in the borough of Hackney, which was originally named after Edward IV’s mistress, Jane Shore, who was reputedly buried in a ditch in the area.

    This news appeared on Bristol Business News, which reported as follows:

    Verve Properties, the niche developer behind Bristol’s highly-successful Paintworks creative quarter, has started work on the first speculative office refurbishment in the city for five years as the market recovery continues to gathers pace.

    London-based Verve said it saw a gap in the Bristol office market for trendy office workspace of the type now common in the Shoreditch/Tech City area of East London that would appeal to the Bristol’s vibrant creative sector.

    What I like about Bristol is precisely that it is Bristol. It’s quirky, diverse and has its own unique features not found anywhere else, like the centuries of architectural variety on display on Old Market Street and West Street, the City Docks and the wealth of green, open spaces which the public can enjoy, even in the city’s less prosperous parts.

    a Bristol montage
    A Bristol montage: image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

    Where attempts have been made to turn the city into somewhere else, it’s been a disaster. One only has to look at Bristol’s so-called ‘Shopping Quarter’ – Broadmead, Cabot Circus and the Mall Galleries – to see the result: bland and unedifying. The area is filled mostly with identikit local branches of national retail chains. Rearrange the shops and you could easily in another large UK town or city.

    I like Bristol because it’s Bristol and it should furthermore be left to be itself and not try to be somewhere else.

    One has to ask the question: do those who profess to love the city but want to turn it into somewhere else really love the city; or do they actually hate it?

  • Canaries save money with open source

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Politics, Tech

    Canary Islands coat of armsCanary Islands news site La Provincia reports that the autonomous government of the Canaries is saving €400,000 per year by backing the use of free and open source operating systems and software and avoiding paying licences to multinational companies for the use of programs and their updates. Apparently the autonomous government annual IT costs have reduced from €1,006,500 to €750,000. Roberto Moreno, the general director for telecommunications and new technologies explains that the migration from proprietary to free and open source software means the government is ridding itself of dependency on one vendor because, in this case “the owner is the one who buys it and can make the changes and modifications needed with his own resources and personnel, which is always much cheaper” than being beholden to an outside company.

    Moreno, who is a professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC), states that the objective is shown by the current legislature’s wishes to introduce these changes to reduce expenditure, given the current economic crisis and the lack of funds in the region’s coffers.

    The next step planned by the Canaries government is to replace the ubiquitous MS Office suite currently used with a free and open source alternative, which is most likely to be Apache OpenOffice. That change will involve some 30,000 desktops and will save the public purse a fair few euros more.

  • Cabinet Office’s open standards consultation extended

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech

    Cabinet Office logoThe Cabinet Office’s consultation on open standards for document exchange with government departments (posts passim), which was due to end yesterday, 26th February 2014, has now been extended until 5.00 pm on Friday, 28th February 2014.

    According to a Cabinet Office spokesman, the reason for the extension is as follows:

    This is because the Standards Hub server went down last night at about 10pm, as a result of which some people were unable to submit their comments to the proposals.

    The file formats being proposed as standards by the Cabinet Office are:

    • HTML (4.01 or higher, e.g. HTML5);
    • ODF 1.1 (or higher, e.g. ODF 1.2);
    • Plain text (TXT); and
    • Comma-separated values (CSV).

    So far it would appear that most respondents to the consultation are supporting this welcome move to openness by the UK government and Microsoft’s shills are thin on the ground.

    Comment on the consultation.

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