Tech

  • UK Parliament: no open standards here

    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.

    image of Parliament's crowned portcullis
    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”

    Steve WoodsPolitics, Social Media, Tech

    Gidiot Osborne looking smarmyToday 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. 🙁

  • Python Software Foundation reaches settlement in trademark dispute

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

    Python logo image
    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.

  • Whatever happened to netiquette?

    Steve WoodsOpen Standards, Tech

    Picture the scene: 3 gently maturing Bristol Wireless techies sat in the pub having a post-lab pint. Between us we’ve got some 6 decades’ worth of experience in using the internet, having started back in the days of dial-up access.

    Two of us have some experience of web development: one in a professional capacity, the other purely amateur but enthusiastic. We recalled how we used to craft web pages by hand (none of your bloated WYSIWYG rubbish! Ed.), especially since in the bad old days of dial-up, access was paid for by the minute and the baud rate of dial-up modems made snails look speedy. Lean, hand-crafted HTML loaded more quickly.

    Back in those days, plain text email also loaded more quickly than HTML (also referred to as ‘rich text’) email. The former didn’t have the latter’s mark-up tags. This led us naturally onto the topic of netiquette.

    We noted its sad decline on just about every mailing list to which we subscribe. Many years ago, people would have had the error of their ways pointed out to them – particularly on lists with a high nerd factor – if they used HTML email or top-posted replies; plain text emails and bottom-posting being the accepted standards. Indeed, committing either – or both – of these transgressions would be tantamount to ‘flamebait‘.

    Discussion threads were another source of controversy: in no way should a departure from the original topic of the thread be broken.

    Back in the mid-1990s communication via email was still a relatively new affair and in 1995 the Internet Engineering Taskforce (IETF), whose goal is to make the internet work better, attempted to lay down some basic rules for communication via the internet in RFC (Request For Comments) 1855.

    Even though it’s now nearly two decades old, RFC 1855 contains some good, practical advice about online communication, most of which is plain common sense; for example:

    A good rule of thumb: Be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you receive. You should not send heated messages (we call these “flames”) even if you are provoked. On the other hand, you shouldn’t be surprised if you get flamed and it’s prudent not to respond to flames.

    As regards ‘flaming’ itself, RFC 1855 has some sound suggestion to make too:

    Wait overnight to send emotional responses to messages. If you have really strong feelings about a subject, indicate it via FLAME ON/OFF enclosures.

    I have put this advice to good use myself: every now and again I’ll clear out my email drafts folders and surprise myself at what I almost sent. 🙂

    One more element of our conversation is perhaps worthy of mention: the digital native. This creature – usually under two and a half decades in age – has spent its entire life in a world of networked communication, but oldies such as me do wonder if it’s even heard of RFC 1855, let alone uses its guidelines in online exchanges. If you’re one that does, comments are welcome below!

  • “Hopelessly incompetent”

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Tech

    At the end of last week, Judge Richard Bray branded Capita “hopelessly incompetent” after he was unable to sentence and expedite deportation proceedings against a Vietnamese drug king because no interpreter arrived at Northampton Crown Court, according to a report in yesterday’s Sunday Express.

    The same report also revealed that Capita Translation and Interpreting, which is making a shambles of providing interpreters for courts and tribunals (posts passim), is using its Capita Polski call centre in Wroclaw, where its 500 Polish staff are meant to match requests for linguists on Capita’s register who are then called or e-mailed with offers of work. However, this is also reported not to be working very well.

    How much longer before the whole Capita/ALS/Ministry of Justice Framework Agreement comes crashing down; and more importantly who’s going to be left to pick up the pieces?

  • More everyday sexism: ePad Femme

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

    Dubai-based tech company Eurostar Group knows exactly what women want (apparently. Ed.) and has designed a tablet especially for them – the ePad Femme. Eurostar itself calls the ePad Femme “the first tablet specifically for ladies.”

    The ePad Femme is an 8-inch tablet running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and comes pre-loaded with a light pink wallpaper and apps concerning yoga, grocery shopping, and cooking, as shown below.

    image of ePad Femme
    Don’t like yoga, shopping or recipes? Ever thought of buying another tablet?

    Speaking to the Jerusalem Post, Mani Nair, Eurostar’s associate vice-president of marketing, said the tablet comes with pre-loaded ‘womanly’ applications so the user can “just turn it on and log in to cooking recipes or yoga”, adding that the ePad Femme “makes a perfect gadget for a woman who might find difficulties in terms of downloading these applications.”

    Needless to say, such sexism has hardly been greeted with enthusiasm by women tech writers. For instance, Casey Johnson has a piece on arstechnica entitled “Finally, a tablet simple enough for a woman to use </sarcasm>”.

    However, such criticism seems likely to fall on deaf ears in Dubai.

  • LibreOffice 4.0.1 released

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

    Yesterday The Document Foundation blog announced the release of LibreOffice 4.0.1 for Linux, MacOS and Windows. This follows the release of LibreOffice 4.0 at the start of last month (posts passim).

    image of LibreOffice Mime type icons
    LibreOffice for all your office suite needs: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database, drawing and formulas

    The Document Foundation describes the new release is a step forward in the process of improving the overall quality and stability of LibreOffice 4.0. However, for business use The Document Foundation suggests the more solid and stable LibreOffice 3.6.5.

    Nearly 100 bugs have been fixed in the 4.0.1 release, according to the release notes.

    The Foundation’s Documentation team has also released a “Getting Started with LibreOffice 4.0” guide. This is available in PDF and ODF formats from the LibreOffice website and as a printed book from Lulu.

    LibreOffice 4.0.1 can be downloaded from the LibreOffice website, whilst extensions for LibreOffice are available from the extension repository.

    LibreOffice Impress Remote image
    Now available from Google Play
    In addition, the release has been announced of LibreOffice Impress Remote (posts passim), which will allow users to control Impress presentations from an Android smartphone. LibreOffice Impress remote is now available free of charge from Google Play for all platforms – Linux, MacOS and Windows, whilst instructions for its use can be found on the Document Foundation wiki.

  • LibreUmbria’s 5 good reasons to switch to LibreOffice

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

    The LibreUmbria blog features a new post today entitled (in English) 5+5 good reasons to adopt LibreOffice. The 10 reasons themselves are split between those for end users (PDF, Italian) and administrators and managers (PDF, Italian).

    image of LibreOffice Mime type icons
    LibreOffice for all your office suite needs: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database, drawing and formulas

    The post also features a fine graphic setting out 5 of the reasons. These are:

    • Quality. When using Office, you will happen to notice that the 2000 version is being officially dropped. This is because there is a new licence to acquire for each update for commercial software. LibreOffice is a product being continuously improved because it is the users who ask the developer community to fix bugs and add and simplify its features. LibreOffice is a product that shall never run out.
    • Freedom. LibreOffice is free software not linked to any company in particular. It can be freely used without limits and conditions imposed by user licences. You can install LibreOffice on your home computers, you can give to a friend and download it free of charge from the internet.
    • Training. Switching to LibreOffice means being able to take a training course which will teach you all the functions you need to know about.
    • Open format. With LibreOffice we use an open format (.odt) instead of .doc. You’ve surely never thought of it, but open formats ensure accessibility in the long term, but above all ensure transparency of the data exchanged; distributing content different from that which you seen on the screen will never happen with .odt.
    • Help. When you start working with LibreOffice you can always count on help from a colleague, as well as its large developer community, research centres and companies ready to fix any bugs in the working of the software.

    As previously reported, Italy’s Umbria region has a project to migrate 5,000 public sector workers from MS Office to LibreOffice (posts passim).

  • Open letter against Iceland’s proposed internet porn ban

    Steve WoodsPolitics, Tech

    Yesterday a group of forty security, privacy and human rights advocates and organizations from 19 countries, including Germany, Poland, the United Kingdom, Palestine, Argentina, Peru, Guatemala, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan and the United States, released an open letter to Ögmundur Jónasson, Iceland’s Minister of the Interior, regarding the ongoing discussions on the possibility of establishing internet pornography censorship in Iceland.

    The text of the open letter is reproduced in full below.

    Ögmundur Jónasson
    Innanríkisráðuneytið
    Sölvhólsgötu
    Reykjavík

    Re: Open Letter to Ögmundur Jónasson, Icelandic Minister of Interior, regarding Internet censorship

    Dear Mr. Jónasson,

    As security, privacy and human rights advocates and organizations from around the world, we are writing to express our deep concern with your current proposals to attempt to restrict Internet access in Iceland to pornographic content.

    Iceland is a liberal democratic state which should not serve as a role model for Internet censorship. Regimes, totalitarian and democratic alike, can use these proposals as an example in order to justify censorship of the Internet, practiced or proposed. It has already jeopardized longstanding efforts to prevent or abolish censorship in totalitarian regimes and protect civil liberties and human rights worldwide.

    The current discussion of blocking pornographic content has offered no definition, no evidence, and suggested no technology. This is an affront to basic principles of the society, and while we acknowledge that this discussion is at a starting point, we feel that the way it is being conducted is harmful.

    Traditionally, censorship has involved preventing publication and persecution of people with unpopular opinions. On the Internet, censorship has taken a new guise. It doesn’t merely prevent publication, but also restricts people’s access to the information they seek. Rather than silencing a voice, the result is depriving the population of material they can see and read. This is censorship, as it skews the way people see the world. It is tempting to regard filtering the internet as a quick and easy way to restrict unwanted speech, opinions, or media, which the government regards as harmful for either them or the people. The right to see the world as it is, is critical to the very tenets and functions of a democracy and must be protected at all costs.

    It is technically impossible to censor content delivered over the Internet without monitoring all telecommunications. Not just unwanted communications or inappropriate material, everything must be examined automatically by unsupervised machines which make the final decision on whether to allow the content to continue or not. This level of government surveillance directly conflicts with the idea of a free society.

    Internet censorship is used by totalitarian regimes in order to restrict people’s access to various information and material on the internet. The methods used to conduct this censorship are technically identical to the methods that would be employed by Iceland if these plans were to be implemented. The act of censoring pornography in Iceland differs in no way from repression of speech in Iran, China or North Korea. By stating that Iceland is considering censoring pornographic material on the Internet for moral reasons, they are justifying rather than condemning the actions of totalitarian regimes.

    The internet is not the source of violence, it is merely a medium by which violence is made apparent. If the government of Iceland is genuinely concerned about the wellbeing of victims of violence, there are many more effective ways. The prohibition of pornographic content may create demand for an underground porn industry, unregulated and most certainly affiliated with other illegal activities, as we have seen in the case of drugs or alcohol prohibition. Hiding the problem is not a solution and may in fact make things worse.

    If the Icelandic Government worries about children getting their sexual education from pornography on the Internet, the solution should be better sex education in the home or through schools. Sex education that deals not only with conception, contraception and sexually transmitted diseases, but also relationships, communication and respect.

    There exist decentralized technical measures that respect the rights and dignity of all citizens in a society which involves aiding families with providing an accessible way to make their own computer and internet access secure for their children, but technically speaking, it would still be possible to go around the blockage.

    Over the last years, Iceland has been regarded by the international community as a shining example of a free, democratic society. Iceland has positioned itself as a model democratic state in global context when dealing with freedom of the press, the open process of drafting a new constitution, and open review of information regulation. Therefore, we implore you to reject censorship as a viable option and seek more effective means of improving society, both in Iceland and abroad.

    Kind regards,
    Renata Avila Pinto, Human Rights Lawyer (Guatemala)
    Jillian C. York, Director for International Freedom of Expression, Electronic Frontier Foundation (USA)
    Kim Pham, Principal, Expression Tech (USA)
    Sjón, Author, President of Icelandic PEN (Iceland)
    Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT (USA)
    Richard Stallman, President, Free Software Foundation (USA)
    Mina Naguib, Human rights activist (Egypt)
    Katarzyna Szymielewicz, Panoptykon Foundation (Poland)
    Trevor Timm, Freedom of the Press Foundation (USA)
    Michał “rysiek” Woźniak, President, Fundacja Wolnego i Otwartego Oprogramowania (Poland)
    Ásta Guðrún Helgadóttir, Free speech activist (Iceland)
    Stefan Marsiske, Hungarian Autonomous Center for Knowledge (Hungary)
    Beatriz Busaniche, Vía Libre Foundation (Argentina)
    Walter van Holst, Vrijschrift (Netherlands)
    Atanas Tchobanov, Balkanleaks (Bulgaria)
    Mazen Maarouf, Writer (Palestine)
    Aðalheiður Ámundadóttir, Lawyer (Iceland)
    Douwe Korff, Foundation for Information Policy Research (United Kingdom)
    Arjen Kamphuis, Chairman, Open Source Working Group, Internet Society (Netherlands)
    James Vasile, Director, New America Foundation Open Internet Tools Project (USA)
    Timo Karjalainen, President, Electronic Frontier Finland (Finland)
    Ot van Daalen, Director, Bits of Freedom (Netherlands)
    Aleksander Waszkielewicz, President of the Board, Fundacja Instytut Rozwoju Regionalnego (Poland)
    Guðjón Már Guðjónsson, Internet Policy Institute (Iceland)
    Margot Kaminski, Executive Director of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School (USA)
    Smári McCarthy, Executive Director, International Modern Media Institute (Iceland)
    Laurie Penny, author and journalist (United Kingdom)
    Sunil Abraham, Executive Director Center for Internet and Society (India)
    Thomas Hughes, Managing Director, Media Frontiers (Denmark)
    Miguel Morachimo, Hiperderecho (Peru)
    Annie Machon, former MI5 intelligence officer and civil liberties campaigner (United Kingdom)
    Daniela Bozhinova, Bulgarian Association for the Promotion of Citizens Initiative (Bulgaria)
    Dariusz Grzesista, Chairman, Polish Linux Users’ Group (Poland)
    Mohammed Tarakiyee, Jordan Open Source (Jordan)
    Józef Halbersztadt, Internet Society Poland (Poland)
    Zineb Belmkaddem, Free speech activist (Morocco)
    Rafik Dammak, Free speech activist (Tunisia)
    Oktavía Jónsdóttir, Executive Director, Human Link Network (Denmark)
    Josef Irnberger, Initiative für Netzfreiheit (Austria)
    Markus Beckedahl, Digitale Geschel schaft (Germany)
    Alek Tarkowski, Director, Centrum Cyfrowe Projekt: Polska (Poland)
    Hugleikur Dagsson, Artist (Iceland)

  • Latvia’s economy ministry should boost use of open standards and open technology

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech

    According to a report on Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news site, LATA – Latvian Open Technology Association – is calling on the Ministry of Economy to make open standards and open technologies one of the core themes of the ministry’s business education efforts. LATA published a statement (Latvian) on Wednesday, pleading continued funding of ICT training for Latvian companies. Earlier this week the ministry announced a four-fold reduction in the training budget.

    “Businesses get the maximum effect from the right skills to use open technologies and open standards.” LATA argues that open technologies and standards make companies more efficient, as well as improving interoperability.

    Latvia’s Ministry of Economy is currently preparing its 2014-2020 plans for using European Social Fund monies. It has announced that it intends to reduce the ICT training budget to 5.25 mn. lats (about €7.51 mn.) and to restrict funding to SMEs. Between 2007 and 2013, over 20 mn. lats (about €29 mn.) was available in employee training grants.

    According to LATA, many Latvian ICT companies are using European funding to improve ICT skills and gain knowledge of new technologies.

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