Daily Archives: Friday, April 5, 2013

  • Ministry of Justice is not the Ministry of Fun

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities, Politics

    An interesting fact emerged today in an article in Inside Time (masthead: the National Newspaper for Prisoners. Ed.) about the mess that Capita Translation & Interpreting’s making of the interpreting contract it has with the Ministry of Justice (posts passim).

    The final paragraph of the Inside Time article mentions last year’s Civil Service People Survey, according to which just 28% of MoJ staff had confidence in their senior management and only 32% said the department was well managed. Moreover, a mere 18% of staff felt changes to services were for the better and only 23% said that change was well managed.

    What was even more surprising to me – and I hope to any other reasonable person – was the response of the MoJ’s spokesperson to these damning verdicts of the Ministry, as follows:

    These results show that staff are growing in confidence in the leadership and management of change in the department.

    What are they putting in the senior management’s and ministers’ tea at 102 Petty France, London SW1? I think we should be told.

    Hat tip: Yelena of Talk Russian

  • Hollyweb? Tell the W3C no thanks!

    Steve WoodsMedia, Open Data, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

    According to its website, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community where its member organisations, a full-time staff and the public work together to develop web standards, whose mission is to lead the Web to its full potential.

    These standards have so far been characterised by complete openness: all web standards are open standards.

    However, these open standards are now under attack.

    There’s a proposal currently before the W3C’s HTML5 Working Group to build DRM (aka Digital Restrictions Management by openistas. Ed.) into the next generation of core web standards. The proposal is called Encrypted Media Extensions or EME.

    The people behind EME are the major media companies; having failed to push such illiberal measures as SOPA and PIPA through the US legislature, the Big Media moguls are now going through non-governmental channels to try to sneak digital restrictions into every interaction people have online.

    image with caption Stop DRM in HTML5
    Hollyweb? No thanks, W3C!

    Netflix, Google, Microsoft and the BBC are all rallying behind this ludicrous proposal, which – as stated above – flies in the face of the W3C’s mission.

    However, a petition has already been set up to oppose the addition of DRM to HTML5 and 3rd May 2013 has been designated the International Day Against DRM.

    The petition page is also available in French.

    I’d urge everyone interested in open standards and all other forms of openness – such as open data and open source – to sign the petition; I’ve already done so.

    This article is reposted with some minor amendments from Bristol Wireless.