Legislating For Unicorns

☞ When Julian Huppert MP (Lib-Dem) asked the Home Secretary Theresa May MP (Con) if banning encryption – as the Prime Minister had been interpreted as saying – is “genuinely what the Home Secretary wants to do?”, she evaded him with her answer. Excellent question from @julianhuppert, but what a silly non-answer. #FreedomOfTheInternet https://t.co/pQ4iQ3rnQE — […]

☞ Should Justin Bieber Go To Jail?

If you found my article in ComputerWorldUK yesterday too long and/or complicated, this campaign web site is the perfect alternative: Free Justin Bieber.

☞ Communities and Control

What community? If you’re interested in the Tizen project, take a look at Dave Neary’s well-founded scepticism. The whole project has the sound of a force-fit that will lead to a poor community experience. A poor community experience is often a symptom of deeper malaise that can mean project failure. I remember doing a similar […]

☞ Birthday Treats

On its first birthday, LibreOffice has reason to celebrate After a year of work, the extensive global LibreOffice community is now showing signs of the strength and maturity the open source world needs. Monthly releases, open Board elections in progress, incorporation near and an international conference coming up, The Document Foundation has succeeded in all […]

☞ Extension of Power

Alert To Activists: Customs Enforcement of IPR “This is a very worrying development. Borders are places with arbitrary rules, over-empowered and unaccountable officers and no recourse for victims. It is simply wrong to give open-ended powers regarding arguable and intangible “infringements” to these people.” Amarino – “Android meets Arduino” Fascinating toolkit to allow open hardware […]

☞ Tricks

The special trick that helps identify dodgy stats I’d heard of Benford’s Law before, but it was a timely reminder. There are quite a few banks of data that it would be good to test, not least open source community download/member/commit stats… How Peaceful Activists Get Swept Up onto “Terrorist” Watch Lists I have to […]

☞ Corporate Actions

Sony asks gamers to sign new terms or face PSN ban Sony demonstrates it still has no respect for its customers. This is the same company that installed an exploitable rootkit on its customers computers. Surely the ability to force your customers to surrender their recourse against you has to be a signal that you […]

☞ Government In Action

Facebook and Cisco back IT skills drive for kids RIM has started up BlackBerry Hands-On Workshops, in which students will take apart BlackBerry smartphones to see how they work.” Free hoodie with every class?  Seriously, we would do far better teaching kids to program and to solder using open source software and hardware than letting […]

☞ Poetic Justice?

UK business and government dangerously out of tune with cyber threats Interesting how the government is keen to protect Cliff Richard’s pension (by criminalising his fans) and to protect celebrities against hacking yet has no policy to pursue scammers or protect against criminal hacking. Instead they prefer to allow the public domain to be eroded […]

☞ Behind The Scenes

The Great Copyright Conspiracy Laid Bare It will come as no surprise to anyone reading here regularly, but there may be some that still don’t realise their political “representatives” have so little grasp of the dynamics of copyright and patent laws that they are willing to trade your cultural inheritance for short-term political advantage. Microsoft […]