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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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Don’t Suspend Scout Finch, Mr. Schmidt. It’s Wrong and It’s Bad for Business. Very sensible commentary on Google’s misjudged “real names” strategy. I still have no idea why Google thinks its approach is worth burning vast tanks of karma to secure. Thank You, United Airlines A heart-warming thank-you letter to United after a warm web […]

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Software Freedom Day It’s just two weeks away, get ready to join in! open80211s Meshed WiFi in every Linux device? Yes please! Eagles singer Don Henley: EFF, Google “aid and abet” criminals Listening to the “special interests” who worry about freedom of speech and breaking the Internet? Well, that makes you just as much a […]

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