Steve Woods

Generic carbon-based humanoid life form.

  • New point release for LibreOffice 24.2

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Privacy, Tech

    The blog of The Document Foundation (TDF) has today announced the sixth point release of LibreOffice 24.2 for Linux MacOS and Windows, which it is describing as “the best choice for privacy-conscious users and digital sovereignty“.

    LibreOffice 24.2.6 banner

    This point release includes over 40 bug and regression fixes over LibreOffice 24.2.5 to improve the software’s stability, plus interoperability with legacy and proprietary document formats. LibreOffice 24.2.6 is aimed at mainstream users and business environments.

    LibreOffice for business

    For business use, TDF strongly recommends the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners with a range of dedicated value-added features, long-term support and other benefits such as SLAs.

    Next week, power users and technology enthusiasts will be able to download LibreOffice 24.8.1, the first minor release of the recently announced new version with many bug and regression fixes.

    As per usual, LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members are invited to support The Document Foundation with a donation.

    Download LibreOffice 24.2.6. Please note that the minimum requirements for proprietary operating systems are Windows 7 SP1 and macOS 10.15.

  • US firm fined by Dutch for illegal facial recognition data gathering

    Steve WoodsGDPR, Privacy, Security, Tech

    Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens logoThe Dutch Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens (Personal Data Protection Authority) has announced today that it has imposed a fine of €30.5 mn. on the US company Clearwiew AI, as well as a non-compliance penalty in excess of €5 mn.

    Stylised facial recognitionClearview is an American company that offers facial recognition services, which has, inter alia, built up an illegal database with billions of photos of faces, including those of Dutch citizens. Furthermore, the authority has warned that using the services of Clearview is also prohibited.

    Clearview offers facial recognition services to intelligence and investigative services. Moreover, Clearview customers can provide camera images to find out the identity of people shown in the images. To this end, Clearview has a database with more than 30 billion photos of people, which it has scraped automatically from the internet and then converted into a unique biometric code per face, all without the knowledge and consent of its victims.

    According to the authority’s chair Aleid Wolfsen, “Facial recognition is a highly intrusive technology, that you cannot simply unleash on anyone in the world. If there is a photo of you on the internet – and doesn’t that apply to all of us? – then you can end up in the database of Clearview and be tracked. This is not a doom scenario from a scary film. Nor is it something that could only be done in China. This really shouldn’t go any further. We have to draw a very clear line at incorrect use of this sort of technology.’

    Clearview says that it provides services to intelligence and investigative services outside the European Union (EU) only.

    Clearwiew’s services illegal and in breach of the the GDPR

    Clearview has seriously violated the privacy law General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on several points: the company should never have built the database and is insufficiently transparent. It should never have built the database with photos, the unique biometric codes and other information linked to them. This especially applies to the codes. Like fingerprints, these are biometric data. Collecting and using them is prohibited. There are some statutory exceptions to this prohibition, but Clearview cannot rely on them.

    Clearview is an American company without an established presence n Europe. Other data protection authorities have already fined Clearview on various earlier occasions, but the company has not changed its conduct. For this reason the Dutch regulator is investigating ways to ensure the violations stop, including whether the company’s directors can be held personally liable for data protection violations.

    Wolfsen: ‘Such [a] company cannot continue to violate the rights of Europeans and get away with it. Certainly not in this serious manner and on this massive scale. We are now going to investigate if we can hold the management of the company personally liable and fine them for directing those violations. That liability already exists if directors know that the GDPR is being violated, have the authority to stop that, but omit to do so, and in this way consciously accept those violations.’

    Clearview has not objected to the decision and is therefore unable to appeal against the fine.

  • One American can’t do irony

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities, Social Media

    Last week this blog featured a post entitled America does irony (posts passim). However, your ‘umble scribe perhaps ought to have prefaced the title with the qualifying Some of… as rules that are not hard and fast have exceptions to them.

    And here we come to a very big exception: namely the disgraced former 45th president of the United States, convicted felon, insurrectionist, adjudicated business fraudster, confirmed sexual predator, perpetual liar and serial golf cheat one Donald John Trump.

    Text reads trying to claim that America does not have a gun problem while standing behind a sheet of bullet proof glass is peak Republican

    Anyone with two working brain cells and a hole in their backside can see the ridiculousness of The Donald’s position, even though the man himself – in the loosest sense of the word – is totally unaware of the fool he is making of himself, against which the so-called Bushisms, i.e. those unconventional statements, phrases, pronunciations, malapropisms, and semantic or linguistic errors made in the public speaking of George W. Bush, the 43rd President of the United States, look positively endearing. But then again, George Dubya is another Republican…

  • Days out ideas. Time machine required

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities, Social Media

    When parliament rises for the summer recess, the period until it reconvenes in the autumn is traditionally known as the silly season. This time of year was traditionally when the press would scramble around desperately for something newsworthy and printable.

    This has changed somewhat in recent decades due to the emergence of the 24 hours news cycle driven by technological change, including the rise of social media.

    However, the need to find worthwhile to publish is exacerbated when the silly season also includes a public holiday, a time when the great unwashed needs to be kept amused and entertained, which brings us to a piece in today’s edition of the Bristol Post/Live.

    Headline reads 7 of the prettiest villages near Bristol to visit in 2023

    Yes, you did read the headline correctly. It does say 2024. Sadly, in this particular item, Bristol’s Reach plc local news title has not followed standard Reach procedure and included affiliate links to time machine providers in the copy, so those intent on visiting Bristol’s hinterland last year will have to go and look for their own, at least until the proofreader returns from holiday. 🙂

  • LibreOffice 24.8 released

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Privacy, Tech

    Today the blog of The Document Foundation (TDF), the organisation behind the free and open source LibreOffice suite. announced the release of LibreOffice 24.8, the second version of the software to be released under the new calendar-based (YY.MM) release numbering system, for immediate download for Linux, macOS (Apple and Intel) and Windows (Intel, AMD and ARM).

    LibreOffice 24.8 banner

    The release announcement lays heavy emphasis on the suite’s privacy features. LibreOffice is the only office suite, i.e. software that can create files containing personal or confidential information that respects user privacy – thus ensuring users themselves can decide if and with whom to share the content they have created. LibreOffice is thus the best option for the privacy-conscious office suite user and provides a feature set comparable to the ubiquitous MS Office. LibreOffice also offers a range of interface options to suit different user habits, from traditional to contemporary.

    New features

    There’s a handy little video that highlights the new features incorporated in LibreOffice 24.8.


    Privacy
    • If the option Tools ▸ Options ▸ LibreOffice ▸ Security ▸ Options ▸ Remove personal information on saving is enabled, then personal information will not be exported (author names and timestamps, editing duration, printer name and configuration, document template, author and date for comments and tracked changes).
    Writer
    • UI: handling of formatting characters, width of comments panel, selection of bullets, new dialog for hyperlinks, new Find deck in the sidebar.
    • Navigator: adding cross-references by drag-and-drop items, deleting footnotes and endnotes, indicating images with broken links.
    • Hyphenation: exclude words from hyphenation with new contextual menu and visualisation, new hyphenation across columns, pages or spreads, hyphenation between constituents of a compound word.
    Calc
    • Addition of FILTER, LET, RANDARRAY, SEQUENCE, SORT, SORTBY, UNIQUE, XLOOKUP and XMATCH functions.
    • Improvement of threaded calculation performance, optimisation of redraw after a cell change by minimising the area that needs to be refreshed.
    • Cell focus rectangle moved apart from cell content.
    • Comments can be edited and deleted from the Navigator’s right-click menu.
    Impress & Draw
    • In Normal view, it is now possible to scroll between slides, and the Notes are available as a collapsible pane under the slide.
    • By default, the running Slideshow is now immediately updated when applying changes in EditView or in PresenterConsole, even on different Screens.
    Chart
    • New chart types “Pie-of-Pie” and “Bar-of-Pie” break down a slice of a pie as a pie or bar sub-chart respectively (this also enables import of such charts from OOXML files created with Microsoft Office).
    • Text inside chart’s titles, text boxes and shapes (and parts thereof) can now be formatted using the Character dialog.
    Accessibility
    • Several improvements to the management of formatting options, which can be now announced properly by screen readers.
    Security
    • New mode of password-based ODF encryption.
    Interoperability
    • Support importing and exporting OOXML pivot table (cell) format definitions.
    • PPTX files with heavy use of custom shapes now open faster.

    Cover of LibreOffice Getting Started guideMinimum requirements for proprietary operating systems are Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 and Apple MacOS 10.15.

    To coincide with the new version release, the LibreOffice Getting Started guide has been updated and is also available for download.

    As usual, users are encouraged to support the TDF’s work with a donation.

  • America does irony

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics, Social Media

    A common misconception about US citizens is that Americans en bloc cannot do irony.

    This is known as stereotyping, i.e. people attributing a set idea they have about what someone or something is like, especially an idea that is wrong.

    The stereotyping was misproved (yet again!) earlier this week by the post below on the former social media site now known as X (mostly for the rating of its content. Ed.) in relation to the disgraced 45th President of the United States, adjudicated sexual predator, condemned business fraudster, convicted felon and compulsive liar, one Donald John Trump.

    Post reads Sorry, but I have to agree with Trump. Crime is out of control. Just look at New York. There is a dude who was convicted of 34 felonies there, and he's still walking the streets.

    In the dictionary irony is defined as follows:

    a situation in which something which was intended to have a particular result has the opposite or a very different result.

    Anyone who does come out with the ‘Americans can’t do irony‘ phrase needs to look up what a national or ethnic stereotype is. 😀

  • Ambushed by donkeys and a lettuce

    Steve WoodsMedia, Politics, Social Media

    Today’s Guardian reports that Britain’s shortest-serving former prime minister, one Mary Elizabeth Truss, stormed off the stage at a book promotion event after being upstaged by a lettuce banner which dropped from the flies.

    The banner bore the phrase “I crashed the economy” below a picture of a lettuce.

    Truss was at Beccles Hall in Suffolk promoting her memoir, Ten Years to Save The West, once described as “the work of a failed politician whose historical legacy will be the unprecedented shortness of her premiership“, when the incident happened.

    Campaign group Led By Donkeys had arranged the stunt and publicised it via its account on the Muskrat’s X-rated social media platform.

    Post reads We just dropped in on Liz Truss’s pro-Trump speaking tour with a remote-controlled lettuce banner. She didn’t find it funny.

    And here’s the video footage in all its (ahem) glory.


    For once, Truss had no difficulty finding how to get off the stage; this has not always been the case.

    In response to the stunt, Truss reportedly remarked:

    What happened last night was not funny. Far-left activists disrupted the event, which then had to be stopped for security reasons. This is done to intimidate people and suppress free speech.

    I won’t stand for it.

    According to The Independent, Conservative political commentator Tim Montgomerie advised: “Liz Truss would be well advised to learn to laugh at herself”.

  • FSFE intervenes in Apple vs. EU Commission

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Politics, Tech, Uncategorized

    A green apple with an internal wormThe Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is intervening in litigation brought by Apple against the European Commission before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). Apple is seeking to avoid Digital Markets Act obligations related to its App Store and the interoperability of its operating system. The FSFE’s mission is to protect free Ssoftware against monopolistic corporate control.

    The CJEU has officially allowed the FSFE to intervene in the litigation brought by Apple against the European Commission to avoid being designated as a ‘gatekeeper’ under the Digital Markets Act. The company has pursued an aggressive policy against software freedom and interoperability, seeking to deter enforcement of the DMA – a law designed to increase fairness and competitiveness in digital markets by regulating the economic behaviour of very large tech companies.

    Dr. Martin Husovec, the FSFE’s counsel, remarked, “Becoming an intervener in this case is crucial as the FSFE is representing the civil society perspective, which enriches the judicial proceedings. This allows the court to make fully informed decisions”.

    The FSFE’s intervention aims to uphold the application of the DMA to Apple, voicing the concerns of the free software community against the Apple’s unfair practices. Free software projects are disproportionately affected by the company’s monopolistic practices. fee policies, strict vendor lock-in, prohibition on side-loading and the restriction on alternative app stores on Apple devices.

    By admitting the FSFE to the proceedings, the court stated that “the case is likely to have a significant impact on […] the supply of free software, free exchange of information and equal chances in accessing software”. Besides, the court recognised that if the EU Commission’s designation decision were to be annulled, […] “such a result would have an impact on the ability of the developers of applications or free software to interconnect their applications free of charge with Apple’s operating system iOS, which, in turn, would affect [the] FSFE’s ability to further and distribute such software to as wide a public as possible”.

    The next step for the FSFE is to submit its arguments by mid-September.

  • Cat educates thick rich man

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics, Social Media

    The social media account of Larry the Cat, Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office, is no stranger to this blog (posts passim).

    Larry has now taken to his keyboard yet again to educate an ignorant, insulting rich man who owns a social media platform to educate the latter on the letter of the law in connection with the recent fascist riots in the Untied Kingdom*.

    In recent days Elon Musk, (yes, him! Ed.) has waded into the debate about rioting thugs, claiming the disturbances to be a matter of free speech, not violence and racism against vulnerable people who have sought asylum in the country.

    Post reads: Support freedom of speech in the UK

    Amongst the many replies to Musk came one from the Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office, a canny political operator who has so far survived the premierships of six prime ministers – David ‘Call Me Dave’ Cameron, Theresa May, disgraced former alleged party-time PM Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, one Mary Elizabeth Truss and Rishi Sunak.

    Although he started out life as a stray, Larry quickly became acclimatised to the political climate in Whitehall, famously being one of those resignations which led to the downfall of Johnson, a man unfit to clean a public lavatory, let alone occupy the highest elected public office in the land (posts passim).

    Larry has posted the following response to Musk’s bland and blissfully ignorant exhortation.

    Post reads We have freedom of speech in the UK; it's written into our law in the 1998 Human Rights Act. But rights come with responsibilities (I appreciate that's a concept you're not familiar with); there's a requirement not to incite criminality or spread hatred online. We find society works better that way. Attachment to post reads Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of tiers. This Article shall not prevent States from requiring the lensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.

    Ouch!

    * = Mis-spelling is deliberate.

  • Bristol says no to hate

    Steve WoodsBristol, Politics

    It was a tense day in Bristol yesterday. There were reports that fascist thugs were planning to ‘demonstrate’ against a legal practice specialising in immigration cases in the Old Market area. Lots of local businesses saw no alternative but to shut up shop early and board up their windows.

    Fortunately, things turned out differently: 2,000 lovely Bristolians packed West and Old Market Streets; the fascists stayed away and a party atmosphere prevailed.

    Even away from the focus of the demonstration there was some tension in the air, particularly where your ‘umble scribe lives in Easton, one of Bristol’s most diverse (in all senses) areas. Local shops in St Mark’s Road and the local community centre shut up early in anticipation of possible trouble, particularly as it was suspected the fascists were planning to march along Stapleton Road.

    As it happened, no march occurred either. Even if it had, there were lots of small knots of local residents keeping an eye out for trouble on the streets, especially in the vicinity of the mosque in St Mark’s Road.

    Also outside the mosque, your correspondent spotted two elderly white people sitting quietly on chairs, one holding a placard reading Bristol says no to hate. By the manner of their protest, your correspondent reckons they might have been Quakers.

    Placard on door to women's entrance to St Mark's Road mosque. It reads Bristol says no to hate

    When they left, they abandoned their placard on the women’s entrance to the mosque.

    Bristol, you should be proud of your citizens today,

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