Politics | Steve Woods

Linux: suitable for business and personal use

11/11/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Politics, Tech

The Netherlands’ Nationaal Cyber Security Centrum (NCSC), part of the Dutch Ministry of Justice, has recently published a fact sheet (PDF) about Microsoft’s impending withdrawal of support for its ancient Windows XP operating system.

The fact sheet urges users to switch to more modern operating systems as alternatives, but also says some interesting things about Linux, for example:

Newer versions of Windows, such as Windows 7 are 8, are still well supported. The same is true of Linux-based operating systems like Ubuntu and Red Hat.

When it comes to operating system updates and suitable uses for operating systems, the NCSC remarks as follows:

In addition to the newer versions of Windows, there are other operating systems which are also regularly provided with updates. There are various Linux distributions which are suitable for personal and business use. Ubuntu and Red Hat are two popular examples of these. It is also possible to replace the computer itself, or you could also choose a computer with a Mac OS X operating system. These are supplied and supported by Apple. Even older versions of Mac OS X or Linux-based systems reach the “end of life” status from time to time. It is therefore also important for users of these operating systems to use a current version.

The NCSC’s main target groups for this working paper are the Netherlands’ ministries, national government councils and service organisations, Joinup reports.
Spalding Magistrates Court – an interpreting black hole?

11/11/2013 Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

Spalding Magistrates Court
The Ministry of Justice’s interpreting contract with Capita Translation & Interpreting is lurching along largely unseen by the general public, delaying and denying justice to many in contravention of Clause 40 of Magna Carta (posts passim) – one of the few clauses of that important legal document from 1215 still in effect today.

Yesterday Lincolnshire’s Spalding Guardian (not to be confused with a similarly titled, typographically challenged offering originally from Manchester. Ed.) carried not one, but two reports of interpreters who missed assignments at Spalding Magistrates Court, which only sits day per week nowadays.

Firstly, there’s the report of a 53 year-old man accused of stealing bolt croppers.

The case of a man accused of stealing bolt croppers could not be heard by Spalding magistrates because there was no interpreter present.

Secondly, the Spalding Guardian covered an adjourned drink-driving case involving a man called Piotr Nowak.

His case is due to be heard on Thursday. There was no interpreter present at last week’s hearing.

In spite of the constant stream of evidence to the contrary, the Ministry of Justice continue to assert that Capita T&I’s performance under the contract continues to improve.

By that logic 2 + 2 = 5 (at least it does in Petty France, SW1. Ed.).

Spalding may have an above average need for interpreters due to the high numbers of East European migrant workers employed in agriculture and food processing – something that must annoy the hell out of UKIP supporters.
Bring back British Rail

05/11/2013 Steve WoodsPolitics

The fifth day of November is remembered in history for more than one thing. Not only was it the day in 1605 one Yorkshireman called Guido Fawkes was arrested in the cellars of Parliament with lots of black powder, it was also the day in 1993 when Parliament passed the Railways Act.

The Act provided for the restructuring of the British Railways Board (BRB), the public corporation that then owned and operated the national railway system. A few residual responsibilities of the BRB remained with BRB (Residuary) Ltd., which was itself abolished in 2011.

The legislation enabled the Secretary of State for Transport John MacGregor to transfer separated parts of the railway to the private sector. Passenger rail services were franchised to private companies including Virgin, FirstGroup and the coach companies Stagecoach and National Express. In addition, the national railway track and signalling company Railtrack was floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1996. British Rail’s track maintenance and renewal operations were sold to private companies, with contracts to provide infrastructure services to Railtrack. The three rolling stock leasing companies or ROSCOs, owners of the passenger rolling stock, were sold to management buy-out teams.

Returning to the Act itself, it was a shambolic excuse for an act of parliament. Such was the level of tinkering involved, it became the second most amended piece of legislation in history. The Act has also been amended several times since then, most significantly by the Transport Act 2000, the Railways and Transport Safety Act 2003 and the Railways Act 2005.

However, that’s not all: it set Britain’s railway back by more than two generations.

We’re now in a situation where there’s no joined up thinking on the railway. Train operating companies have regional monopolies and if your journey involves the services of more than one operator, it’s unlikely your connecting service will be held for you to catch should your preceding train be running late.

The railways were nationalised in 1948 because the ‘Big Four’ national regional railway companies – Great Western Railway, London and North Eastern Railway, London, Midland and Scottish Railway and the Southern Railway – plus 55 other railway undertakings were making such a dreadful mess of running the rail system.

The way things were: British Railways logotype from 1956

We’re back in that state once again. We were in that state before the 1997 general election, in the run-up to which the Labour Party frequently promised to renationalise the railways, a promise upon which it then reneged once elected.

On this 20th anniversary of rail privatisation it’s appropriate to draw attention to the work of Bring Back British Rail. Founded in 2009, Bring Back British Rail strives to popularise the common-sense idea of renationalising the ludicrously over-priced and over-complicated railway system, which the people of Britain have been left with as the result of the Major government’s privatisation. Its aim is to unite disgruntled rail passengers and disheartened rail employees all over the country, to demand a re-unified national rail network run for people instead of profit.

Give it your support.
Face recognition advertising – sign the petition

04/11/2013 Steve WoodsPolitics, Tech

News broke yesterday that supermarket giant Tesco is set to install hi-tech screens that scan customers’ faces in petrol stations so that they can be fed targeted advertising. The screens will be provided by Amscreen, whose chief executive seems to think that implementing a system like “something out of Minority Report“, the dystopian science fiction film, is something of which to be proud. ( Here’s a hint for Alan Sugar’s son: that’s like recommending Nineteen Eighty-Four as a blueprint for running the United Kingdom. Ed.)

It isn’t. What is being proposed is a gross intrusion of privacy and an affront to dignity.

Naturally, this has caused a storm of outrage on social media.

Every little helps?

However, it’s not just Tesco that’s planning this. Some parts of the UK’s healthcare sector are also planning to implement it.

Fortunately, someone with some gumption and a great regard for their own and others’ privacy has set up a petition on the government’s e-petition website. The petition reads as follows:

Face recognition software is about to be used to see what adverts you are looking at. It recognises your gender, age and will be used in GP surgeries, hospitals, dentists whilst you wait for your appointment and other public areas. This is a complete invasion of privacy.

Sign the petition.

Finally, let’s not forget how George Orwell described advertising in 1936 in Keep the Aspidistra Flying:

Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket.
Capita: still lost in translation?

01/11/2013 Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

The Ministry of Justice has released statistics for the use of language services in courts and tribunals for the second quarter of 2013 (PDF).

If Capita Translation & Interpreting still has a 98% performance target for filling all requests for language services for courts and tribunals, then the fact it is only filled 92% of requests in the quarter under review – as stated by the report – means they are still failing to fulfil the terms of their contract with the MoJ.

Furthermore, the report gives figures for “off-contract” language service bookings for the first time.

“Off contract” bookings are requests for translation and interpretation [sic] services made outside the Capita TI contract. Bookings for the service are made directly by the courts and tribunals – that is, not through the language service booking portal.

In Q2 2013 – the first quarter for which data is held centrally – a total of 2,929 off contract bookings were made by criminal courts, civil & family courts and tribunals. This accounted for just under 7% of all bookings made for languages services in that period.

Just over half (51%) of these bookings were made by tribunals, with a further 48% made by criminal courts.

This blog will be keeping a close eye on the figures for “off contract” bookings in future. Any increase over subsequent quarters will mean that Capita T&I are living up to their parent company’s well-deserved nickname: Crapita.
Racist van: a load of tripe

01/11/2013 Steve WoodsMedia, Oddities, Politics

Earlier this year I blogged about the Home Office’s so-called racist van (posts passim). Yesterday along with most of the national media the BBC reported that the Home Office had admitted that just 11 illegal immigrants had left the UK as a result of its ill-advised campaign.

Although the Home Office’s efforts were ill-advised and less than successful, its use of mobile billboards has inspired their use by others like the Tripe Marketing Board, as the picture below – allegedly from Lancashire – shows.
Open data still not open enough

29/10/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Data, Politics, Tech

In the week of a major international summit on government transparency in London, the Open Knowledge Foundation has published its 2013 Open Data Index, showing that governments are still not providing enough information in an accessible form to their citizens and businesses.

The UK and USA top the 2013 Index, which was compiled from community-based surveys in 70 countries. They are followed by Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands. Of the countries assessed, Cyprus, St Kitts & Nevis, the British Virgin Islands, Kenya and Burkina Faso ranked lowest. There are many countries where the governments are less open but that were not assessed because of lack of openness or a sufficiently engaged civil society. This includes 30 countries who are members of the Open Government Partnership.

The Index ranks countries based on the availability and accessibility of information in ten key areas, including government spending, election results, transport timetables, and pollution levels, and reveals that whilst some good progress is being made, much remains to be done.

Rufus Pollock, the Open Knowledge Foundation’s CEO said: “Opening up government data drives democracy, accountability and innovation. It enables citizens to know and exercise their rights, and it brings benefits across society: from transport, to education and health. There has been a welcome increase in support for open data from governments in the last few years, but this index reveals that too much valuable information is still unavailable.”

However, even open data leaders such as the UK and USA have room for improvement: for example, the USA does not provide a single consolidated and open register of corporations, whilst the UK Electoral Commission lets down the UK’s good overall performance by not allowing open reuse of UK election data.

Furthermore, there is a very disappointing degree of openness of company registers across the board: only 5 out of the 20 leading countries have even basic information available via a truly open licence and only 10 allow any form of bulk download. This information is critical for range of reasons, including tackling tax evasion and other forms of financial crime and corruption.

Under half of the key datasets in the top 20 countries are available to re-use as open data, showing that even the leading countries do not fully understand the importance of citizens and businesses being able to use, reuse and redistribute data legally and technically. This enables them to build and share commercial and non-commercial services.
Jamaica adopts GNU Health

29/10/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech
Jamaica is to become the first country in the world to adopt GNU Health, the free and open source health and hospital administration system nationwide, Joinup reports, following the signing of an agreement between the Jamaican Ministry of Health (MoH) and GNU Solidario, a NGO supplying free software for health and education.

This will be a herculean task, demanding cross-sectoral integrations from all the regions of this country. To initiate the implementation, programmers, system administrators, physicians, nurses and health records staff, as well as other public officials gathered to participate in several meetings, workshops and focus groups. The MoH Health Informatics team itself had representatives from both the national and the regional levels, as well as health records, clinical, IT and management personnel.

After an intense week, the initial guidelines for the project were designed in order to complete the first stage by the end of this year.

GNU Health provides the following functionality:
- Health Information System (Demographics, Epidemiology);
- Hospital Information System;
- Electronic Medical Records.
In addition, GNU Health has won the Best Project of Social Benefit award from the Free Software Foundation, amongst other international awards.
Wanted: English interpreters in London

27/10/2013 Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities, Politics

The title is true and it’s a genuine item straight from the news you couldn’t make up department: Capita Translation & Interpeting, the outfit responsible for making an utter mess of the courts and tribunals interpreting contract with the Ministry of Justice (posts passim) is seeking English interpreters for assignments in the London area.

Yes, it does sound amazing, but below is a screenshot of a page from Capita T&I’s website, captured today at 4.45 pm. English is the fifth item down the list.

English speakers wanted in London? The mind boggles.

Do you have any ideas why Crapita should need English interpreters in the capital of the country where the language originated? Put them in the comments below. 🙂

Hat tip: RPSI Linguist Lounge
UK government does something right

27/10/2013 Steve WoodsBristol, Media, Politics, Tech

The UK’s dreadful, destructive coalition government has done something right – for a change.

As part of the forthcoming Local Audit and Accountability Bill, which will be debated by MPs in the House of Commons on Monday, new rights will be granted to the press and citizens to film and report council meetings, the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) has announced.

In 2012 the government changed secondary legislation to open up councils’ executive meetings to the press and public. However, this did not apply to councils’ committee meetings or full council, nor to parish councils. Eric Pickles, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, asked councils to open up their committee meetings, but many councils are still not complying. Many councils, particularly in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire are still keeping democracy behind closed doors. Some councils had even banned local residents from recording, blogging and tweeting at council meetings. Ministers believe these councils are clinging to outdated analogue ideals in a digital age.

Mr Pickles said: “An independent local press and robust public scrutiny is essential for a healthy local democracy. We have given councils more power, but local people need to be able to hold their councils to account. I want to do more to help the new cadre of hyper-local journalists and bloggers.

“I asked for councils to open their doors, but some have slammed theirs shut, calling in the police to arrest bloggers and clinging to old-fashioned standing orders.

“This new right will be the key to helping bloggers and tweeters as well as journalists to unlocking the mysteries of local government and making it more transparent for all. My department is standing up for press freedom.”

The council chamber in Bristol’s Counts Louse (aka City Hall © G. Ferguson)

Here in Bristol, the council is well ahead of Mr. Pickles. Meetings have been webcast for years and members of the public and elected councillors freely tweet proceedings from the Counts Louse.

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