RTBF.BE reported on Friday that Belgian Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo had a laptop and working notes stolen on Monday last from his official car. The public prosecutor’s office has launched an inquiry. No suspect has yet been identified and the public prosecutor’s office does not want to comment any more on the case at this stage.
According to a spokesperson for the Belgian PM, the thieves didn’t steal any secret state document or other classified information. In addition, the PM’s laptop was safeguarded by a password (shouldn’t it have been encrypted as well? Ed.).
The theft was carried out while Elio Di Rupo went to a Brussels gym in the avenue des Arts at the end of the working day after leaving the headquarters of the European Commission. His chauffeur had left the car to go to a nearby bookshop. The thieves forced open a door and broke windows to carry off the contents of the car’s boot.
Elio Di Rupo and his driver both gave statements to the police.
PSV Eindhoven supporters launched a vehement protest against the introduction of wifi at the their Philips Stadion ground during their side’s 6-1 home victory over NAC Breda in their opening game of the season, according to yesterday’s Guardian.
Fans displayed one banner reading: “F*ck Wi-Fi, support the team”. Placards with crosses running through the wifi signal were also held aloft before the match. Supporters’ groups believe the introduction of wifi is just the latest of a series of decisions by the club intended to gentrify the crowd at home matches.
However, the club’s website has a slightly different take on the introduction of wifi. The game against NAC Breda marked the test phase of the ‘Connected Stadium’ project. All visitors had free access to the internet, social media and email via the ‘PSV’ network. This is the first time in the Netherlands that a stadium has been equipped with a wifi network. The club is also asking users for feedback.
Le Monde Informatique reported on Wednesday this week that, at the end of 2013, the Société d’Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel (SETE) decided to provide a high bandwidth wireless connection for both its employees and visitors to the Eiffel Tower and more particularly for customers using the Salon Gustave Eiffel for private events. Two sites therefore had to be equipped – the public and non-public parts of the Tower itself and the company’s headquarters. Users also had to be able to move between the two sites retaining the same wifi connection.
To achieve these objectives, SETE turned to BSO Network Solutions. The infrastructure installed enables a 100 Mb/s connection with a firewall cluster managed by BSO Network Solutions. This supplier monitors all of the infrastructure from its Network Operation Centre.
The project comprises 25 wifi access points, 13 of which have already been deployed. The outstanding part of the project mainly concerns areas of the monument not open to the public in order to assist maintenance operations by engineers. The project’s overall cost has not been disclosed.
Free software for public sector organisations will become a reality, at least in the Lombardy region, according to Italy’s Today news site. An agenda item submitted by the Five Star Movement, which makes provision for promoting the use of free computer systems in the public sector, has been approved by the regional council.
“In Europe and in forward-looking Italian organisations, open source has been adopted comprehensively and is useful in saving public funds; in fact it also ensures financial savings due to the possibility of public sector organisations re-using software,” explains the Five Star Movement’s Eugenio Casalino, who presented the agenda item in the regional council.
In 2012 the Italian government did away with a grant of €40 mn. to provide Italian public sector organisations with Microsoft software.
Via its blog, The Document Foundation has announced the release of LibreOffice 4.3; this is the 8th major release of the free and open source office suite since the birth of the project in September 2010.
LibreOffice for all your office suite needs: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database, drawing and formulas
LibreOffice 4.3 offers a large number of improvements and new features, including:
Document interoperability: support for MS’ OOXML Strict, OOXML graphics improvements (DrawingML, theme fonts, preservation of drawing styles and attributes), embedding OOXML files inside another OOXML file, support for 30 new Excel formulas, support for MS Works spreadsheets and databases, as well as Mac legacy file formats such as ClarisWorks, ClarisResolve, MacWorks, SuperPaint and more.
Comment management: comments can now be printed in the document margin, formatted in a better way, and imported and exported – including nested comments – in ODF, DOC, OOXML and RTF documents, for improved productivity and better collaboration.
Intuitive spreadsheet handling: Calc now allows several tasks to be carried out more intuitively, thanks to the smarter highlighting of formulas in cells, the display of the number of selected rows and columns in the status bar, the ability to start editing a cell with the content of the cell above it and the user being fully able to select text conversion models.
3D models in Impress: support of animated 3D models in the new open glTF format, plus initial support for Collada and kmz files that are found in Google Warehouse, in order to add a fresh new look and animations to keynotes (support for this feature is currently on Windows and Linux versions only).
LibreOffice 4.3 also supports “monster” paragraphs exceeding 65,000 characters in length. This is an example of an 11 years old bug solved thanks to the modernization of the old OpenOffice source code. In addition, the accessibility technology on Windows has become a standard feature, thanks to the improvements based on IBM’s IAccessible2 framework.
The full list of new features and improvements of LibreOffice 4.3 is available on the wiki.
According to the Coverity Scan service, the quality of LibreOffice source code has improved dramatically during the last two years, with a reduction of the defect density per 1,000 lines of code from an above the average 1.11 to an industry leading 0.08. Read Coverity’s report for more information.
LibreOffice 4.3 and LibreOffice 4.2.6 – which will be released on Friday – are available for download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Extensions and templates to enhance the software’s functionality and add specific features can be found at http://extensions.libreoffice.org/.
The Document Foundation (TDF), the organisation behind the free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite, is congratulating the UK government for choosing Open Document Format (ODF), in addition to Portable Document Format (PDF) to meet user needs (posts passim).
“TDF has always been a strong supporter of ODF and a believer in open document standards”, says Thorsten Behrens, TDF Chairman. July 22 will be a date to remember as the culmination of a dream inaugurated when ODF become a ISO standard on November 30 2006. By standardising on ODF and PDF, the UK government is showing the world that it is entirely possible to find a way out of proprietary formats to enhance user freedom”.
LibreOffice supports both ODF – the suite’s native document format – and PDF (including PDF/A). Furthermore, LibreOffice can handle Hybrid PDF files, which combine the advantages of PDF and ODF by embedding a fully editable ODF document into a PDF without breaking any of the standard characteristics of both formats.
To find out if you can access the Dirty Internet via your mobile, phone your provider’s Department of Dirty customer services. Your mobile phone normally has internet filtering enabled by default.
Great news for all lovers of open standards! It’s goodbye to the ubiquitous use of MS Office formats in Whitehall; and what’s more, the government has decided not to sanction the use of Microsoft’s OOXML ‘standard’ despite lobbying by the US software giant and its supporters.
The open standards selected for sharing and viewing government documents have been announced today by the Minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude.
The standards set out the document file formats that are expected to be used by all government bodies. Central government will begin using open formats to ensure that the general public and civil servants can use the applications that best meet their needs when viewing or collaborating on documents.
The selected standards, which are compatible with commonly used document applications, are:
PDF and PDF/A or HTML for viewing government documents;
Open Document Format (ODF) for sharing or collaborating on government documents.
When government departments have adopted these open standards:
the general public, businesses and voluntary organisations will no longer need specialist software to open or work with government documents;
civil servants will be able to share and work with documents in the same format, reducing problems when shifting between formats;
government organisations will be able to choose the most suitable and cost-effective applications, knowing their documents will work for people both within and outside government (does this mean Whitehall will be moving towards using LibreOffice or OpenOffice, both of which are free of charge? Ed.).
The adoption of open standards comes in the wake of a consultation on open standards (news passim) which attracted over 500 contributions, as well as by talking directly to users.
The new standards will come into effect straight away for all new procurements subject to the HMG’s Open Standards Principles. The Government Digital Service will work with Whitehall departments to publish guidance and implementation plans.
Edward Snowden. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower who revealed the extent of internet and telecommunications surveillance by the USA’s National Security Agency and Britain’s GCHQ to the world, made a surprise appearance at the Hope X conference in New York over the weekend.
In his address, Snowden called upon geeks of the world to develop anti-surveillance technology to prevent governments spying on their citizens, stating: “You, in this room right now, have both the means and the capabilities to help build a better future by encoding our rights into the programs and protocols on which we rely on every day.”
Snowden also stated that the technology developed needed to be easy to use. “We need non-attributable communications for unattributed internet access that is easy, transparent and reliable,” he said and added that GPG, while effective, was “damn-near unusable” for the average user.
RTBF.BE reported on Friday that Belgian Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo had a laptop and working notes stolen on Monday last from his official car. The public prosecutor’s office has launched an inquiry. No suspect has yet been identified and the public prosecutor’s office does not want to comment any more on the case at this stage.
Le Monde Informatique 
Free software for public sector organisations will become a reality, at least in the Lombardy region, 
