Tech | Steve Woods

Debian GNU/Hurd 2013 released

22/05/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

The announcement below has been posted under the News section of the GNU website.

GNU Hurd is the GNU project’s replacement for the Unix kernel and comprises a collection of servers that run on the Mach microkernel to implement file systems, network protocols, file access control and other features that are implemented by the Unix or similar kernels (e.g. Linux).

It is with huge pleasure that the Debian GNU/Hurd team announces the release of Debian GNU/Hurd 2013. This is a snapshot of Debian “sid” at the time of the Debian “wheezy” release (May 2013), so it is mostly based on the same sources. It is not an official Debian release, but it is an official Debian GNU/Hurd port release.

The installation ISO images can be downloaded from Debian Ports in the usual three Debian flavors: NETINST, CD, DVD. Besides the friendly Debian installer, a pre-installed disk image is also available, making it even easier to try Debian GNU/Hurd.

Debian GNU/Hurd is currently available for the i386 architecture with more than 10.000 software packages available (more than 75% of the Debian archive, and more to come!).

Please make sure to read the configuration information, the FAQ, and the translator primer to get a grasp of the great features of GNU/Hurd.

Due to the very small number of developers, our progress of the project has not been as fast as other successful operating systems, but we believe to have reached a very decent state, even with our limited resources.

We would like to thank all the people who have worked on GNU/Hurd over the past decades. There were not many people at any given time (and still not many people today, please join!), but in the end a lot of people have contributed one way or another. Thanks everybody!
Know Your Place

20/05/2013 Steve WoodsBristol, Open Data, Tech
For people my age, “know your place” is synonymous with the British class system and was usually found in company with the idiom “your elders and betters“.

However, for Bristolians, Know Your Place is also a local success story, particularly as it’s somewhere one can learn about and share information about historic Bristol. It’s part of the local council website where visitors can:
- Explore historic maps of Bristol including 18th century tithe maps, late 19th & early 20th century Ordnance Survey maps, plus Ashmeads plans of central Bristol from 1828, 1855 and 1874;
- Access information from the Bristol Historic Environment Record (HER);
- View early 19th century images from the Braikenridge Collection;
- Upload your own historical information and images; and
- Comment on your area’s heritage.
My bit of Bristol as seen on Know Your Place with 1880 Ordnance Survey map overlay

Know Your Place was funded jointly by the City Council and English Heritage and was money well spent, only costing £25,000.

Since the site went live, more than 500 people have contributed their own historical information and images, but there’s still more that could be added given that the city’s history goes back to at least Saxon times.

There are now plans to expand the mapping to Bristol’s surrounding authorities, which go under the acronym CUBA – Councils that Used to Be in Avon.

You can access Know Your Place at http://maps.bristol.gov.uk/knowyourplace/?maptype=js

Finally, more good news: all layers except the base maps in Know Your Place can be re-used and the HER data is available as open data.
Lamplight from tides

18/05/2013 Steve WoodsBristol, Oddities, Tech

Despite its long and fascinating history, Bristol has had a reputation over time of being the graveyard of dreams. Some dreams assume concrete form and it is the lack of concrete – or any other building materials – that are the subject of local author Eugene Byrne’s new book ‘Unbuilt Bristol’, which is published today by Redcliffe Press at a very reasonable £15.00.

Unbuilt Bristol is described as ‘The city that might have been 1750-2050’. As regards the book’s content, Eugene writes:

While all your old favourites are there (all the other proposals for a bridge over the Avon Gorge, the insane 1960s/70s plan to fill in the Floating Harbour and cover it in roads etc.) there are plenty more which you won’t have heard of. Like the Victorian scheme to put Bristol’s main railway station in Queen Square, or a visionary 19th century plan to run the city’s street lighting using power generated by the rise and fall of the river Avon.

And it’s the latter idea – that visionary 19th century plan to run the city’s streetlights on tidal power from the Avon that forms the subject of this post.

River Avon – the power behind the city of Bristol. Picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The project to generate electricity from the Avon to run Bristol’s streetlights is described in Charles Wells’ A short history of the Port of Bristol’, which was published in 1909 and is available free from the Internet Archive. Regarding the amount of tidal power available and the fate of the project itself, Wells wrote:

…when proposals were first brought before the city for the introduction of electric light (November, 1881), Mr. Smith secured the appointment of a committee to consider an interesting scheme for utilising the great power of the tide in the river Avon for generating the electricity. Mr. Smith said he believed by this method a saving of about £6,000 per annum could be effected compared with the cost of generation in the ordinary way. Prof. Silvanus P. Thompson, who was on the staff of Bristol University College, had made calculations (upon data supplied by Mr. T. Howard, Dock Engineer) showing that the available tidal power at Totterdown was over 6 billions of foot pounds per annum, equal to 279,389 h.p. per tide. At Rownham the power was three times greater, and at Avonmouth over 2,000,000 h.p. per tide. To light by electricity the 4,274 street lamps then in the city would require from 4 billions to 2 billions of foot pounds per annum according to the system adopted. There was, however, no practical result from the appointment of the committee, and in March 1891 the Corporation voted £66,000 for the beginning of the present installation with an ordinary power station on Temple Backs.

Where it meets the Severn estuary at Avonmouth, the Bristol Avon has a tidal range of 15 m (49 ft), the second largest in the world, only being beaten by the Bay of Fundy in eastern Canada.

Given the present concerns about burning fossil fuels and carbon emissions, perhaps it is time to revisit generating electricity from the Bristol Avon, although one factor that could prove a disadvantage is the heavy load of silt sloshing up and down the river with every tide.
Amarok 2.7.1 “Harbinger” released

17/05/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech
Amarok is a great media player for the Linux platform and one I’ve used for years; and now it’s also available for Unix and Windows too.

The Amarok team announced the release of version 2.7.1, codenamed “Harbinger” on Wednesday this week. According to the following from the release announcement, it’s a release to fix one bug in particular:
The Amarok Team has discovered a very unpleasant bug in QtWebkit ↔ GStreamer interaction that made continuous playing almost impossible, due to frequent crashing. We decided to work around it in our code and take it as an opportunity to release a bugfix version. It contains a couple of other fixes we deemed important.

This version only contains some very essential fixes and changes compared to 2.7.0:
- A modification in handling MusicBrainz ID tags was needed to avoid problems with falsely duplicate tracks.
- We fixed a weird behaviour when the “Use Music Location?” question is answered “Yes” on the first run.
- We now have worked around the QtWebkit ↔ GStreamer bug that caused frequent crashes on track start; this happened if the Wikipedia applet tried to load a page containing an audio tag.
- The database is now also created if the home directory contains non-ASCII characters.
- The Nepomuk Collection now also shows track numbers.
These changes have also been incorporated into the next release – 2.8.0 – which is still in development and promises yet more fixes and enhancements.
Open source “strengthens democracy”

17/05/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech

Croatian President Ivo Josipović
Open source strengthens democracy, according to Croatian President Ivo Josipović, as reported on Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news website.

Josipović appreciates the open source community’s creative and innovative spirit and is reported as saying: “What you are doing is something good, creative and innovative”, while opening the Croatian Linux Users’ Convention 2013 in Zagreb on Wednesday 15th May. As regards democracy, the President remarked: “Most importantly, open source helps to strengthen democracy.”

President Josipović also expressed his “complete support” for the government plans to implement open source and open standards (what about open data? A stool needs three legs, not two! Ed.) in the Croatian public sector’s IT, according to the organisers of the Croatian Linux Users’ Convention.

This is not the first time that Mr Josipović has shown his support for open source and open standards (posts passim)
Be careful on Skype, Microsoft is reading your texts

15/05/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech
Anyone who uses Skype, has agreed that Skype may also read their text messages too. Heise Security has found out that Microsoft, which bought Skype in 2011 for $8.5 billion, actually avails itself of this right. At the very least https URLs sent via the chat interface receive an unannounced visit from Redmond some time later.

Heise was alerted to this by a reader who pointed out that unusual network traffic was reported after a Skype chat with colleagues. The server logs pointed to a possible replay attack. As things turned out, a Redmond IP address had accessed the https URLs that had previously been sent. The Heise Security re-enacted the situation, sending each other URLs: one of the test https URLs contained login information; the other pointed to a private file sharing cloud service. A few hours after posting the team spotted the following in the the server log files:
```
65.52.100.214 - - [30/Apr/2013:19:28:32 +0200]
 "HEAD /.../login.html?user=tbtest&password=geheim HTTP/1.1"
```
Heise Security too had received a visit from an IP address registered to Microsoft. Some readers reported in the comments that Microsoft also monitors http URLs.

When challenged about this behaviour, the company asserted that messages are scanned to filter out links to spam and phishing pages. However, the facts do not support this assertion: spam and phishing sites don’t normally lurk behind https URLs and Skype didn’t touch those. Furthermore, Skype is sending out head requests, which only the server’s retrieve administration data. Skype would have to examine the content of pages to investigate web pages for spam or phishing.

Heise’s conclusion is that anyone who uses Skype must only agree that Microsoft can use all the data transferred almost as it feels inclined to do. It must be assumed that this actually occurs and that the company will not reveal exactly what it is doing with this data.

As far back as 2008, The H Online, Heise’s English language news site, had previously drawn attention to potential eavesdropping in Skype.

Anyone concerned about their privacy and the security of their own data is therefore advised to switch their communications to a client using the open source XMMP (formerly known as Jabber) protocol and free chat programs that support it.
ISS migrates to Linux

09/05/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

Laptops for crew use on the International Space Station (ISS) are being migrated from Windows to Linux, the Linux Foundation reports.

International Space Station – now penguin-powered

The reason for the migration, given by Keith Chuvala of United Space Alliance, a NASA contractor deeply involved in Space Shuttle and ISS operations was as follows:

We migrated key functions from Windows to Linux because we needed an operating system that was stable and reliable – one that would give us in-house control. So if we needed to patch, adjust or adapt, we could.

The laptops will be running Debian and those currently running Scientific Linux, a Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone, will likewise be converted to Debian, according to ZDNet.
Snooper’s Charter: the legislation that refuses to die

09/05/2013 Steve WoodsPolitics, Tech

Yesterday the world witnessed an annual bit of Ruritanian pantomime that passes for the unwritten British constitution in action: the state opening of Parliament and the Queen’s Speech.

According to a report in today’s Guardian, it would appear that the so-called Snooper’s Charter is proving harder to kill than a particularly stubborn vampire, in spite of Nick Clegg’s recent assurances.

This emerged from the text of the Queen’s Speech which gave the go-ahead to legislation, if required, to deal with the limited technical problem of there being many more devices including phones and tablets in use than the number of IP addresses that allow the authorities to identify who communicated with whom and when.

Published at almost the same time, a Downing Street background briefing note on investigating online crime says: “We are continuing to look at this issue closely and the government’s approach will be proportionate, with robust safeguards in place.” The note also reportedly states: “This is not about indiscriminately accessing internet data of innocent members of the public, it is about ensuring that police and other law enforcement agencies have the powers they need to investigate the activities of criminals that take place online as well as offline.”

At this juncture, it’s worth pointing out that we don’t know who is advising the government, but those advisers don’t seem to realise that an IP address can never be linked to a single human being, no matter what they do.

Civil liberties organisations are also worried by the rise of the Snooper’s Charter from the grave. Emma Carr, deputy director of Big Brother Watch, said: “The Queen’s Speech is clear that any work should pursue the narrow problem of IP matching, nothing more, and does not mandate the government to bring forward a bill. It is beyond comprehension for the Home Office to think that this gives them licence to carry on regardless with a much broader bill that has been demonstrated as unworkable and dangerous by experts, business groups and the wider public. It is not surprising that some officials may want to keep trying, having already failed three times under two different governments, to introduce massively disproportionate and intrusive powers, but that is quite clearly not what Her Majesty has put forward today”.

As is also helfully pointed out by The Register, the Home Office spent the past 5 months completely rehashing its proposed Communications Data Bill following a mauling from a select committee of MPs and peers in late 2012. Consequently, it’s hard to believe that the work Theresa May’s department has done on the redrafted bill to date will not – once again – appear before Parliament and predicts it could make reappearance in the 2014 Queen’s Speech – the last one before the next general election.

So, it looks like the lobbying will have to continue, perhaps assisted by holy water, wooden stakes and garlic for more efficacy. 😉
Tomorrow is Global Accessibility Awareness Day

08/05/2013 Steve WoodsBristol, Open Standards, Politics, Social Media, Tech
We learn from Accessible Bristol that tomorrow, Thursday 9th May is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). On that day people all over the world will be coming together to spread the word about accessibility and Accessible Bristol will be among them.

Throughout the day the Accessible Bristol team be on Twitter answering your questions about technology and accessibility, as well as tweeting useful accessibility tips and resources.

Tweet your questions to @AccessibleBrstl and use the #GAAD hashtag to keep track of Global Accessibility Awareness Day activities.

However, Accessible Bristol also has a challenge for the people in Bristol and the South West for 9th May and challenge you to do at least one of the following things on 9th May:
- Go mouseless for an hour (touch screen devices don’t count);
- Surf the web with a screen reader for an hour;
- Create a captions file and share it with the video’s owner;
- Write a blog post or make a video about the way you use and experience the web.
This post originally appeared on Bristol Wireless.
Contribute to Wikimedia Commons from your smartphone

06/05/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Data, Open Source, Tech

Login screen on the Commons Android app
Wikimedia Commons is a great resource: nearly 17 mn. freely usable media files that anyone can use for any purpose and to which anyone can contribute too!

Making contributions to Wikimedia Commons is also getting easier: it’s now possible to transfer images to the Commons database from an Android or iOS smartphone using a free and advert-free mobile app. Features include the ability to view a stream of your contributions, upload multiple files and export to Commons using – if you’re on Android – that phone’s share functionality. Your images will also be tagged with the GPS co-ordinates if GPS tagging is turned on.

Wikimedia points out that by uploading your files to Commons, contributors will be doing more than if they just shared them with friends: they’ll be contributing the goal of spreading free knowledge around the world and sharing their work with billions of Wikipedia readers around the world (Wikipedia is the fifth most visited website in the world. Ed.).

The Android app is available from Google Play, whilst the Apple Store features the iOS app.

The developers also hope to add more features in future and make it easier to browse and discover all the great content Commons has to offer.

The app development team would like you to report any bugs, as well as giving them your suggestions for new features.

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