I received the following message from a solicitor on 10th April 2013:
“I represented a Latvian national yesterday and today in Haverfordwest Magistrates. He was produced in custody yesterday morning. His English was limited. No Latvian interpreter could be found, the DJ remanded him over night “insufficient info” until today for interpreter to be sorted. 3.00pm today we conclude the case, no interpreter, I did the hearing at the same time as typing into Google translate! The alternative would have been further depravation [sic] of his liberty (he was fined £205 including surcharge and costs for the offences before the court).”
A good example of what price competitive tendering does to the quality of a service!
The blog of The Document Foundation, the German foundation behind LibreOffice, announced the release of LibreOffice 3.6.6, the free and open source office suite for Windows, MacOS and Linux. It is described by the Foundation as a maintenance release for the 3.6 series
LibreOffice for all your office suite needs: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database, drawing and formulas
This release is aimed at businesses and individual end users who prefer stability to more advanced features (those who want more advanced features can sample LibreOffice 4. Ed.). This new release is suited to the increasing number of organisations migrating to LibreOffice, which is steadily growing worldwide.
Two days ago, the Sicuri Blog reported a serious security problem with the Social Media widget for WordPress, one of the world’s most popular open source blogging platforms.
To quote:
If you are using the Social Media Widget plugin (social-media-widget), make sure to remove it immediately from your website. We discovered it is being used to inject spam into websites and it has also been removed from the WordPress Plugin repository.
This is a very popular plugin with more than 900,000 downloads. It has the potential to impact a lot of websites.
The plugin has a hidden call to this URL: httx://i.aaur.net/i.php, which is used to inject “Pay Day Loan” spam into the web sites running the plugin.
The authors report that the malicious code was added only 12 days ago when version 4.0 of the plug-in was released and The H Online IT news site reports that the package had a change of maintainers back in January this year.
Besides removing this particular widget, users are advised to find another plug-in to replace it.
The GNOME Foundation started the Free & Open Source Software Outreach Programme for Women, otherwise known as OPW, in 2010. Many other FOSS organisations joined the programme in the January-April 2013 round. Bits from Debian, the official blog of the Debian Project, announced yesterday that Debian will also be joining in the next round of OPW from June-September and offering one internship.
OPW allows applicants to work on any kind of project, including coding, design, marketing and web development. The Debian Google Summer of Code (GSoC) projects will also be offered as possible projects for OPW, but GSoC only allows coding projects. If potential participants have any idea of a non-coding project and want to mentor one, please contact Debian on the soc-coordination mailing list adding [OPW] in subject line.
OPW works in the same way as GSoC except there’s no Google involvement. The same advice that is provided for GSoC mentors works for OPW mentors.
The main goal of OPW is to increase the number of women in FOSS, so all women who are not yet Debian developers or maintainers are encouraged to apply. There are no age restrictions and applicants don’t have to be students.
Applicants need to take the following 3 steps:
Choose a project from this list. There are actually two lists, one for GSoC and another with non-coding tasks that can be only offered by the OPW. Those lists may change over the next few weeks.
Make a small contribution to Debian. Projects will add a task the applicant must complete as part of the pre-selection process. If no task is provided, you are welcome to ask the mentors of the project. You can also make a different extra task of the one listed to show your skills and interest.
Create a page on the Debian wiki with your application. Applicants may use a pseudonym, but in that case, please give Debian about yourself privately by email to the coordinators listed on the Debian OPW page.
An interesting fact emerged today in an article in Inside Time (masthead: the National Newspaper for Prisoners. Ed.) about the mess that Capita Translation & Interpreting’s making of the interpreting contract it has with the Ministry of Justice (posts passim).
The final paragraph of the Inside Time article mentions last year’s Civil Service People Survey, according to which just 28% of MoJ staff had confidence in their senior management and only 32% said the department was well managed. Moreover, a mere 18% of staff felt changes to services were for the better and only 23% said that change was well managed.
What was even more surprising to me – and I hope to any other reasonable person – was the response of the MoJ’s spokesperson to these damning verdicts of the Ministry, as follows:
These results show that staff are growing in confidence in the leadership and management of change in the department.
What are they putting in the senior management’s and ministers’ tea at 102 Petty France, London SW1? I think we should be told.
According to its website, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community where its member organisations, a full-time staff and the public work together to develop web standards, whose mission is to lead the Web to its full potential.
These standards have so far been characterised by complete openness: all web standards are open standards.
However, these open standards are now under attack.
There’s a proposal currently before the W3C’s HTML5 Working Group to build DRM (aka Digital Restrictions Management by openistas. Ed.) into the next generation of core web standards. The proposal is called Encrypted Media Extensions or EME.
The people behind EME are the major media companies; having failed to push such illiberal measures as SOPA and PIPA through the US legislature, the Big Media moguls are now going through non-governmental channels to try to sneak digital restrictions into every interaction people have online.
Hollyweb? No thanks, W3C!
Netflix, Google, Microsoft and the BBC are all rallying behind this ludicrous proposal, which – as stated above – flies in the face of the W3C’s mission.
However, a petition has already been set up to oppose the addition of DRM to HTML5 and 3rd May 2013 has been designated the International Day Against DRM.
I’d urge everyone interested in open standards and all other forms of openness – such as open data and open source – to sign the petition; I’ve already done so.
Right at the back of the Burial Ground set into the sandstone of Redcliffe Hill itself is a small cave, now barred by a wrought iron gate, as shown in the picture below.
The Hermit’s Cave in Redcliffe, Bristol
According to the plaque to right of the entry, the cave was first used as a hermit’s habitation in the 14th century when John Sparkes (or Sparke, according to some sources. Ed.) was installed in 1346 by Thomas Lord Berkeley to pray for him and his family. The plaque continues by saying that the cave continued to be occupied by successive hermits until the 17th century.
Thomas definitely needed someone to pray for him. In 1327 Thomas was made joint custodian of the deposed King Edward II of England, whom he received at Berkeley Castle where he died, believed to have been murdered by an agent of Isabella of France (also known as the ‘She-Wolf of France’. Ed.), Edward’s wife, and Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of March (whose daughter Margaret, was Thomas’ first wife. Ed.), on 11th October 1327.
Thomas de Berkeley was tried an accessory to the murder of the Edward II by a jury of 12 knights in the 4th year of King Edward III of England, but was honourably acquitted.
The land where the hermit’s cave now stands was acquired by the Religious Society of Friends (otherwise known as the Quakers) in 1667 and used as a burial ground until 1923. The gravestones from the former burial ground are now stacked in the hermit’s cave. The earliest recorded memorial is dated 1669 and the latest 1923, whilst the ages of the dear departed range from eight months to 99 years.
According to the plaque, some well-known Bristol Quaker names are included amongst the memorials, i.e. Alloway, Grace, Harford, Houlden, Jennings, Ring, Smyth, Wall and Whitworth.
The burial ground was handed over by the Quakers to Bristol City Council in 1959 – presumably to help allow the local environment and heritage to be destroyed by the council’s highway engineers (including the demolition of the world’s first lead shot tower. Ed.).
Earlier this week The Law Society Gazette reported that the court interpreting service provided by Capita Translating & Interpreting (formerly ALS) is getting worse, contrary to the emollient assurances given to MPs by the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Minister for Victims and the Courts, Helen Grant MP, that the service is has improved and is continuing to improve.
Capita Translating & Interpreting has failed to reach its performance target after a year, resulting in delays in thousands of court cases.
Figures released by the Ministry of Justice show that the performance actually fell in January 2013 the rate of complaints about the service has increased since August 2013.
For the first year of the contract, i.e. up to 31st January 2013, Capita Translating & Interpreting’s overall success rate was 90%, compared with a target of 98% in the contract.
During the year under review, Capita Translating & Interpreting received 131,153 requests for language services; these involved 259 different languages. Eleven per cent of these requests “were cancelled by the requesting customer”, i.e. either HM Courts & Tribunal Service or the National Offender Management Service. Of the remaining 116,330 requests, 104,932 were fulfilled or the requesting customer failed to attend, equivalent to a success rate of 90%.
In its statistical bulletin, the MoJ said that “presenting a single success rate does not provide the whole picture on the changes in the operation of the contract over the first 12 months” (that sounds like an excuse to me. Ed.). In addition, the MoJ is claiming that the fall in performance coincided with the contractor reducing the mileage rate paid to interpreters and Helen Grant MP is sticking to her guns with the improbable claim that the contract with Capita Translating & Interpreting is saving taxpayers £15 mn. per annum.
Capita T&I’s performance for the year to 31.0.1.13. Source: Ministry of Justice
The council has installed ANPR cameras at its 3 recycling centres at Pixash in Keynsham Midland Road in Bath and Old Welton in Radstock to prevent callers from outside the district from using the facilities.
From 2 April 2013 you will need a FREE electronic Recycling Centre Resident’s Permit. You will not be able to use any of three our Recycling Centres with out [sic] this.
According to the council, the move is necessary as it could not afford to subsidise the cost of disposing of waste belonging to people who live elsewhere. The council also states somewhat disingenuously that residents’ council tax pays for them to dispose of their recycling, but somehow omits to state that the council earns income from selling stuff that can be recycled.
Nevertheless, it is asking its residents to sacrifice their privacy – and hence their liberty – to recycle or dispose of domestic waste.
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