tech

  • GnuPG’s future secure after crowdfunding success

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

    GNU PG logoGnuPG is the de facto standard implementation of the PGP standard. Anyone currently encrypting their emails as a private individual is almost always using a software package that has GnuPG under its bonnet. Since the middle of December GnuPG’s main developer has been collecting donations to enable financing of his work on the software. This was going rather slowly until last Thursday, when, helped by media reports of the project’s plight, main GnuPG Werner Koch and his fellow developers succeeded in raising the required €120,000 within one day, German IT news site heise reports.

    The software’s development will therefore be fully financed for the current year for the first time. In addition, Facebook and payment processor Stripe have both stated their readiness to subsidise its development with $50,000 per year each and The Linux Foundation has given Koch a one-off donation of $60,000. Even the German Federal Office for Security & Information Technology (Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik – BSI) is intending to support the GnuPG project. This was announced via German computer periodical c’t. It is believed the BSI has given the project similar support in the past.

    Explaining its decision, Facebook stated:

    We think it’s important to have a diverse family of software that can stand the test of time, and this is a great opportunity to support such a project. GnuPG was started 17 years ago, and we hope it keeps improving for years to come.

  • Greenwash Capital moves to non-existent website

    Steve WoodsBristol, Oddities, Tech

    In a new move Bristol City Council has started advertising websites for non-existent domains as part of its tenure as European Green Capital 2015.

    I’m indebted to Redvee for the photograph below.

    sign for a non-existent solar park and website

    Not only does the solar park itself not exist, neither does the domain shown on the sign, as a simple whois search reveals.

    whois search for lawrencewestonroadsolarpark.co.uk

    I wonder how much money has been wasted on the publicity for a non-existent solar park and its accompanying (and equally non-existent) website.

    Would anyone from Bristol City Council care to comment?

    Update 02/02/2015: a subsequent whois search today revealed that the domain in question was registered by a PR person working for Bristol City Council this morning and that the registrant contact details are currently awaiting validation.

  • “Most beautiful” LibreOffice 4.4 released

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

    The Document Foundation has announced the release of LibreOffice 4.4, billed as “the most beautiful LibreOffice ever“.

    This is the ninth major release of this leading free and open source office suite, with a significant number of design and user experience improvements.

    LibreOffice 4.4 infographic
    LibreOffice 4.4 infographic. Click on the image for the full-sized version.

    “LibreOffice 4.4 has got a lot of UX and design love, and in my opinion is the most beautiful ever,” says design team leader Jan “Kendy” Holesovsky. “We have completed the dialog conversion, redesigned menu bars, context menus, toolbars, status bars and rulers to make them much more useful. The Sifr monochrome icon theme is extended and now the default on OS X. We also developed a new Color Selector, improved the Sidebar to integrate more smoothly with menus, and reworked many user interface details to follow today’s UX trends.”

    LibreOffice 4.4 likewise offers several significant improvements in other areas, such as:

    • Support of OpenGL transitions in Windows and improved implementation based on the new OpenGL framework;
    • Digital signing of PDF files during the export process;
    • Installation of free fonts Carlito and Caladea to replace the proprietary Microsoft C-Fonts Calibri and Cambria, to get rid of font related problems while opening Microsoft’s proprietary format OOXML files;
    • The addition of several new default templates designed by volunteers;
    • Visual editing of Impress master pages, to remove unwanted elements, adding or hiding a level to the outline numbering and toggling bullet points on or off;
    • Better Track Changes – with new buttons in the Track Changes toolbar – and AutoCorrect features in Writer;
    • Improved import filters for Microsoft Visio, Microsoft Publisher and AbiWord files, as well as Microsoft Works spreadsheets;
    • New import filters for Adobe Pagemaker, MacDraw, MacDraw II and RagTime for Mac;
    • Greatly expanded support for media capabilities on each platform.

    A complete list of new and improved features is available in the release notes.

    LibreOffice 4.4 is available immediately for download from http://www.libreoffice.org/download/.

    I’m looking forward to the new release being available in the Debian Jessie software repositories in the next few days. 🙂

  • OpenStack Debian image available

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

    OpenStack logoDebian developer Thomas Goirand has announced on his blog that a Debian disk image of the free and open source OpenStack cloud computing software platform is now available from Debian at cdimage.debian.org.

    Thomas writes:

    About a year and a half after I started writing the openstack-debian-images package, I’m very happy to announce to everyone that, thanks to Steve McIntyre’s help, the official OpenStack Debian image is now generated at the same time as the official Debian CD ISO images. If you are a cloud user, if you use OpenStack on a private cloud, or if you are a public cloud operator, then you may want to download the weekly build of the OpenStack image from here:

    http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/openstack/testing/

    Note that for the moment, there’s only the amd64 arch available, but I don’t think this is a problem: so far, I haven’t found any public cloud provider offering anything else than Intel 64 bits arch. Maybe this will change over the course of this year, and we will need arm64, but this can be added later on.

    Now, for later plans: I still have 2 bugs to fix on the openstack-debian-images package (the default 1GB size is now just a bit too small for Jessie, and the script exits with zero in case of error), but nothing that prevents its use right now. I don’t think it will be a problem for the release team to accept these small changes before Jessie is out.

    When generating the image, Steve also wants to generate a sources.tar.gz containing all the source packages that we include on the image. He already has the script (which is used as a hook script when running the build-openstack-debian-image script), and I am planning to add it as a documentation in /usr/share/doc/openstack-debian-images.

    Last, probably it would be a good idea to install grub-xen, just as Ian Campbell suggested to make it possible for this image to run in AWS or other Xen based clouds. I would need to be able to test this though. If you can contribute with this kind of test, please get in touch.

    Feel free to play with all of this, and customize your Jessie images if you need to. The script is (on purpose) very small (around 400 lines of shell script) and easy to understand (no function, it’s mostly linear from top to bottom of the file), so it is also very easy to hack, plus it has a convenient hook script facility where you can do all sorts of things (copying files, apt-get install stuff, running things in the chroot, etc.).

    Again, thanks so much to Steve for working on using the script during the CD builds. This feels me with joy that Debian finally has official images for OpenStack.

    I’m a great fan of Debian GNU/Linux (byline: the universal operating system. Ed.), having used it or its derivatives (e.g. Ubuntu, Mepis) as my main operating systems since my wholesale move to free and open source software.

  • Introducing the biometric wireless keyboard powered by keystrokes

    Steve WoodsOddities, Tech

    Georgia Tech's wireless keyboardResearchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the USA are behind a project to develop a wireless keyboard powered by keystrokes, Le Monde Informatique reports. The force generated by the fingers can produce enough electrical current for a wireless connection. To convert mechanical energy into electricity, the researchers applied a coating which acts as an electrode on keystrokes. The small electrical charged produced is stored in a lithium-ion battery which powers the interface wirelessly.

    However, during their work, the researchers have thought of another use which could have a much wider impact. Over 100 volunteer testers typed the word “touch” on the keyboard and a software package collected data on the pressure exerted on the keys and measured the time interval between each stroke. It proved to be that these measurements are particular to each individual. By using signals analysis techniques, they identified touch patterns unique to individuals with a low error rate to achieve a kind of biometric authentication.

    A marketable product in 2 years

    In a telephone call, Professkr Zhong Li Wang of the School of Materials Science and Engineering at Georgia Tech, stated that these patterns enable a “unique personal measurement” to be defined.

    This keyboard, which uses standard materials, would be cheap to develop, Professor Wang stressed. The keys are not mechanical, but made up of transparent films stacked vertically to produce electricity. His team is still working on making the keyboard more reliable, but he believes this product could be marketed in just under two years. What happens if a person breaks a finger or changes his typing rhythm? Professor Wang states that a second authentication mechanism is a definite requirement.

  • Erasmus Prize for Wikipedia Community

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Open Source, Tech

    Wikipedia logoWhen Wikipedia came online in January 2001, no-one could have have imagined its subsequent development. Fourteen years later, innumerable authors have produced more than 34 million articles in 280 languages. The Wikimedia Foundation attracts 20,000 mn. hits on the online encyclopaedia and its sister projects, heise reports.

    This success is now being recognised by the Dutch-based Praemium Erasmianum foundation with the noted Erasmus Prize. Part of the citation reads: “By distributing knowledge to places where it was previously unavailable, Wikipedia also plays an important role in countries where neutrality and open information are not taken for granted. With its worldwide reach and social impact.”

    Each year the Praemium Erasmianum foundation recognises people and institutions for their services. The prize will be handed over to representatives of the Wikipedia community in the autumn, while the prize money of €150,000 is to be used for community development.

    In the meantime, the Wikimedia Foundation must grapple with future strategy. As Foundation Trustee Phoebe Ayers recently explained on her blog, the online encyclopaedia’s readership has clearly declined, particularly in industrial countries. Even sharply rising mobile access figures cannot compensate for the loss. The number of authors has also been declining steadily for several years. The Wikimedia Foundation is investing in a more attractive platform that’s also easier to use to counteract this trend.

  • FSFE stickers tell truth about cloud computing

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

    As with all other fields of human activity, IT is not immune from fads and fashion.

    One of the recent fads has been for so-called cloud computing.

    Wikipedia describes cloud computing (often truncated to just the cloud. Ed.) as follows:

    Cloud computing is a recently evolved computing terminology or metaphor based on utility and consumption of computing resources. Cloud computing involves deploying groups of remote servers and software networks that allow centralized data storage and online access to computer services or resources. Clouds can be classified as public, private or hybrid.

    However, almost from the outset, cloud computing has been heavily criticised by free software advocates such as the Free Software Foundation’s founder, Richard Stallman.

    The latest effort to counteract the cloud computing hype comes from the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), which has just produced a sticker that tells the simple truth about the cloud.

    sticker text reads there iks no cloud just other people's computers

    That’s right! Other people’s computers, although in this case the people or persons are likely to be juridical persons, i.e. corporations.

    The stickers can be ordered from the FSFE (scroll down until you find them) and a small donation to its work would be appreciated in return.

  • City of Munich joins The Document Foundation Advisory Board

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

    TDF logoIt’s been announced that the City of Munich has joined the Advisory Board of The Document Foundation (TDF) the non-profit foundation steering the development of LibreOffice, the leading free and open source office productivity suite.

    On the TDF’s Advisory Board, Munich’s city council will be represented by Florian Haftmann. Back in 2003, the city of Munich – the capital of Bavaria and Germany’s third largest city – launched the LiMux Project to migrate their software systems from closed-source, proprietary products to free and open-source software. The project was successfully completed in late 2013. The City of Munich has hosted a LibreOffice HackFest since 2011 to improve LibreOffice’s features aimed at enterprise environments.

    “The city of Munich is a healthy reference for every migration to free software and as such will add a significant value to our Advisory Board, where it will seat side by side with MIMO, representing the migration to LibreOffice of French Ministries, and with other companies providing value added services on top of LibreOffice,” says Thorsten Behrens, Chairman of The Document Foundation. “Doctor Florian Haftmann will be introduced to other members of TDF Advisory Board during next planned meeting, on January 15, 2015.”

    With Munich’s addition, the TDF Advisory Board now has 17 members: AMD, CIB Software, City of Munich, CloudOn, Collabora, FrODeV (Freies Office Deutschland), FSF (Free Software Foundation), Google, Intel, ITOMIG, KACST (King Abdulaziz City of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia), Lanedo, MIMO (Consortium of French Ministries), RedHat, SPI (Software in the Public Interest), Studio Storti and SUSE.

    Reposted from Bristol Wireless.

  • WiFi coming soon to French TGV trains?

    Steve WoodsTech

    After years of tests, the French state railway operator SNCF is going to launch an invitation to tender to equip its TGV (high-speed train) carriages with WiFi, Le Monde Informatique reports. There’s light at the end of the tunnel for the travelling public.

    picture of 3 TGV trains
    Three TGV trains at Paris Gare de l’Est. Picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

    On Friday’s France Inter breakfast programme, Axelle Lemaire, the Secretary of State for Digital Affairs encouraged SNCF to deploy WiFi quickly on TGV lines. An invitation to tender to provide internet access will be launched very shortly under the aegis of SNCF’s digital strategy. The railway company has been testing a service using a flat satellite antenna on the roof of some carriages for several years. In June 2007, SNCF was reported to be working together with Colubris Networks. In December 2007, the firm was testing a WiFi service on TGV services to eastern France. There has since been lots of public relations exercises, but nothing definite for passengers.

    If passengers are growing impatient waiting for the arrival of WiFi on TGV services, this is also because the service has already been available for many years on Thalys and EuroStar trains providing international services. SNCF’s immobility is once again being blamed on the cost of deployment: €350,000 would be needed to equip one TGV carriage. Asked whether the service would be free for passengers, the Secretary of State stonewalled expertly hoping “that the recent increase in SNCF’s fares will include the costs of deploying WiFi”, adding her wish that “using the WiFi would be without additional charge for passengers”.

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