The Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg has put a transparency portal online, heise reports. Data and documents from the city administration and publicly-owned companies are being made available in the schedule of information. The portal also comprises the data from the former Hamburg Open Data Portal. Amongst other things, the transparency portal makes available decisions by Hamburg’s Senate, minutes and resolutions, budget and management plans, policies and specialist guidelines, official statistics and progress reports, geodata, the tree protection register, environmental measurement data and commercial data.
The Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg is therefore complying with the requirements of the Transparency Law, which became effective in the city in October 2013. According to this legislation, Hamburg must publish its reports, contracts and Senate decisions on the internet. Under the previous Information Freedom Law, it only had to provide information upon request.
The Bristol Post is not renowned locally for its in-depth coverage of technology, let alone such exotic areas as crytocurrencies, but today proved an exception as it reported on the fortunes of Bristol’s only Bitcoin cash machine, which is located in Superfoods in St Stephen’s Street (review here) in the centre.
SatoshiPoint, the machine’s owners have hailed it a success after the machine processed 250 transactions and the equivalent of £38,000 in Bitcoins in the month of August alone.
SatoshiPoint’s Hassan Khoshtaghaza said: “Bristol is doing very well, in fact better than our London ATMs because there are now six of them in London so the use gets spread out. We are getting users from as far as Cardiff and Bath coming to use the machine in Bristol and our volume is increasing each month on buy and sell transactions.”
The company recently installed a Bitcoin machine in Brighton and further cities under consideration are Cardiff, Manchester and Edinburgh, plus Newcastle Airport, according to Khoshtaghaza.
SatoshiPoint’s Bitcoin machines accept £10 and £20 notes, but not debit or credit cards and users can buy anything from £10 to £1,500 worth of Bitcoins a day, at the live price plus 7% commission.
Joinup, the European Union’s public sector open source news website, reports today that MT@EC, the Machine Translation service developed by the European Commission under the ISA programme, can now also be accessed over a secure (https) internet connection; previously it was only accessible to institutions connected to the highly secure sTESTA network. The new web access now also allows public administrations that are not connected to the sTESTA network to request access for their staff.
MT@EC is currently available free of charge to all public sector organisations. Since the tool has been trained mainly on official EU documents, it can handle and translate texts and documents related to EU policy and collaboration in the 24 official EU languages better than other tools. A presentation of the MT@EC service, including screenshots of the user interface, is available as a PDF. Interested organisations have the opportunity to participate in ‘customisation pilot projects’, concerning which more information can be found in the document “ΜT for Member States: Description of pilots” (PDF).
In this 2nd major release of MT@EC, the quality of the output has been further improved by adding data from more sources and by enhancing the processing for the current 6th generation of the machine translation engines. Users can now also submit PDF files, whilst support for other formats has been improved. Furthermore, language auto-detection is now available for text snippets. Users can drag and drop files if they are using the interface through the Firefox or Chrome web browsers. Users can also choose not to receive the translated text by email for confidentiality reasons but instead download it from their personal workspace in the interface.
The European Commission (DG Translation) is organising a user conference on the machine translation service on 5th December 2014 in Brussels.
Earlier today the birth was announced of LibreItalia, which has been founded by Italian members of The Document Foundation and has the objective of bringing together all the Italian users of the free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite to speed up the adoption and promotion of the suite that is designed as a free individual productivity and office automation tool capable of closing the digital divide and breaking down the barriers to information technology for the poorest in society.
In addition, LibreItalia will promote the ODF/Open Document Format (ISO/IEC 26300) standard for official documents, which was recently adopted by the UK government (posts passim) as a template for all content, together with PDF/A.
The initial Board of Directors, which will be in post for two years, consists of seven members, five of whom are directly involved in the LibreUmbria project (which was originally established to promote the use of LibreOffice in public sector organisations in the Umbria region. Ed.): Sonia Montegiove, Chair; Marina Latini, Vice-Chair and Chief Technical Officer; Giordano Alborghetti, Treasurer; and Andrea Castellani, Alfredo Parisi, Gabriele Ponzo and Italo Vignoli, directors.
All the new association’s news about LibreOffice is featured on the LibreItalia website. To become a member of LibreItalia, you’ll need to fill in an application using the relevant form after reading the site’s About us and Articles of Association pages. The membership fee for ordinary members is a mere €10.00 (reduced to €5.00 for students) and entitles members to a libreitalia.it mailbox.
Becoming a member of LibreItalia means supporting the values of transparency, sharing and working together, the same values which characterise the original LibreUmbria project.
For more information, email info (at) libreitalia.it.
Heise reports that the major change in version from 1.48 to the newly released version 2.0 of the Calibre e-book management software are not apparent in its interface or feature list. However, on the inside the developers have converted the code to the Qt 5 GUI library and thus eliminated quite a few errors which were due to the Qt 4 library previously used. In particular, errors in text display should therefore be a thing of the past. Nevertheless, Calibre 2.0 no longer supports Windows XP and OS X versions prior to 10.7 (Lion). Anyone using these dated operating systems would be better off sticking with Calibre 1.48.
However, the developers of version 2.0 have still added some new features. The software can now also synchronise e-books under OS X with MTP mobile devices (Android phones and tablets). There is a new Mark Books tool that can be used to mark books temporarily. The mark appears as a little pushpin icon next to the book and all marks are automatically cleared by restarting calibre. A detailed version history can be seen in the changelog.
According to the official Xinhua news agency, China is hoping to launch a sovereign operating system in October in order to “wean” itself off operating systems developed abroad such as Windows, Le Monde Informatique reports. The Chinese OS, which still has no official name according to Xinhua, will be offered initially for desktop PCs, before being rolled out subsequently for smartphones. It will probably be a Linux distribution that has been revised and fixed by the Chinese security agencies and will be named China Operating System (COS). Xinhua quoted a report by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technologies (MIIT), the organisation entrusted inter alia with the regulation and development of the software sector in China. “We are hoping to launch a desktop PC operating system in October to support [local] app stores,” said Ni Guangnan of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. Mr Ni heads up the alliance for the development of the official operating system created last March in the People’s Republic of China.
According to the MIIT, Mr Ni cites the end of support for Windows XP and the ban on Windows 8 on Chinese government computers as an opportunity for the launch of a domestic OS. Earlier this year the Chinese authorities banned the use of Windows 8 on government computers, a move triggered following the end of support for Windows XP in April. Prior to that the authorities denounced Microsoft regarding the ending of security updates for the 13 year-old operating system. China was historically a bastion of Windows XP, largely due to the large-scale pirating of Microsoft software. Another reason for China’s discontent is thought to be the revelations by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
China has long disagreed with foreign technology companies, particularly Microsoft and Google – but also sometimes with Apple – as regards their impact and influence in the country. However, the animosity increased considerably last month when the Chinese anti-trust authorities raided several Microsoft offices, seizing computers and documents within the scope of their investigation. This investigation was launched following complaints made in July 2013 into the manner in which Microsoft Windows and Office are linked and the compatibility between Windows and Office.
A Red Flag base for the sovereign Chinese OS?
Screenshot of Red Flag Linux. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.China has been working on its own operating system for nearly fifteen years. Launched in August 1999, the Red Flag Linux distribution was partly financed by the government’s Information Ministry. The same year Red Flag was recommended as the replacement for Windows 2000 on all government PCs. The tensions at that time between the Chinese government and Microsoft were the origin for this directive. However, this local Linux distribution never took off and Red Flag Software, the company behind this local Chinese OS, closed down this year. However, the Red Flag OS is going to be revived.
A report published by the MIIT on 20th August states that the assets of Red Flag Software have been acquired by Penta Wan Jing Information Technology Industry Group for RMB 38.62 mn. This sudden new development was also officially recorded by Mr Ni, who approved Penta Wan Jing’s acquisition and stated that a revitalised Red Flag distribution could contribute to the project to create a sovereign operating system.
The operating system based on the Linux kernel (sometimes also called GNU/Linux. Ed.), in all its myriad forms, is 23 years old today.
It all began with an email by a young Helsinki University student called Linus Torvalds to the comp.os.minix newsgroup.
Linus’ original email is reproduced below.
Hello everybody out there using minix –
I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things).
I’ve currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work. This implies that I’ll get something practical within a few months, and I’d like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won’t promise I’ll implement them 🙂
Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)
PS. Yes – it’s free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT portable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(.
I love Linus’ modest assertion that his creation wouldn’t be big and professional like GNU! 🙂
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.
The Bristol Post is not renowned locally for its in-depth coverage of technology, let alone such exotic areas as 
Joinup, the European Union’s public sector open source news website, 
The operating system based on the Linux kernel (sometimes also called GNU/Linux. Ed.), in all its myriad forms, is 23 years old today.
RTBF.BE 