Just a year or so ago, Bitcoin was weird. The digital ‘crypto-currency’ had become fairly notorious as a preferred medium of exchange for hackers, outlaws, and the most strenuous libertarians. The underlying blockchain technology—a secure, distributed database requiring no central server or owner—was earning the curiosity of radicals and visionaries who saw in it the … Read more
Who did not talk about #PanamaPapers yet ? Nobody, right ?! Now since only few medias companies have access to the leak, I was wondering how important is this leak ? To what can we compare all this huge amount of data ? Let’s go for a short visit to Panama, a virtual visit obviously, … Read more
As debate about the sharing economy rages, with fingers pointed at Uber and Airbnb as prime examples of what isn’t sharing, a global community is working toward a better world through…actual sharing. Creative Commons, the nonprofit organization that enables millions of people to share billions of creative works through a suite of free licenses, recently released its 2016-2020 organizational strategy. The … Read more
Using open source has set the city of Limerick (Ireland) free to modernise its organisation. The city merged several isolated department front-desks into one modern customer centre, with the customer relations management system and other open source solutions greatly improving service levels. Not encumbered by the limitations of proprietary licences, Limerick could customise applications to … Read more
Author’s note: Firefox landed support for multistream and renegotiation support in Firefox 38. This article talks about how the team at Jitsi Videobridge, a WebRTC service, collaborated with the Firefox WebRTC team to get Jitsi’s multi-party video conferencing working well in Firefox. In the process, several issues were identified and fixed on both sides of … Read more
A contest/editathon to be run from 1 April to 1 May 2016 in which anybody in the world can contribute, not just people in Wales. Due to people with various committments, entries are welcome throughout March too, though anything submitted before April 1 won’t count in points towards the main contest. Create and … Read more
In designing and researching new eGovernment services The push by the UK government to use more free and open source software for its eGovernment services is helping to get citizens more involved, says Bernard Tyers, a user experience researcher working for the UK’s Home Office. “Everyone can see how the design and research process works, … Read more
Last month, the European Commission officially launched the European Data Portal. The portal now hosts almost 400,000 datasets, almost twice as much as when the beta version was released last November. Here is an overview of the technical changes made since then: the Metadata Quality Assessment (MQA) has been enhanced and new graphs have been … Read more
European Research Council grants for code reviews The European Research Council (ERC) is funding several open source software research projects, including code audits, security testing and on cryptography. Each of four projects in Austria, France and Germany received just under EUR 2 million in so-called Consolidator Grants. One such grant was awarded to the code … Read more
Eric Schmidt is an influential figure, even among the parade of powerful characters with whom I have had to cross paths since I founded WikiLeaks. In mid-May 2011 I was under house arrest in rural Norfolk, about three hours’ drive northeast of London. The crackdown against our work was in full swing and every wasted … Read more
