At 11AM (all times given in this article are UTC+1) later today, the 32nd Chaos Communication Congress (32C3) will kick off its four day stint of hacker-related talks. Past Chaos Communication Congress (CCC) events have been the host to quite a few famous people and groups in the technology world including the ‘fail0verflow’ team, a … Read more
Blockchain is an open source project supported by the Linux Foundation and twenty industry partners to develop an open source distributed ledger platform. The Linux Foundation has partnered with twenty companies on a major collaborative project called Blockchain, which aims to build an open source distributed ledger system and enable Bitcoin-like transactions for the business … Read more
Government emphasises open standards and urges use of liberating alternatives Sweden’s public administrations should use open IT standards and software “that frees the state administration from dependence on single technical solutions”, the government writes in its note on ICT, part of its 2016 budget plan. “For eGovernment solutions, IT standards will play an increasing role … Read more
Apache Spark When it comes to open source big data processing, Hadoop is no longer the only name in the game. Apache Spark is a general purpose distributed data processing tool that allows users to process gigantic datasets across many nodes, coordinating the processing so that users can concentrate on writing their queries in their language … Read more
There are two processes in the public sphere that we all depend on but that few of us really understand. And what’s worse is that both are in trouble. The first is the process of funding public projects. Public financing often involves a mix of taxation and the issuance of bonds or federal grantmaking to … Read more
Image: Jack Wallen For the longest time I’d been heralding Ubuntu and it’s Unity desktop as one of the best Linux distributions. I liked Unity…a lot. The design was beautiful, and workflow about as efficient as you would ever find. The Dash, the Launcher, the HUD…they all came together in a perfect storm of form … Read more
Image: Jack Wallen Let me just put this out there for your consideration. All platforms are insecure. They can all be exploited in one way or another. At some point in time, it will be announced that no operating system is invulnerable and every single one of them has their kryptonite. Every. Single. One. Windows. … Read more
Consultation on anti-corruption resource package This document summarises an initial plan for the development of a companion resource to the International Open Data Charter, and invites comments, feedback and contributions to shape the draft resource, to be developed over the first half of 2016. You will find a number of consultation questions (Q) in … Read more
A few days ago, Tom Steinberg—the founder and former director of mySociety—wrote a fascinating piece on power that was meant for people developing civic technology. In a post on Medium, Tom clearly describes the nature of power as it relates to technology and implored civic technologists to think more directly about how shifts in power … Read more
People who work in digital technologies don’t tend to talk a lot about power, except perhaps in relation to our ever-depleting smartphones. But if your goal in deploying modern technologies is even partly to make the world a better place, rather than solely increase the size of your Exit, sooner or later you’ll need to … Read more
