Free Software Linux

Some suspicious lack of transparency here: The Italian open source advocacy group Associazione per il Software Libero is protesting two memoranda of understanding (MOU) signed this summer by the Italian government and Microsoft. The group last week published a public protest letter. The association explains that over the past three months it has in vain tried to raise the issue with the minister of public administration and innovation, Renato Brunetta. "We now publish this letter to get his attention on the benefits of open source software."

One of the fundamental rules in an open, democratic society is that government must be transparent to be truly accountable: if you can't see who is doing what, there's no hope of fingering the wrong-doers. Against that background, this is a huge slap in the face of the European Union's citizens: Marco Cappato MEP asked the Council to provide him the contract concluded by the Council and Microsoft, and the Study on the Open Source realized by the interinstitutional committee on informatics in 2005. ...

This is really cool. One of the great things about Wikipedia is that you can see who has made edits: this makes the process of accumulation transparent - in theory. In practice, it's often too hard to see the wood for the trees. Enter WikiDashboard, which offers a visual representation of the editing process: The idea is that if we provide social transparency and enable attribution of work to individual workers in Wikipedia, then this will eventually result in increased credibility and trust in the page content, and therefore higher levels of trust in Wikipedia.

It has for long been argued — in several different places in fact — that one of the principal adoption barriers for Free software to face is corruption. The obstacles to clear are not purely technical.

Windows only: Free transparency utility Blend isn't like a lot of other see-through window hacks for Windows, and that's a good thing. The system tray utility takes up very little memory (3 MB or...

If any area of human activity cries out for openness, it is the political process. In particular, if want to institute e-voting, you'd be mad not to opt for open source and its associated transparency. Or, to put it another way, you'd be nuts not to follow Brazil's fine example: The Tribunal Superior Eleitoral (the brazilian Election Supreme Court), officially announced on April 4th, 2008, that the brazilian 2008 elections will use 430 thousand electronic voting machines migrated from VirtuOS and Windows CE to GNU / Linux and open source softwares for security and auditing defined by proper law. All open source and in-house developed software will be digitally signed and all loaded software will may be verified at voting places by inspectors at any time to check against tampering. Special measures will be taken to reduce risks of breaking in by crackers, like no direct network connection to internet. Random voting machines will be audited by TSE, political parties and external auditors.

It is often said that 3 things make a 'trend' in the modern world, so here are 3 very sneaky browser bugs triggered by 3 different Drupal modules that have crossed my path in the last few weeks, all (it turns out) quite likely related. Here they are, in the hope that if you see something similar you might be able to locate the problem a little more rapidly. read more