Archive for the ‘news & announcements’ Category
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Media Freedom and Information Access Practicum (MFIA) at Yale Law School filed a friend-of-the-court brief today urging the Illinois Court of Appeals to block the unmasking of an anonymous online critic of a local political candidate.
The critic, commenting on a story on the website of a suburban Chicago newspaper called the Daily Herald, engaged in a heated debate with other commenters. One turned out to be the son of the village trustee candidate in Buffalo Grove, Illinois, who was discussed in the article. The candidate, Lisa Stone, who eventually won her race, asked a state court to order the newspaper to release the critic’s name and address without appropriately showing that the statements directed towards her son were defamatory or otherwise illegal. Stone indicated that she may choose to subsequently file a lawsuit once she determines the critic’s identity through the pre-complaint procedure.
Household network communications is developing so quickly that it is necessary to adapt and change in order to take advantage of the new services and meet the broadband needs that they require. With this objective, a group of UC3M researchers have presented a new proposal for architecture for Residential Gateway or RGW, which is a device that connects a residential communications network with an access network from any server. This work, recently published in the journal, Computer Networks, is a pioneer in the field, according to the authors.
“Other research focuses on defining which functionalities a Residential Gateway should have, while ours is aimed at facilitating the way to implement them and making them more flexible,” asserted one of its authors, Jaime García Reinoso, Professor at the UC3M Department of Telematics Engineering.
The government of Galicia, one of Spain’s autonomous regions, wants to boost the use of free and open source software by its public administrations and citizens. The regional ministry for Modernisation and Innovation aims to bring together its previous initiatives on open source, it explains in a statement published on 27 January.
Previous initiatives on free and open source software have not yet resulted in an increased uptake by public administrations, companies or citizens, writes the ministry. “These actions were isolated and lacked coordination and an overall strategy.”
At least three open source projects in the Czech Republic are working to allow platform independent access to the government’s electronic message service. The mandatory service, called ‘Datove schranky’ (Data boxes) is currently only accessible on computers running Microsoft’s proprietary operating system.
The open source development projects started following an appeal by a group of 25 Czech companies and individuals. The group called on the government to make Datove schranky accessible to all computers and devices. According to the AbcLinuxu (‘the ABC of Linux’) website, the group has now raised 85000 CZK (about 3200 Euros), which it wants to award to the first open source project that offers platform independent access.
The ministry of infrastructure and transport in Valencia, one of Spain’s autonomous regions, last week began migration of three of its open source Geographic Information Systems (GIS) applications and projects to the European Union’s Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR).
The applications, gvSIG Carreteras, gvSIG Sandbox and gsSIG Mobile, are currently hosted on the gvSIG software development site of the ministry in Valencia or on a development website hosted by the Polytechnic University of Valencia.
Chips that can simulate a supernova or predict a hurricane are yesterday’s goal, if Intel’s recently unveiled 48-core research chip is any indication. Today’s goal is squeezing all the simple but extensive work of a data center onto a single chip. Big IT firms have huge, sophisticated networks of servers, says Justin Rattner, Intel’s chief technology officer and director of Intel Labs. But ”they’re not computing the mass of a proton,” he says. ”They’re searching for the needle in a haystack.”
In response to the need for better, faster data mining, Intel Labs has developed what it’s calling a single-chip cloud computer. The 1.3-billion-transistor research chip, the company reported yesterday at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference, consists of 48 Pentium-class IA-32 cores formed into a network of 24 tiles. Each tile has two cores plus one router to allow intercore communication. The keys to its efficiency at handling needle-in-a-haystack-type tasks are two new software-based techniques: one for rapidly transferring data between its many cores and the other for controlling the power those cores consume.
Another Big Win for EFF’s Patent Busting Project
San Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has won reexamination of an illegitimate patent on voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP) that could cripple the adoption of new VoIP technologies.
A company named Acceris Communications Technologies, now C2 Communications Technologies, was awarded the bogus patent for hardware, software, and processes for implementing VoIP using analog telephones as endpoints — covering many telephone calls made over the Internet. EFF and the law firm Fenwick & West LLP filed a reexamination request showing that both a prior patent and published reference materials described the underlying technology long before Acceris made its claim. Today the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) granted EFF’s reexamination request, ruling that there were substantial new questions of patentability. Continue reading.
Several public administrations in Spain are sponsoring the development of Zorb, an open source extension to Nagios, an open source network monitoring tool. Zorb allows users to fine-tune the processing of events generated from the monitored instances, hosts and services. Zorb has just been published on the OSOR Forge.
The development of Zorb is made possible with the help of Cenatic, the Spanish government’s resource centre on open source and open standards,the government of Tenerife and the public administration of the city of Benicasim.
The Danish parliament and the Danish minister for Science this morning agreed that the Danish state administrations should use open standards, including the Open Document Format (ODF), starting on 1 April 2011. A formal vote on the agreement is planned for next Tuesday.
Talking to the Danish parliament this morning, Science minister Helge Sander said he was proud that many countries are anxious to see how Denmark will use open standards, reports the Danish IT news site Version2.
Sander said: “My ambition is that we now only communicate using open standards. We must not make this decision on purely symbolic arguments and principles. It must be a practical decision.”
Wine makers in Spain will soon be able to use the gvSIG open source geographic information services developed in a large part with the help of several of Spain’s public administrations.
The gvSIG association announced on 18 January to start working together with a Spanish provider of commercial GIS services. The two will develop and introduce GIS applications allowing wine makers to use GPS, remote sensing and infrared sensors to monitor their production.
The Polish Police force wants to increase its use of free and open source software in order to cut costs, announces Andrzej Trela, Deputy Chief of Police and responsible for logistics, in an interview in the Police force’s monthly newsletter, published on 15 January.
The Deputy Chief expects moving to open source will not be that difficult. There are only slight variations between proprietary and open source applications and these will be clear to the vast majority of users, he says. “Too often we think we need these proprietary applications, even though we only use about five percent of all that they can do.”
Last week the MPAA and RIAA submitted their comments in the FCC’s net neutrality proceeding. As anticipated in EFF’s comments, the big media companies are pushing for a copyright loophole to net neutrality. They want to be able to pressure ISPs to block, interfere with, or otherwise discriminate against your perfectly lawful activities in the course of implementing online copyright enforcement measures.
Of course, the MPAA and RIAA couch this in language intended to sound inoffensive. The RIAA says “the perfect should not be the enemy of the good” and “justice often takes too long.” The MPAA chimes in that “it is essential that government policies explicitly permit—and encourage—ISPs to work with content creators to utilize the best available tools and technologies to combat online content theft.”
The Commissioner-designate Neelie Kroes wants the public sector to increase its use of open standards, she said in her appearance before a European Parliament committee on 14 January.
“Digital society depends on open standards and interoperability, and with this in mind, public organisations must practise what they promote. If they don’t use open standards, why should citizens? I will pursue this from local authorities up to the European institutions.”
Open standards have been made mandatory for the IT systems of Hungary’s public administrations. The Hungarian parliament voted in favour of amendments prescribing open standards, to a law on electronic government services, on 14 December. The changes received 197 votes in favour, one against and 146 abstentions, according to the Open Standard Alliance, a Hungarian advocacy group that lobbyed in favour of the amendments.
The changes to the law intend to make electronic services by public adminstrations accessible to all, by prescribing the use of IT standards that are publicly accessible and without any restrictions such as royalties.
