Last week's draft Communications Bill outlines how civil servants are again intent on surveilling the internet communications of innocent British citizens. Fortunately, Free Software provides several ways with which you can protect your privacy online, regardless of the measures that the Coalition may impose upon you or your telecoms providers.
Read more »4 Steps to immunity from UK snooping laws
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Italian Province of Trentino Approves Free Software Law
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The council of the government of the autonomous province of Trentino on Wednesday morning approved a law on free and open source software and open data. The law instructs public administrations to prepare migrations plans to switch to free and open source software and to make its software applications available as open source.
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VA lays roadmap to certify VistA for meaningful use
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The US Veterans Affairs Department is preparing a roadmap toward meaningful use certification of its VistA electronic health record version that is being updated and improved in the OSEHRA open source community.
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Presidential Election TLWIR Special – Which Man Would Be Better for Free Software?
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Most geeks that I have met tend to not hold a great deal of interest in politics. We generally would prefer to spend our time solving technical problems than debating presidential politics. However, if we compare the two men fighting to be the commander-in-chief of the United States for the next four years, one has a clear advantage from a Free Software perspective.
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CIO European Parliament: free software users are important avant-garde
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The European Parliament's Free Software User Group is 'very important'. Its work helps strengthen democracy in the European Parliament. "And if you help it here, you're probably also helping it in Greece, Finland, the United Kingdom and elsewhere."
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Portuguese Government Adopts ODF as Sole Editable Document Format
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According to a press release issued today by the Portuguese Open Source Business Association, the government of Portugal has decided to approve the OpenDocument Format as the single editable, XML-based document format for use by government, and in public procurement.
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FOSS brings over €10 million savings for Munich
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Over €10 million has been saved by the city of Munich, thanks to its development and use of the city's own Linux platform. The study is based on around 11,000 migrated workplaces within Munich's city administration as well as 15,000 desktops that are equipped with a FOSS office suite.
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Majority in Bern council tells Swiss city to switch to Free Software
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A clear majority in the council of the Swiss city of Bern has voted for a switch to free and open source IT solutions. It instructs the city's IT department to make future IT purchases platform and vendor neutral and to prefer using open source solutions. This way, the council wants to rid the city of IT vendor lock-in.
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The U.K. Cabinet Office solves the open standards policy conundrum
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When an IT contract is put out for bid, a respondent that does not intend to deliver products that comply with "open standards," as defined by the Principles, must include a fair estimate of the government’s later switching costs into the vendor’s initial bid, as if those costs would need to be paid at the time of procurement rather at the time of product replacement.
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European Commission's Low Attack on Open Source
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Again, as long-suffering readers may recall, the original European Interoperability Framework also required royalty-free licensing, but what was doubtless a pretty intense wave of lobbying in Brussels overturned that, and EIF v2 ended up pushing FRAND, which effectively locks out open source - the whole point of the exercise.
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USPTO Asks For Input On Software Patents
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United States Patent and Trademark Office is reviewing its policy on software patents and is asking for feedback. Groklaw reports that the USPTO will be hosting a pair of roundtable sessions in February, during which the public will have the ability to attend and put forth their viewpoints.
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Develop a FLOSS scheduling system for VA and win $3 million
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The US Veterans Affairs Department has launched a contest with $3 million in prizes for development of a new patient scheduling system based on open source software. The VA’s chief information officer said “for the last 18 months, we have been working with the open source community to support this change in direction.”
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Norway to Push for FOSS Cash Registers
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The Norwegian Ministry of Finance wants all the existing cash registers in the country thrown out and replaced with new ones. The new ones should fulfill a list of requirements that include providing open source code.
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Belgian government to re-use EC's open source e-invoicing software
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The federal government of Belgium will implement Open e-Prior, the open source electronic invoicing software developed by the European Commission's ISA program. It should be up and running by September and should handle a quarter of all invoices sent by suppliers by June 2014.
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Falkvinge on the history of the copyright
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Rick Falkvinge, the founder of the original Pirate Party, explains the 700 years of copyright in interesting and readably short 7-part series. He sheds light on different views and how we have arrived to the current situation.
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