Further, after the last post, BT futurologist says we’re living in science fiction. And what particular works does she mention? Blade Runner, Judge Dredd and Solyent Green. Well. In the world of Halting State, meanwhile, the Germans have had a wee probby with their electronic health cards. Partly it’s due to a reasonably sensible design;…
Read More i’ve got the key, i’ve got the secret…whoopsOK, so some more Symbian-related whining. I’ve discovered Ensymble, the pythonic package that turns your .py scripts into SIS Symbian packages and signs them. Great. And then you can send the package to Symbian Signed Online and get them signed. Great. And here’s a useful map from Nokia showing which capabilities require which forms of…
Read More yet more symbian whiningSomething else that came up at OpenTech; is there any way of getting continuing information out of the government? This is especially interesting in the light of things like Who’s Lobbying? and Richard Pope and Rob McKinnon’s work in the same direction; it seems to me that the key element in this is getting information…
Read More why is there no enduring FOIA request?So what do we need to know about a parliamentary bill? First of all, as soon as a piece of legislation is published, it has certain meta-data. Date originated; originating department; originating MP; originating house; type – primary legislation, order in council, statutory instrument; current status (pre-legislative/Green/White Paper, first reading, committee, report, second, third, Royal…
Read More free our bills: hardcore wonk/geek outOpenTech blogging…after this morning’s MySociety brainstorm on the specifications for MPs’ expenses and tracking bills through Parliament, I’m concerned that we’re going to end up with the best imaginable system for monitoring public employees’ expenses, and miss some absolute horror of a thing while our attention is elsewhere. (Is that the latent content of Heather…
Read More a package manager for Westminster 1.4OK, so the Iranian police – well, the Basij, the IRGC, the spooks, the cops, the repressive state apparatus anyway – are publishing photos of demonstrators on the Web and trying to crowdsource the job of identifying the faces on their CCTV tapes. It says here. And, indeed, here they are. Now, this is obviously…
Read More stars of CCTVIt’s the kind of day on the Holloway Road that rappers get mawkish about. So, obviously, time for some blogging about open-source software for the public sector. I’m hugely impressed by the contestants in the SourceForge Community Contest, specifically the ones in the Government category. There’s Trisano, a free epidemic surveillance system for public health…
Read More irrigating Senegal with free softwareIt’s that time again: OpenTech is next Saturday. I’m not presenting anything, which will leave me more time to argue about random things in the ULU bar. But I’m especially keen to do this with readers, and anyone who’s interested in the political uses of Asterisk, starting out with Ardour, which I’ve just installed, and…
Read More admin: opentechArbor Networks has a great post with data on Iranian Internet censorship. As well as the deliberate transit shortage, they seem to be targeting specific protocols, notably SSH, the secure shell protocol one uses to administer servers and also quite often to provide a VPN tunnel. This isn’t surprising, really, but it is depressing; practically…
Read More spamWe keep hearing that the Iranian government, or at least one of the competing centres of power within it, is trying to jam satellite TV downlinks and harassing the owners of satellite dishes. The BBC World Service and Al-Jazeera have reportedly both been targeted, specifically as they both use one of the HotBird satellites over…
Read More satellite’s gone, way up to Mars…