open...

Far too few people know about LibriVox : LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files back ...

Another brilliant essay on security from Bruce Schneier. It's all well-worth reading, but here's the nub: If universal surveillanc...

One of the (few) advantages I enjoy over Bill Gates is that I can walk down the street without people recognising me. Not for much longer:...

As I've noted many times, one of the big benefits of deploying open source is freedom from lock-in: using open formats that anyone can i...

If you needed proof that the UK government simply hasn't thought through the implications of its Digital Economy Bill, look no further t...

An important document about ACTA has been leaked. It's in Dutch, but Jan Wildeboer has kindly provided a translation . It's worth ...

It is well known that an old PC, underpowered for ever-more greedy Windows versions, will generally run GNU/Linux without a problem. This m...

We tend to think of free software as (mostly) new, so the fact that Apache celebrated its 15th birthday yesterday seems pretty extraordinary...

Here's a particularly stupid move by Amazon: Microsoft Corp. today announced that it has signed a patent cross-license agreement with A...

One of the pernicious effects of the highly-successful campaign to re-brand intellectual monopolies as "intellectual property" is ...

Now this is rum. A little while back, there was a petition on the 10 Downing site: “We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to abando...

Remember the browser ballot screen that Microsoft agreed to add as part of its settlement with the EU over competition issues? It's happ...

I've written about the growing interest in HTML 5 a couple of times, and there is a parallel discussion around the role, if any, of Flas...

As I've noted before, in ACTA governments and the content industries are pushing the Big Lie that swapping copyrighted materials is lin...

I love travelling by train. In my youth, I bought Interail passes for many years, and basically lived on trains for a month, wending my way...

In the famous online argument between Linus and Minix creator Andrew Tanenbaum during the very early days of Linux, one of the more memorabl...

Since I have been banging on about the need for open data in science for some time, you won't be surprised to learn that I am in agreeme...

If, like me, you were wondering where on earth (and atmosphere) we now stood with climate science in the wake of recent events, here's t...

As you may have heard, last week there was a bit of kerfuffle over Google's Buzz and its implications for privacy. And Google has respon...

Readers with a taste for high comedy may remember my post “Why SAP is Such a Sap over Software Patents”, which rather took to task a certain...

It has been a sad spectacle to see the British Library – without doubt once the greatest library in the world, and hence a powerful force fo...

I'd never heard of the UK government's Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), but that's not surprising, since ...

Now here's an idea : Computer code is also at the heart of a scientific issue. One of the key features of science is deniability: if you...

I missed this story when it first came out, which is a shame, because it's an important revelation of what the current mad mix of surve...

Regular readers of this blog will know that I'm a big fan of OpenOffice.org, and that I think it has the potential to break through into...