The French website Mediapart reports that at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, a technically skilled person managed to intercept 14 Members of the European Parliament and their staffers using trivial tools. (Original article behind paywall, English version, report by Der Spiegel in German.) [Update: I’ve changed “hacked” to “crack” in the title. As you’ll be Read more »
For a long time, cars were a symbol of freedom and independence. No longer. In its Zoe electric car, car maker Renault apparently has the ability to remotely prevent the battery from charging. And that’s more chilling than it sounds. When you buy a Renault Zoe, the battery isn’t included. Instead, you sign a rental Read more »
Now that we know for a fact that we’re constantly under surveillance, more people are wondering what you can do to protect yourself. Today I wrote down some thoughts in response to a post on the OKFN-discuss mailing list. Here it is, lightly edited. In order to protect your privacy, it’s important to think about Read more »
On July 9 at the Libre Software Meeting / RMLL in Brussels, we’re organising a big panel discussion on “Technology, Power and Freedom“. After the news about wide-ranging communications surveillance we’ve heard in recent weeks, this topic is arguably even more pressing than it was before. But we want to look at the long term: Read more »
There’s a great workshop coming up at the European Parliament, on “Legal aspects of Free Software”. The official link is rather understated, but the speakers are first class [Update” here’s the preliminary agenda]. They include Eben Moglen, economist and Free Software researcher Rishab Ghosh, FSFE’s very own Carlo Piana, and the project lead for Munich’s Read more »
I’m Bucharest this weekend for the Coliberator conference, organised by FSFE associate organisation Ceata. In one of my talks, I presented FSFE, and talked about things we can work on together. In the discussion that followed, we collected problems that Free Software is facing in Romania. It’s a rough-and-ready list of points, collected on a Read more »
For the second time, the European Parliament has asked its internal administration to prepare a full report on how the Parliament uses and develops Free Software. Our friends over at EPFSUG have been pushing hard for this for a long time, and we at FSFE have helped where we could: 48. Requests for the second time, Read more »
Keynote delivered at the European Parliament, Brussels, 2013-03-27 Document Freedom Day is an annual campaign to build awareness for Open Standards and interoperability. Over 50 events are taking place today around the world around this date, from Nicaragua to Taiwan to Ghana. Open Standards and interoperability help to put us in control of the technology Read more »
Microsoft just can’t avoid getting into trouble with competition watchdogs. Today, the European Commission slapped the company with a fine of EUR 561 million (ca. USD 731 million) for breaching a 2009 settlement over the bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows. Under this agreement, Microsoft promised to display a “browser choice” screen on Windows installs Read more »
Today’s the day to say “thank you” to the people who make Free Software. Obviously, I use a lot of the big, well-known products all day, every day: the GNU operating system, the Linux kernel, emacs, mutt, LibreOffice, Firefox, and so on, and I’m grateful to the thousands of people who have built these programs Read more »