Well, it's not often I get to completely influence the UK Government's approach to open standard. GOV.UK is adopting .ODF as their official document standard! All documentation will be also made available in HTML & PDF. Sweet! Yeah, yeah, so I only played a small part in the (no doubt) hideously complicated process - but I'm happy to take full credit :-) Last year, the UK Government opened…
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This is part 4 of a series of blog posts looking at the security of the UK Government's web infrastructure. Over the last few days, I've shown that hundreds of websites run by branches of the UK state are in a perilous state of disrepair. There are multiple sites with hugely embarrassing XSS flaws, running ancient and unsecured software, languishing unmaintained and long since abandoned. What …
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Cyber Security is of vital national importance. As the United Kingdom places more of its infrastructure onto the Internet, bugs and glitches go from minor inconveniences to full scale national emergencies. Suppose, for a moment, that a hacker were to interrupt payment processing for banks, or tamper with the UK's water supply, or cut off the phone lines. The economic damage alone could run…
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The BBC is reporting that the Government is so afraid of prisoners having access to concealed mobile phones, they want to introduce a ban. UK officials are considering banning the sale of small mobile phones designed to resemble car key fobs. A government spokesman told the BBC that it was discussing the issue with the National Trading Standards Board and the Serious Organised Crime Agency. It …
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David Cameron wants to block certain "pornographic" search terms. He joins a long list of MPs who simply don't understand what they're talking about - like Claire Perry, Andy Burnham, and Helen Goodman. I've talked before about my time working as an "Adult Material Classifier" for Vodafone UK. In short, my team and I used to watch pornographic videos and classify whether they were suitable for…
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Another year - another OpenTech! See blog posts from 2010 and 2011. It feels like every year the event gets bigger and better. It's still the same crowd of politically aware techies, and it still costs a ridiculously cheap fiver to come along, and the talks were of an abnormally high quality. Here are my thoughts from the day. Farmification Of Factories Fascinating talk from Lisa Ma about…
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Strolling along London's Southbank the other day, I came across one of those new-fangled information posts. Crudely stuck to it was a decidedly old-fashioned piece of paper bearing a planning notice. But! My my! What's that in the lower left corner? A QR code! Unsurprisingly, scanning the code takes you directly to the planning application on the web. Although the site isn't specifically…
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On Thursday, I attended my first TeaCamp. It's a mini-meetup for UK Gov folk doing interesting digital things. These are some random jotterings based on the discussions both at the event and at BeerCamp afterwards. All conversations were under Chatham House Rule. Social Media is a problem for all organisations - whether public or private. Rightly or wrongly, the "public" see an organisation…
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The lovely people from UK Gov Camp have put up some of the videos from the barcamp. Here's me chatting about mobile and the WordPress Mobile Pack - from Steph at Helpful Technology. See my blog post about the day. …
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As per the meme, here are my 20 points on Gov Camp UK. Sign up early. I dawdled and so was only able to get a ticket for Saturday. I feel like I missed out on a lot of interesting conversations. BarCamps should be recorded for posterity. It's a point I've made before. Cameras and disk space are so cheap, we should record what we say and do at BarCamps by default. Now, that may inhibit…
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As I mentioned in my last post, we've just had solar panels installed! Because of Greg Barker MP's idiotic decision to scrap the Feed In Tariff with only six weeks' notice - we've had to get this done in rather a rush. Thanks to Angi and Philip at Sunny Future Solar, we were able to get our system installed before the deadline. Yesterday, we received confirmation that panels were installed and …
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A quick report on OpenTech 2010 - the London event for geeks interested in Government data, openness and generally doing good things with tech and data. Copyright Matt Jones used under a Creative Commons non-commercial, attribution, share-alike licence. I attended last year's event which inspired me to create my "VoteUK" service for the 2010 general election. I had considered doing a talk…
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