chrisbray.co.uk

As the Open Rights Group have just pointed out there are yet more disturbing proposals going through Whitehall at the moment!

Our government has already force our internet service providers to store their traffic data without our permission, but even worse it is now making plans to store that data themselves in their own central database so they can access it without even asking the ISP, let alone the consumer!

I agree entirely with the ORG when they say:

Check out their new site StateBook highlighting the dangers of this surveillance society that the Labour party seems intent on introducing.

I have already emailed my MP, the Home Secretary Ms Jacqui Smith, voicing my concerns and I would advise you to do the same, the ORG have details of how you can do this on their site.

Once again, thanks to the Open Rights Group for making me aware of this issue by virtue of their ORG-action mailing list.

I strongly urge my readers to to both join the ORG-action mailing list and Support the Open Rights Group

The Register is today running a story on how the BSI will face a high court action from the UK's Unix & Open Systems User Group over it's controversial u-turn regarding the adoption of Microsoft's Office Open XML as an ISO standard.

The BSI reversed it's decision to oppose this "standard" in March this year after Microsoft failed to fast-track OOXML into the ISO and will face action in the High Court backed by a number of British advocates of open techology include the Open Source Consortium.

If you ask me it's the right thing to do, the BSI reversed its decision for no good reason other than pressure from Microsoft or one of their cronies. OOXML has no place on the ISO standards roster, especially when the ISO already have a perfectly good, openly developed, standard for office documents! The more the BSI know they've done wrong the better.

If you wish to support this action, and at the same time earn a number of other benefits too, you should consider joining the UKUUG.

I just stumbled across an interesting site.

This site suggests the the www. prefix used for so long on website domains should be treated as deprecated and we should move away from using it.

Why you ask, well http://no-www.org states:

And I think it's an interesting idea, had we not grown up with the www. prefix we wouldn't assume to type it, and there are plenty of sites that do not use it, but deprecated? I can't help but think that's a little bit harsh!

Does anybody have any comments on the use of a www. (or the specific non-use) with respect to search engine rankings?

Personally all of my sites conform to "Class A" of the no-www compliance standards, the same site accessible both with and without the www. prefix.

It would appear that someone was listening when I was amongst the people calling for the ISO committee that was voting on it to Vote No To Office Open XML since it failed to meet the criteria set out by the ISO for adoption as an International Standard.

Microsoft put their typically positive spin on this citing it as a milestone towards the adoption (press release can be found here) but the fact is that this is a blow to the ill thought out and technically flawed format.

Hopefully there will be more support for the far more open and truly cross platformODF format suggested by OASIS which has already been implemented by many office suites.