Open Source beer

Hearing the term Open Source most people, at least those with some interest in ICT, automatically think of software, the most famous being the operating system Linux. However, the Open Source philosophy can also be applied to the non-digital "old economy" of analogue products.

Danish students from the Information Technology University in Copenhagen recently released an open source beer recipe. Their beer is called in Danish Vores Oel, which means "our beer".

There have been other attempts before to apply the Open Source principle to hardware, but not with big success, as in the case of OScar, the Open Source car project. It still needs to be proven that Open Source can be a successful concept outside of the ICT domain.

'Free' Danish beer makes a splash, BBC News, 28 July 2005
Vores Oel website
OScar project

Increased e-mail surveillance won't help against terrorists

The British Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, will propose new measures for increasing e-mail and phone surveillance at an emergency meeting of the EU interior ministers on the implications of last Thursday's London bombings. Mr Clarke claimed that the London attacks could possibly have been prevented.

This statement appears to be rather doubtful. There is no evidence to confirm that scanning more e-mails and phone calls would lead to the prior detection of terrorist plots.

There is already an overload of information. The information overload would be further increased with the suggested move. Finding the relevant information would become much harder, and terrorists have proven to be clever in escaping communication surveillance. Paying the price of reducing civil liberties for some vague assumption of increasing security does not appear to be justified.

Email spying 'could have stopped killers. The Observer, 10 July 2005

Convergence of telecoms and audiovisual media

Convergence has become a major trend in ICT. After the convergence of fixed and mobile telecoms services, the next trend is the convergence of telecoms and audiovisual media.

A new industry-driven European initiative called Networked and Electronic Media, NEM, has been established, which intends to promote this convergence. NEM was officially launched as a European Technology Platform in Brussels on 29 June. The participating companies like Thomson, Alcatel, France Telecom, and the BBC consider networked and electronic media to be a new industry sector with huge growth prospects.

Website of NEM, the Networked and Electronic Media Platform