The 9/11 attacks on the twin towers and the Pentagon shocked the Western world into a sense of insecurity not seen since the Cold War. This public nervousness provided the political leverage the British Labour government needed to bring ID cards onto the agenda. Fear of terrorism has been used by governments around the world to introduce authoritarian new measures in the name of protecting the citizenry. Here in the UK such moves coincided with the Government’s long tradition of centralising control to Whitehall.

We’re all alone, floating isolated in bubbles of our technology. We’ve built ourselves cocoons of entertainment which make it easier for us to avoid meaningful relationships with other people and the world at large.

The United States is a huge country with massively decentralised and complex elections. There are hundreds of elections and referenda held simultaneously using punch card, optical scan, touch screen, postal ballot and push-button voting systems. It's a legal and technical minefield of overlapping system and legal requirements with no clear national voice on how elections should be run.

I have a long history with electronic voting, both building and researching systems. However I no longer believe that we should aim to build electronic voting systems for our elections and I’m here to explain why this is the case.

I stared at the email in disbelief, I really couldn’t believe it. I’d merely been chasing some copyright assignment papers that had gone AWOL in the Free Software Foundation, and now here was an email from RMS – Richard Stallman himself. My heart was leaping as I realised that RMS was asking me if I wanted my software to become part of the GNU (GNU’s Not Unix) Project, the ultimate free software umbrella project. At this point I had no inkling of how hands-on RMS was, nor how much work it would take for my software to become fully GNU compliant.

Not so long ago Vonage came to the UK. Vonage provide a basic form of Voice over IP (VOIP). In other words, Internet telephony. You pay a monthly fee and get cheap calls routed over the Internet. Vonage send you a box which you plug into your ADSL line and your normal phone handset. Voila! Internet prices with old fashioned ergonomics.

Let's take a stroll through the world of patents and licenses. If you follow these things you'll know that patents are a double-edged sword. For example, patent offices are supposed to thoroughly check for 'prior art'. This isn't old paintings, but finding evidence that someone else came up with the invention, thereby invalidating the right to win a patent.

Nestled at the bottom of the box for my new Netgear router I found a little yellow slip of paper. Does this small slip of yellow paper point to the FLOSS world's future success? The slip explains that the router uses code protected by the GNU General Public License and so the source can be downloaded from the Netgear website.