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Tag Archive: Wales

Catholic Archbishop Slams Facebook

Catholic Archbishop Slams Facebook

According to Archbishop Vincent Nichols, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, the accoutrements of the digital life – social networking sites, texting, and e-mails, are undermining community life.

Talking to the Sunday Telegraph, he said that friendships were becoming more “transient,” with quantity valued over quality, and claimed that was a key factor in suicides among young people.

"Friendship is not a commodity," he said.

"Friendship is something that is hard work and enduring when it’s right."

He said that society was losing its interpersonal skills because, more and more, people were using media that were not real communities.

The Force Is With…The Force

The Force Is With...The Force

Using the Freedom of Information Act, Jane’s Police Review has obtained information showing that eight officers of Strathclyde Police in Scotland claim Jedi as their religion on diversity forms.

Additionally, two civilian staff claim to follow the Star Wars religion. That’s from a total of 8,200 police officers and 2,800 civilian staff. No other UK force had Jedi members.

Jane’s Police Review editor Chris Herbert told the BBC:

"The Force appears to be strong in Strathclyde Police with their Jedi police officers and staff.”

Wikipedia Founder Announces Shutdown of Wikia Social Search

Wikipedia Founder Announces Shutdown of Wikia Social Search

Jimmy Wales is best known for his role in founding Wikipedia—and for bringing some controversy to the foundation for personal expenses and alleged payment-for-edit actions. However, Wales has also been involved in the startup Wikia, which has been operating since 2006. The idea behind Wikia is to apply community-driven services and so-called crowdsourcing to everyday Internet tasks, following the principle that the “wisdom of crowds” is going to be a whole lot better at giving people what they want than even the most sophisticated search algorithm.

1911 UK Census Goes Online

1911 UK Census Goes Online

Normally it’s 100 years before a British census is available, to ensure none, or very few, of those mentioned in it are still alive. However, a 2006 ruling by the Information Commissioner has meant that the census information for England and Wales has become available from the National Archives sooner than the projected January 2012 release date.

Although searching the census – the first to have data written by the participants themselves – is free, viewing and copying images is on a pay-per-view basis. Not all data will be available yet; information deemed “personally sensitive,” meaning “details of infirmity or other health-related information, information about family relationships which would usually have been kept secret and information about very young children who were born in prison,” still won’t become available until 2012, and nor will data from Scotland.

More British Data Losses

More British Data Losses

It’s beginning to seem as if some Brits don’t take the idea of data protection very seriously. There have already been several losses of data this year, and now a memory stick containing data on 10,000 persistent offenders and all 84,000 prisoners in England and Wales has gone missing, the BBC reports.

Even worse, the data on the stick, which was held by the company PA Consulting, not a government agency, was unencrypted. The company informed the government on Monday as had admitted it doesn’t know how the stick went astray.

Wikipedia Boss In Money For Edit Furor

The BBC has reported that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has been accused by Jeffrey Merkey, the former chief scientist at Novell, of agreeing to editMerkey’s Wikipedia page in exchange for a $5,000 donation to the Wikimedia Foundation. On a mailing list, Merkey published as statement he’dreleased to AP. "Wales agreed that in exchange for a substantial donation and other financial support of the Wikimedia Foundation projects, Wales would use his influence to make Merkey’s articleadhere to Wikipedia’s stated policies with regard to internet libel ‘as a courtesy’ and place Merkey under his ’special protection’ as an editor."   But on that same list, Wales responded,  "Of course I would never offer, nor accept any offer, whereby a donation would buy someone special editorial treatment in the encyclopeadia."   The Wikipedia entry for Merkeywas supposedly libellous, and Wales said he often worked with people who Wiki entries included damaging, libellous or false information. On examination, Merkey’s page had last been edited byWales and put in a state called “protection,” meaning the public could make no additional edits.   The non-profit Wikimedia Foundation runs Wikipedia. A spokesman for the foundation,Jay Walsh, denied the edit-for-donation allegation in the Daily Telegraph.   "Jimmy never made this offer, and of course this is a practice theWikipedia Foundation would never condone."

Wikipedia’s Wales Wails Over Dirt, Expenses

Wikipedia

One of the problems with publicly-editable reference project like Wikipedia is that any subject is fair game, from the politics of how the organization is run to the private lives of its founders.

James "Jimbo" Wales, co-founder and chairman emeritus of the Wikimedia Foundation, is finding himself again at the center of controversy following an ugy breakup with Canadian political pundit Rachel Marsden. Wales is currently going through a divorce, but is the subject of steamy online chat transcripts released by Marsden, who also put items of Wales’ clothing on sale on eBay Canada. The chats suggest that Wales may have violated Wikipedia’s conflict of interest rules to urge a proxy to edit Marsden’s Wikipedia entry to be more to her liking.

Less Privacy Overall In ‘07

Less Privacy Overall In ‘07A 1000-page report compiled by Privacy International and the Electronic Privacy Information Center has revealedconcerns about privacy and surveillance during 2007.   The reports fins that privacy protection has “worsened” and that in more societies than ever, surveillance has become“endemic.”   Of the 47 countries ranked, only Greece, which topped the table, had "adequate safeguards against abuse." Most countries were found to have "somesafeguards but weakened protections."   Compared to 2006, when the count was five, nine countries - England, Wales, Malaysia, China, Russia, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and the US– were deemed to have “endemic” surveillance, with Britain the worst in Europe.

MP Website Award Winners

MP Website Award WinnersWe judge politicians on a lot of things – voting records, where they stand on policies, and other burning topics. But we don’t usually judge them on their websites.   Last week,however, British Members of Parliaments were judged on just that, in the British Computer Society MP website awards. The overall winner was Adam Price, MP for Carmarthen East in Wales.   ‘It’s an honour to win the award but it’s a team effort,’ said Price in his acceptance speech. ‘Many MPs aresceptics of technology but blogging and websites are becoming essential to politics in the same way that the printing press was when it was invented.’   Price said that he’d posted asuggestion on his blog about hos own political party, Plaid Cymru, working with the Labour party, and a few days later negotiations started. Price felt that he wouldn’t have been able to do this withany other medium than via a blog.   However, not all MPs have a website. Of a total of 646, 96 don’t publicly post a URL.   Paul Flynn won the award for best design, Derek Wyattfor engagement, and Alan Johnson for accessibility. Nadine Dorries, Boris Johnson, and George Galloway all received commendations from the judges.

Open Source Search to Compete with Google

Open Source Search to Compete with Google

The man who tore down the ivory towers of academia with an encyclopedia that could be edited by anyone plans to take a similar approach to searches with a new open-source search tool that he hopes will directly challenge Google. Jimmy Wales announced on Friday that his company Wikia is working on an open source search client that uses individual computers to index the Internet.

The new search project is based on Grub, an existing platform for distributed search that Wikia purchased and turned open source. The intent is for searchers download the Grub client, which allows users’ computers to help index the Internet when their connections and processing power aren’t being fully used. Traditionally, this role is performed by centralized computers owned by the company building the search engine.

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