One of the holy grails of free and open computing is a really great free/open phone; it's been tried many times before without much success, but a new crowdfunder from Purism (who make a pretty great free/open laptop) has just crossed the $1,000,000 mark and is on track to hit its target of $1.5M in the next 18 days. Read the rest

Here's a reading of my latest Guardian column, Digital failures are inevitable, but we need them to be graceful, about the social and political factors that make all the difference when choosing technologies. Read the rest

Douglas sez,

18 months ago Boing Boing posted about EFF's effort to get Ubuntu to make full disk encryption (FDE) easy upon install. EFF has delivered.

I'm sure many of us have had and continue to have the experience of trying to nudge someone (or ourselves) over from OS X or Windows to GNU/Linux and LUKS full disk encryption, but the process got roadblocked at some point because using the alternate installer to config the partitions and all for FDE was just too much of a hassle for parties involved. Now in Ubuntu 12.10, FDE is just a tickbox in the default installer. How cool is that?

This means it's a good time to donate to EFF. And if you're using Ubuntu 12.10, don't forget to fix the privacy problems for which EFF provides a tutorial (thanks again!).

(Thanks, Doug!) Read the rest