ISOC Bulgaria Signed the Madrid Declaration on Privacy

ISOC-Bulgaria was among the first to sign the Madrid Privacy Declaration.

Complete Statistics About Usage, Spread of Internet in Bulgaria

There have been a number of surveys in the last few months, re: Internet usage. Here is a summary below, and when we are ready with this survey.isoc.bg, we’ll publish the results, as well.

July 2009:

1. Internet is being used by 44.69 % of the population in Bulgaria, aged 15-69 (which means, the percentage is higher, because younger people use more). This is, according to a representative research of Market Test from July 2009. The complete statistitcs is published here (PDF file, 65 Kb)
2. Bulgaria ranks 1st in the European Union for usage of high-speed Internet (above 10 Mbps). The table is published here (PDF, 131 Kb), and the whole document – here (the page will open in a new window, the report is published in all EU languages). According to this data, 46.5 % of the Internet users in Bulgaria, are accessing the Net at speeds above 10 Mbps. Sweden is second, with 36 %.
3. According to a survey made by the Oxford and Oviedo Universities, nine countries, South Korea, Japan, Sweden, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Netherlands, Denmark and Romania have the quality of the broadband Internet, which is needed for future web applications (e.g. HD Internet TV). In 2008 only Japan was covering this requirement.

Last, but not least, Speedtest.net is also clear – Bulgaria is ranked 7th in Europe and 9th in the world, in download speed, and 3rd in the world in upload speed.

It is time to inform the European Commission about all this, so that they don’t publish silly stuff like this.

EDRI Open Letter to the European Parliament on Amendment 138 in the Telecoms Package

EDRI Open Letter to the European Parliament on Amendment 138 in the Telecoms Package *
19 October 2009

To the Members of the European Parliament,

European Digital Rights is an association of 29 privacy and civil rights organisations
based in 18 European countries and active across the European Union. As an association
whose focus is on protecting the civil rights of online citizens, we have serious concerns
about the possible abandonment of the core meaning of the so-called “Amendment 138”
in the Telecoms Package. We believe that this would not just create lasting damage for
the rights of European citizens, but it would also durably damage the credibility and
institutional power of the European Parliament.

Citizens’ Rights
The purpose of Amendment 138 is to protect the fundamental rights of citizens to
freedom of expression and communication, to privacy and to due process of law. It also
protects the development of democratic culture on the Internet. The fact that the Council
is aware of current and planned activities in Member States that will undermine or do
already undermine these principles should further convince Parliamentarians of the need
to defend the principles in Amendment 138. Even if, and it is far from evident that this is
the case, the Council can argue convincingly that there are certain exceptional
circumstances where communications must be limited for the purposes and urgency
required by the European Convention on Human Rights, such limitations should remain
the exception in a democratic society, while the rights defended in Amendment 138 must
constitute the rule. This must be reflected in the Telecoms Package.
Furthermore, failure to protect EU citizens will not only undermine their rights, but will
be used in less democratic countries to victimise individuals, justified with the excuse
that this is “EU policy”.

Parliament Powers
The Parliament now has the chance to protect citizens’ rights and fully perform its
institutional function within the European legislative process.
A capitulation faced with the unacceptably inflexible, legally dubious and democratically
deficient approach of the Council would inflict lasting damage on the Parliament.
What trust can voters have in an institution that will overwhelmingly support citizens’
rights before an election only to abandon them immediately afterwards? What credibility
will the Parliament have in future inter-institutional negotiations when it is prepared to
abandon a position it supported twice with such an overwhelming majority? What
authority will be left once the Parliament loses this crucial battle with the Council? Could
there be a worse moment to fail so completely on an issue of such importance, at the
historic moment when the institution is being entrusted with a greatly increased scope of
codecision powers under the Lisbon Treaty?
For the sake of the rule of law, for the sake of European citizens and for the sake of the
only democratically elected European Institution, we urge you to take whatever actions
you can to defend the principles in Amendment 138. In particular, we urge you to support
the principle that, unless exceptional circumstances render this impossible, citizens are
entitled to a prior judgment before any measure is taken to limit their fundamental right
to freedom of communication.

Yours faithfully,
Andreas Krisch
President
===

* ISOC-Bulgaria is an EDRI member, and has participated in the drafting of this Open Letter. We, obviously, support it wholeheartedly.

ISOC – Bulgaria helps protect Internet users in Bulgaria

Bulgarian English-language weekly Sofia Echo reports about a very unusual soft-porn turned into blackmailing web site:

“Hi, my name is Maria and I am 19 years old. I don’t have a boyfriend at the moment, but I made some sexy pictures with my girlfriend, I hope you like them. If you want to become my friend, fill in your email address and your birthdate.”

This was the text that was said to have lured unsuspecting teenagers to a 59 leva a month subscription for a soft-porn site.

The site, mariqs-homepage.com, was taken down by Bulgaria’s Chief Directorate for Combating Organised Crime (CDCOC), safenet.bg reported.

Upon registering as a friend of Maria’s, users would receive an emailed invoice for the sum of 59 leva for a 30-day subscription.

The terms of services of the site contained a clause in which registration was interpreted as entering into a binding service contract with Global Internet Business, the site’s owner.

Quoting recent abuse of the service, the email went on to say that if users did not pay, the matter would be referred to the courts.

According to Safenet.bg, several teenagers had felt threatened and tipped off the National Centre for Safe Internet (NCSI) and the Internet Society Bulgaria, who in turn handed the case over to the Interior Ministry and the Commission for Consumer Protection. Among those who tipped off the Centre was a teenage girl who had allegedly been bullied into sending her photos to the site, Safenet.bg said.

Washington Internet Daily on new EU Parliament appointments

The Washington Internet Daily has published today an article about the new European Parliament Committee Chairman, Herbert Reul of the European People’s Party/Christian Democrats.

Among others, the media quotes Veni Markovski, saying, “Reul is a “balanced person” who grasps the complexity of the issues presented by the European Commission and won’t accept extreme positions”.

Gearing up for Document Freedom Day

Via FSFE blogs

Document Freedom Day (DFD) was launched in 2008 as a global day for the promotion and awareness of Document Freedom in particular, as well as Open Standards and interoperability in general. 205 teams from around the world registered for the first edition of Document Freedom Day. The things they did ranged from mini-conferences and hands-on lessons for applications supporting ODF, such as OpenOffice.org, over creation of awareness by taking to the streets and engaging people in discussions about Document Freedom, to awarding a special prize to the Foreign Ministry in Germany for its exemplary support for Open Standards and Free Software.

This year, Document Freedom Day will be on 25 March, and now is the time to start preparing for it.

Here are some thoughts on the why, the how, and the what.

Why Document Freedom Day is special
While software remains abstract to many people, documents are something that we can all relate to. They are central to everyone’s daily life and work. Document Freedom affects us all, and also makes it easier for people to understand Open Standards and interoperability in other areas. Document Freedom allows to build awareness for these issues with people who are not computer experts, but computer users. Declaring a global day for Document Freedom allows us to raise our voice together, it provides a rallying point in the year where we can put this issue on the agenda and into the newspapers.

An elevator pitch for Document Freedom
Like all Open Standards, Document Freedom provides users with the freedom to choose their application freely, and yet still be able to communicate and collaborate with others. This freedom of choice provides the basis for competition in the field of text processing software. Where there is healthy competition, companies and software developers are driven to innovate, and monopoly pricing becomes impossible. So Document Freedom means better software and lower cost. Document Freedom also means that yesterday’s documents can easily be read with tomorrow’s software, protecting and preserving your data against forced vendor incompatibilities through the upgrade treadmill.

For governments, Document Freedom translates into control over its data, now and in the future. It also means that citizens can freely choose their software to communicate with the government. And finally, Document Freedom protects against monopoly rent extorted from the government, providing the benefit of lower taxes to society.

Some ideas for DFD
If you already have an idea for Document Freedom Day, you can move right ahead. You don’t need to ask for permission and there is no paperwork, although it does make sense to register your team and let others know what you are doing. By sharing our local activities with others, we give visibility to Document Freedom on a global scale.

In case you don’t yet know what you would like to do, the DFD ‘08 team page has activities from all around the world that might give you an idea. It might also be a good idea to subscribe to the mailing list for DFD teams in order to find others to work with, or exchange ideas and plans. There are also various companies that have declared their support for Document Freedom Day. If you work for one of these companies, you could ask around to find out what others are planning. If your company is not yet listed, you could suggest to take DFD ‘09 as an opportunity to declare your support for Document Freedom.

DFD ‘09 is coming. Let’s make it an even bigger success than 2008.

Bulgarian Prosecution’s website under Creative Commons BY

The Bulgarian Prosecution’s site has been launched officially under Creative Commons Attribution license. This step has been taken after initiative from the Internet Society – Bulgaria and our letter to the General Prosecutor.

The institution has chosen the most liberal of all licenses, a very positive sign and a good news for the world Creative Commons community.

Anyone can copy, distribute, display and transmit content from the prosecution’s website, with only one condition:
Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
What does “Attribute this work” mean? The page you came from contained embedded licensing metadata, including how the creator wishes to be attributed for re-use. You can use the HTML here to cite the work. Doing so will also include metadata on your page so that others can find the original work as well.

After the President’s site migrated to CC, Bulgaria has shown a positive tendency in the direction of openness, using the advanced technologies and creative ideas.

The Path Towards Centralization of Internet Governance Under the UN

An interesting essay Published by the Publius Project of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

You can read the whole article here, or on the website of Publius Project:
part 1
part 2
part 3

Analysis on balance: Standardisation and Patents

Standards and patents for me is a very dry issue, which is difficult to be explained in a simple way. Georg managed to do this quite well, and I am sure this is going to be very useful for many people, interested in the topic.

Software patents have been a hugely controversial debate, with lines of battle drawn primarily between large corporations holding large patent portfolios and engaged in multiple cross-licensing deals, and the Have-Nots, entrepeneurs, small and medium enterprises, and software users from the student using GNU/Linux all the way to institutional users in governments.

This debate got a lot quieter with the rejection of the software patent directive in 2005. Its place in the headlines was taken by other debates, such as standardisaton. Open Standards have been a buzzword for years, but never has this term been discussed more intensively.

On Wednesday, 19 November 2008, both debates met in Brussels at a workshop titled “IPR in ICT standardisation”, although “Patents in ICT standardisation” would have been a more suitable name because the discussion was exlusively about the interaction of patents and ICT standardisation.

Patents and standards are fundamentally at odds, so many people call for a balance between patents and standards. This article comments upon the workshop and explains why standards should prevail over patents at least in the area of software.

read the rest of the analysis here

Стандартите и патентите за мен са суха материя, но цитирания по-горе анализ може да е полезен на интересуващите се от областта. Освен всичко друго, ясно показва колко и защо са важни отворените стандарти.

Katowice Municipality in Poland: saving public money with OpenOffice.org

From OpenSource Observatory of the IDABC:

Katowice, a city in southern Poland, is one of the most rapidly developing Polish metropolis with an estimated population of around 320,000 people in the core urban area alone.

Having to upgrade both hard- and software of large numbers of computers are a significant budget item of any large administration. Licenses for proprietary software contribute significantly to IT costs, especially since software licensed for old computers often cannot be transferred to new ones.

Therefore, Katowice Municipality decided in 2005 to start implementing and using OpenOffice.org on almost all the computers in the city administration. Since then, Katowice’s IT department installs OpenOffice.org instead of Microsoft Office on all newly bought computers. The financial analysis, in this respect, has shown many drawbacks of buying and upgrading proprietary software in the municipality. Firstly, as it has already been mentioned, computers have to be replaced frequently due to their heavy utilization by the civil servants. This means that for every new computer, a new software license has to be bought. Secondly, the need for updating old software on already existing hardware creates a budgetary burden, especially when updating all of the 850 computers in the Municipality. Finally, the need for creating training sessions for civil servants on the updated versions was another point favoring the use of the free OpenOffice.org.

The case of Katowice Municipality is a good example how public administration can save a substantial amount of money by deploying free software. It also shows that OpenOffice.org can easily substitute proprietary software without much special preparation on the technical level. Given the growing availability of high-quality open source programs for desktops and servers, Katowice clearly stands poised to lead the way towards much greater usage of this type of software in the Polish public sector.

As a result – successful deployment of OpenOffice.org on 450 computers with substantial savings of EUR 100,000 on licensing fees.

Read the whole article.

Internet Society – Bulgaria also initiated such project in 2004, with the financial support of UNDP – Bulgaria. Details on that project are also available in this document.
Unfortunately, after the project end, the whole information flow on the topic ended. All the opportunities, created from being a pilot municipality in a country in transition, all the chances to position the city under your management in a nice way, being an example in the EU and non EU regional community went to the wild.

I want to very clearly explain to whoever tries to twist the question on what was our role after the project:
ISOC – Bulgaria is not a post-controlling body, we do not have any jurisdiction over municipalities, advisory role, neither financial or human resources to service computer configurations, stimulate employees and doing PR for the local administration units. We worked hard to draft the idea, to create the circumstances for its realization and to implement it. We showed a way to make things better.

Today, three yeas after the project I have no idea neither the deployed OpenOffice.org packages have been still there and used, whether the employees are stimulated to enhance their computer literacy, nor how much the municipalities are saving by using free software. Because probably the mayor has changed, and the new one started to build his own empire on the ruins of the previous one’s accomplishments. Because, obviously in my poor little country, saving taxpayers’ money is not a priority. Too bad, Bulgaria.

I will try to finish this article in a positive way, inspired by constant German influence: hard work is needed, gentleman, more work.