Posts

Posted on

Datamap First Debian Package

Over ten years ago, I wrote a little ‘thing’ for marking and saving records on maps. That was fairly ‘new’ then. For small groups and specific projects, I believe this is still useful, so I’ve revived it and re-written it, using Mojolicious.

There are a number of new features to be added, federation, new languages in the templates and a more general set of parameters.

Meanwhile, the project is here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/datamap/ and the Debian package, tested on Ubuntu 20 AWS and Linux Mint is here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/datamap/files/

I realise that it’ll be less popular, but I’m giving up offering native Windows versions of my software.

Posted on

Cclite2 Preliminary Package

This is now available on Sourceforge at https://sourceforge.net/projects/cclite2/

It’s  based on Mojolicious, Postgresql, a native RESTful interface, JWT direct access, SMS and non-app mobile phone HTML reduced interface. Also a simple test suite. Deeper details and a to-do list at Sourceforge. Better documentation to follow.

Currently there’s only English, French and Spanish templates, but, in a month or so when the set is stable, we’ll add the other languages.

Share and enjoy.

Posted on

Democracy Commission: Draft Critique

This is unfinished, but in the spirit of release early, release often, I’m publishing. Comments to my email or Twitter, welcome too. I ‘m not opening comments here because of the spam.

After recent adventures with the Covid champions and a couple of other instances of asymmetric coproduction, I may produce a revised version in a while. Meanwhile, I’m working fairly seriously on this: https://sourceforge.net/projects/cclite2/

democracy-commission-critiqueDownload
Posted on

Initial Questions about the ‘new’ NHS app.

Very little is known publicly about the ‘new’ app, this: https://github.com/nhsx/COVID-19-app-Android-BETA having been abandoned, I believe.

Here are a couple of straws in the wind from Wired, usually solid tech commentators:
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/nhs-coronavirus-tracking-app
and very recently: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/nhs-covid-19-tracking-app-contact-tracing

Since so little is known, the list of questions is ‘long’:

  • How was Newham ‘selected’ and is there a financial arrangement?
  • Which company or organisation designed and wrote it? 
  • Is it open source, if so under what licence?
  • If open source, what guarantee that the build is in step with published source?
  • Is there a clear document with all the T&C’s outside the ‘app’?
  • What permissions does the app actually request (rather than require): http://skptr.me/list_of_permissions.html?
  • Does it de-install easily and *completely*?
  • Does it deal with proximity via Bluetooth, or, if not, what?
  • Is there a clear description of ‘possible infection’ algorithm?
  • What data is transferred where and to whom (countries, organisations,systems)
  • Can the ‘codes’ (you have 200?) be used to de-anonymise?
  • Given the April Wired article, specifically is geolocation turned on and processed?
  • Is there an active centralised system component as with the first app?

I’m sure that there are a few more, but that would be a good start.

Posted on

SMS Clustering Map

I wrote this quickly, mainly as a local support tool for the pandemic. One can send a simple SMS, it’s stored in an sqlite database and shown, clustered on a map. Lots of ways of changing the values too. Since it’s Perl, quite a lot can be done with the message parsing.

Also, it’ll work with an SMS dongle now on very low powered systems. It’s available as source code and a Debian package here.