Stop at Zona-M

If you read Stop!/Zona-M regularly, you already know that “free as in freedom” software and file formats are an essential tool for anybody interested in reducing expenses in Public Administrations, make them more efficient and allow all citizens to control in the best possible way what they representatives are doing (and if you don’t know this yet, it’s time to read the article linked at the bottom of this page!).

As I wrote in the Online Loser Guide, Internet is a wonderful thing, but should be used with lots of attention. Following the flow without thinking you just risk to contribute to lots of confusion, as shown in the example below (which is quite recent, even if for several reasons I was unable to publish it earlier).

The online petition of the week, at least in Europe, is called “Internet for Democracy - Shut Down the Europarliament. Now!". I will not sign it, and I recommend everybody to do the same. However, I do suggest that everybody reads it because it’s about very general issues that you should really, really think about.

UPDATE MARCH 4TH, 2010, 20.30 GMT+1: the unauthorized copy mentioned below has been removed by the staff of the Bellunopress website, shortly after I asked them to comply with the terms of use of this website. I am happy to see such a confirmation that this incident was just a temporary slip, without (as I had said since the beginning, cfr below) any intention at all to harm anybody: This page remains online, of course, as useful resource for whoever should have the same problem in the future with other websites.

Just when you think you’ve heard everything, something new arrives (update 2010/10/07: actually, S. Charney just did it again).

Two years ago, we heard that half a million computers are infected with malicious bots every day (a “bot” is a software program that enters your computer from the Internet or inside infected files, then runs in the background to steal your data, send spam or wreak havoc in some other way).

As I already explained in another article file formats are extremely important: unless, at least in Public Administrations (PAs), only open file formats are used, serious amounts of public money can go to waste, important public digital documents may become unreadable and private citizens or businesses may be forced to useless expenses if they want to interact with PAs.