Desperate demand for the Elonex webbook
I’ll just paste a copy of this email from Alan Cocks on the Ubuntu UK mailing list.
=========================================
Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2008
From: alan c
To: British Ubuntu TalkSubject: [ubuntu-uk] Desperately seeking Ubuntu Webbook – with Bolt Cutters!
In Bracknell, the Carphone Warehouse Webbook (Elonex) with preinstalled Ubuntu which is included in one of CPW’s deals is in such extraordinary demand that the recent display item in CPW Bracknell Princess Square shopping mall was stolen last week by desperate people using *bolt cutters*!
The many larger laptops with Vista installed were left untouched. Sad eh? Even thieves don’t want Vista.
The Webbook was secured using a kensington similar stranded wire lock, so I guess the culprits even had some angle grinding to do later, to remove the lock itself.
The desperate act took place in a normal shopping day in broad daylight, and the miscreants were seen making off at speed, unencumbered by antivirus or other unnecessary items which might have slowed them down!
Like most shopping malls, there is security video in operation, I trust that it will be put to good use.
=========================================
Apart from the obvious bit about stealing being wrong (Hmmm, makes me think about Number 10 Downing Street again) this is a great story… I love the bit about the thieves not wanting Vista – lol.
Thanks Alan.
Number 10: The same thing twice?
I’m not quite sure I fully grasp what is going on with this (some would say I never do) but maybe it might be of interest to other readers and hopefully someone will come along and explain a bit more.
I was looking about on-line the other day just following my (rather large) nose around the ‘Anthony Baggett’s theme being used by Number 10 Downing Street’ story. And I came across something I don’t really understand. Perhaps others might be able to shed some light on what might be going on here?
Let’s start with the background: Number 10′s Website, is using a look and feel derived from an original theme by Anthony called NetWorker. The way we know this is by the header that was left in the main stylesheet and almost every other file from Anthony’s original package being left in tact on the server.
During my wanderings around the internet I came upon this page: https://secure.mysociety.org/cvstrac/chngview?cn=12360 which shows a list of files that have been updated or changed in some way on a developer’s version control system called CVS. The owner of this system is a group called MySociety.org.
According to their website, MySociety are a non-profit charity and who look to have built some pretty interesting sites; many around freedom of information and enabling better access to Government. They were responsible for creating the Petitions System for Number 10 which looks to have been written as a custom application using at least Perl and PHP.
Here is a screenshot of the page showing the date of the commit (04/08/2008) and the name of the committer (matthew) and a quite long list of files that have been added, removed or altered as part of this commit.
For those who are not familiar, this kind of tool is used by developers to manage software projects. You can literally see each change made to your project, by time and by developer so when something gets fixed (or gets subsequently broken again) you can go back in time and recover your project to the same state prior to a particular commit.
I would like to draw your attention toward the bottom of the page in the screenshot. There you can see a few stylesheet files being removed and two new ones being added. One line in particular caught my attention:
“mysociety/pet/web/no10_css/style.css added-> 1.1“
If you click on the revision number (1.1 in this case) to view the contents of the file1 you will see that the it has the same header as that of the main Number 10 Downing Street file.
I used the Meld comparison tool as I did before to compare it with Anthony’s original2, and this is another derivative work of Anthony’s original style.css file. And I compared this one with the stylesheet used for the main Number 10 website3 they are very, very similar indeed.
If you visit the Prime Minister’s petition site note the similar look and feel to the main 10 Downing Street pages. Now take a look at the stylesheet for this site: http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/no10_css/style.css.
This looks to me like two separate websites, developed by two different companies, but both using the same derived work. Anyone care to elucidate?
1. My Society’s stylesheet
2. Anthony’s original stylesheet
3. No. 10′s heavily modified stylesheet
Excellent Linux Humour
A bit of light relief… I came across a link to this very funny page on the Linux From Scratch mailing list.
I also really enjoyed the sig of the poster: Jeremy Henty…
“I compiled Linux From Scratch, and all I got was this lousy command line.”
Nice one.
Thanks Jeremy.
Timber! (More on Number 10′s website)
Here is the output of a Linux command called tree on the original contents of the theme that NMM claim to only have used the stylesheet from1.
~/Desktop/dev_area/networker-10$ tree -phDC
.
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 24K Jun 21 2007] How To Post Images In This Theme.doc
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 1.0K Jul 11 2007] archive.php
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 397 Aug 17 2007] archives.php
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 4.0K Jul 8 2007] comments.php
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 147 Jul 11 2007] footer.php
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 80 Jun 5 2007] functions.php
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 1.7K Jul 12 2007] header.php
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 267 Jul 12 2007] ie6.css
|-- [drwxr-xr-x 232 Aug 17 2007] images
| |-- [-rw-r--r-- 88K Jul 12 2007] Thumbs.db
| |-- [-rw-r--r-- 2.0K Jul 12 2007] ad_space.gif
| |-- [-rw-r--r-- 217 Jun 18 2007] bullet.gif
| |-- [-rw-r--r-- 398 Jun 22 2007] nav_hover.gif
| |-- [-rw-r--r-- 1.3K Jun 6 2007] sub_rss.gif
| `-- [-rw-r--r-- 4.3K Jul 12 2007] wp.gif
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 1.1K Jul 9 2007] index.php
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 18K Jun 13 2007] license.rtf
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 700 Jul 11 2007] page.php
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 60K Jun 13 2007] screenshot.png
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 946 May 10 2007] search.php
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 257 May 10 2007] searchform.php
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 2.5K Jul 12 2007] sidebar.php
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 1.3K Jul 11 2007] single.php
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 2.4K Feb 2 2007] sitemap.php
`-- [-rw-r--r-- 9.6K Jul 12 2007] style.css
I thought I would try to find out just how much of Anthony’s theme is still there. Not being much of a hacker myself, all I have done is simply added each of the file names above to a URL that points to the location of the theme directory in the Firefox navigation bar. So the whole URL in the bar looks like this: http://www.number10.gov.uk/wp-content/themes/networker-10/filename-to-look-for.
If you try and open a non-existent file, you get a “404″ not found message as one would expect. Anything else means the file is present. The way php works however makes it very hard to tell what the contents of the .php files are.
Guess what? There is an awful lot of Anthony’s content still on Number 10′s website. Here’s what I found when comparing the response I got from Number 10 to the original files in the theme package:
How To Post Images In This Theme.doc:
Files are identical and there is a really interesting comment at the bottom of this file that is just so ironic: “to give credit where credit is due, I borrowed this idea from Chris Pearson who is the author of the Cutline theme.“archive.php:
File exists and returns a blank page.archives.php:
File isn’t present, returns 404.comments.php:
File present and returns exactly the same response text as is written in the original file: “Please do not load this page directly. Thanks!”footer.php:
File present and returns a blank page.functions.php:
File present and returns a blank page.header.php:
File present, returns a blank page.ie6.css:
File present, has been modified greatly and Anthony’s header has been removed! But it does contain an identical first line of css styling:#content, #sidebar { overflow: hidden; }. Note the spacing and line breaks etc- /images
Thumbs.db:
Files are identical.ad_space.gif:
Files are identical.bullet.gif:
Files are identical.nav_hover.gif:
Files are identical.sub_rss.gif:
Files are identical.wp.gif:
Files are identical.
index.php:
File present, and returns a blank page.license.rtf:
File is present and the files are identical. Yet, the copyright notice of the site states “Crown Copyright! so which applies here?page.php:
File present and returns a blank page.screenshot.png:
This one is really funny… files are identical.search.php:
Not present, returns 404.searchform.php:
Not present, returns 404.sidebar.php:
File present and returns “Newsletter. Sign up to our newsletter to keep updated with the latest information from Number 10, Click here to subscribe”. The HTML source retains comments from the original.single.php:
File present and returns blank page.sitemap.php:
File present and returns XHTML header information the same as in the original.style.css:
File present, as we know already.
So, out of 24 files in the original theme package, only three files have been removed. If you look here in the comments from my post of yesterday, you can read what Dave Smith of NMM said:
1. The only file that was drawn upon from Ant’s theme was the css file.
Now clearly some of the files above will be pre-requisites for any WordPress theme (like index.php for example) but 21 out of 24?.
I’m sure I can smell something quite smelly around here.
Number 10, WordPress and The Commons
This is a post largely related to the response that David Smith of New Media Maze posted yesterday regarding the farce of their web site development for Number 10 Downing Street.
The story so far, for any new readers, can be found here, here and here. And do follow the links in those posts to the various other sources to get a broader picture.
(David, if I am wrong anywhere, I assume you will let me know…)
What concerns me greatly about this whole fiasco is that New Media Maze are still (as I write this at least) basically trying to act as though they’ve done nothing really wrong and everything is fine. I think it isn’t.
David’s post seems to be an attempt to convince the reader that because they changed lots of things from the original template, their requirement to appropriately attribute the original work is negligible and the lines they forgot to remove left in the stylesheet are sufficient.
His post also, to me at least, indicates a rather poor appreciation of what Open Source, “The Commons” and the new collaborative world in which we all live really mean.
First then, the WordPress theme.
The simple fact is this: the Number 10 website which New Media Maze claim to have designed is based on original work by somebody else. How much of the original work remains in the design is really not important, although almost all of the original stylesheet is still present within the gargantuan ~4000 lines of the new site’s file. (Incidentally, who on earth designed a stylesheet like that? I don’t recall ever seeing a 65kb stylesheet before. Maintenance and alterations are going to be fun…). And we also saw that the index.php file was from the original source as they had left the comment in it.
Irrespective of the legal position New Media Maze believe themselves to be in, the right (as in decent, proper, common) practice in these circumstances is to attribute the work in a suitable manner. Such as a simple line somewhere on the site saying something like: “This website is based on an original idea by…”.
I’m sure you all get the idea. And being a “Full Service New Media Agency” I’m sure NMM could come up with something suitably profound.
Most people on the Internet have no idea what a CSS is, how to find or read one, and why should they to be frank? There was a visible copyright notice in the original theme. It has been removed.
The continuation of this farce, by NMM is not helping their position, or their client’s, one little bit. To be honest, by continuing to bleat on about how little of the original work was used rather than just doing the right thing, makes them look like [insert your prefered derogatory phrase here]. My personal choice would be “a bunch of cowboys”.
On a secondary, but related note, an impression I get from reading David’s statement makes me wonder if Downing Street are actually running WordPress or are in fact running some uberpress code that has been made ultra-secure and “top secret”. If I am wrong about this please let me know, it is just an assumption on my behalf. What version of WP are they running? We can’t tell as they took out the meta-tag.
If they have hacked the code to make it more secure, I hope that those modifications have been provided back to the WordPress community so everyone gets the benefit. If they haven’t, Downing Street are not running WordPress, but a fork. They are now stuck with a version which will get harder and harder to maintain, and will ultimately be less secure than the publicly developed OSS code that has the world’s eyes watching and improving it every day…. I hope I am wrong and the backend is a regular WordPress release but if it isn’t, then Downing Street really have been sold a pup and are not using Open Source code at all.
And you want ID Cards??? (More on Number 10)
This is quite amazing stuff really. You just couldn’t make up a better story.
The Number 10 website fiasco just keeps going.
New Media Maze, that “Full Service New Media Agency”, look to have really screwed up. Not only have they nicked a free WordPress template and removed the attribution and removed the license, but it seems the site itself is actually full of bugs and errors too.
Dizzy Thinks has found some lovely errors and a strange chap called “Adam Test”… ROTFL.
And when you’ve finished rolling around on the floor laughing take a look at this research on The Rouseabout to see what a little more digging throws up: (I’ll give you a clue: 404s).
Honestly, if this is what we get for £100,000 of taxpayer’s money from New Media Maze then, quite frankly, I’m glad I hadn’t heard of them before.
How much are the Gov. going to spend on our ID card database? The one that nobody wants. Do you trust them to get it right? Nahhh.
And Glyn Moody discovered a little known government project to build a “massive central silo for all UK communications data…”.
It’s at times like these that I fall on my virtual knees and bless the cyber-gods that ensure every single major UK government project is a complete and utter failure, so this doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of ever working properly. Phew.
PLEASE!!!! Someone take these huge IT projects out of the Government’s hands! They are so crap at it our whole lives will end up on Facebook if we aren’t careful… Oh, most already are.
All we need now is for Microshaft to come rolling along spouting off about how much better the site would have been if they’d spent the money on Blog Server 2008 running on Windoors 2010 with Sequal Server 2012… or whatever crap it is they are pushing this week.
