RISC OS friendly ISP and hosting provider Orpheus Internet have recently launched a crowd funding campaign, with the goal of helping to raise the funds needed to set up a second data centre in a new location. This new data centre will act as a mirror of their primary data centre, providing some much-needed redundancy for when things go wrong - like the incident early last month that left all of their servers unreachable for several hours, and left some systems down for a couple of days.
 
Setting up a second data centre is something that Orpheus have been planning for a while now, but have been struggling to find the funding for - the business doesn't have enough capital to spare, and despite recognising the plans as being sound, banks and other lenders have been unwilling to offer up any cash of their own. Last month's incident - Orpheus's only major outage in the past ten years - was enough to convince Richard that the plans for the second data centre should be kicked up a notch, hence the launch of the crowdfunding campaign.
 
So far the campaign has received donation pledges and long-term loan pledges totalling £3,950 out of the £15,000 goal. This is good progress, but that progress will only continue if new pledges continue to be received. If this is something you're interested in supporting, please contact Richard on 01702 462385 or via the email address crowdfunding@orpheusnet.co.uk.
 

You may have been receiving quite a few emails recently related to GDPR. This is a new set of rules which into effect across the whole EU and impacts anyone who holds individual data. Companies now need to be much more careful on what data they hold on you and have your permission to hold it. You also have a right to ask Companies to forget you and delete any emails which include you.
 
GDPR can result in very serious fines (and the body which enforces it is funded by fines so will be looking to impose some penalties so it can pay its bills). So most companies are being very cautious, especially until it is clear what the rules actually mean.
 
There are 2 aspects from a RISC OS aspect....
 
Firstly, if you are holding any personal data (ie mailing list, customer details, etc), you need to have ensured you comply with the new rules. This also includes keeping the data secure... So a major feature of the !Impact release at Wakefield was adding encryption so that data is not stored on disk in easily hackable/readable text files. If you have !Fireworkz documents, you should be securing them. Hopefully, the new Elesar update for !Prophet will include enhancements to make it easier to keep data secure.
 
Secondly, you may well be receive emails from ROOL and other RISC OS companies. You need to reply to these to confirm your permission to continue contacting you. The ROOL email arrived this week and if you do not reply, you will not receive any more emails from them. So make sure you reply!
 
GDPR comes into force on 25th May.
 

It may seem a long way off with the long summer holidays stretching out to there distant horizon, but September and October will come round all too quickly.
 
So here is a quick reminder to make sure you have notes the date for your diary...
 
London RISC OS Show will be on Saturday 28th October 2017 at its usual venue of St Giles Hotel - Feltham, London
 
It is easily accessible by both car and public transport.
 
All the major (and many minor players) in the RISC OS world attend (and generally run special offers and have new releases). So it is great place to see them, sample their wares and catch-up with other enthusiasts.
 
In recent years, we have seen some innovations at the RISC OS show with organisers setting up taxi shares, meet ups or lifts via the RISC OS newsgroups, websites or at the show. The Internet make finding other attending much easier, so don't leave it until the last minute this year. The summer will fly by...
 
There is a useful RISC OS Calendar page over at RISCOSitory which covers shows and also includes user group meetings if you are looking for (or organising) an event.
 

Just as in life, there are lots of different ways of measuring and estimating popularity. Online one of the ways you can do this is to use a tool called Alexa. This gives sites a ranking based on how popular Alexa thinks the site is (so number 1 is google.com).
 
It is not an exact science (and it can be misrepresentative on some sites where Alexa has less data), but it is a useful 'guess'. So I typed in some RISC OS sites (and non-RISC OS sites which you may have heard of as a comparison) to get some numbers. Here is what Alexa reported for global rankings.....
 
apple.com 65
bbcbasic.co.uk 2,564,449
cjemicros.co.uk 3,463,770
drobe.co.uk 19,898,135
iconbar.com 3,913,170
linuxmint.com 4,450
netsurf-browser.org 1,165,775
osnews.com 114,759
orpheusinternet.co.uk 17,233,044
raspberrypi.org 3,186
riscos.com 2,866,998
riscos.org 9,126,309
riscository.com 11,268,284
riscosopen.org 366,518
stardot.org.uk 827,545 (41,450 in just uK)
ubuntu.com 1,493
xara.com 88,840
 
It is not a total surprise that ROOL is easily the top RISC OS site I could find. We have some work to do with Iconbar (as do the RISC OS vendors if they want to grow their sales online).
 
What do you make of the numbers?
 
Weblink to lookup a website on Alexa.
 

According to an email sent out by Neil Spellings this evening, the usernames and hashed passwords of all registered users on the old aemulor.com and newer buyit.Spellings.net websites have been posted online.
 
The leak, which contains just under 1200 email address and password hash combinations, appears to have been obtained through an SQL injection attack on some "very old" PHP code from the original aemulor web store and was posted to the Pastebin website on Thursday evening (29 April).
 
People who have accounts with the Spellings.net website are advised to change their password and also change the password on other sites that they use the same password on.
 
You can view the full email sent to registered users of the Aemulor/Spellings websites by clicking here.
 

In my personal computer usage, the web browser has always been the weak link on RISC OS so it is really nice to see an update to Netsurf appearing with NetSurf 3.2 being released at the end of August. It looks like essentially a bug-fix and code tidy release, with some incremental improvements to support for CSS handling, but always welcome features. You can get the RISC OS release from here
 
One of the really cool features of the Rasperberry Pi is the ability to run the NOOBS software which allows you to install several different Operating Systems. With multiple SD cards ,swtiching between Linux and RISC OS is as easy as rebooting with a different card. Raspbian works well but its bowsers have been slightly disappointing (there is lots of choice with NetSurf, IceFox, experimental builds of Chrome but I have found them all either under-powered or sluggish).
 
So it is really great to see the release of Epiphany ( a new browser heavily optimised for the Raspberry Pi ). This is easily installed on your existing Linux SD card. You can read the official announcement here. It is especially interesting to note the heavy involvement of Ben Avison (one of the key memebers of RISC OS Open) in the development.
 
 
Happy browsing on your Pi...
 

Jonathan Duddington, author of the RISC OS e-mail client Pluto, has announced that as of now, Pluto is available for free. The project has been open-sourced, enabling other developers to take over maintenance of the software. Jonathan has also updated the program for ARMv7 compatibility, enabling it to run on the most modern hardware.
 
Pluto is written in C and lets users to manage their e-mails and usenet (newsgroup) subscriptions. It has a fast and consistent user interface with many options for sorting and organising articles, a built in editor for composing e-mails or news postings, and a search facility amongst other features. Thanks to Jonathan for his generosity. The lack of a powerful and free Mail user agent was one of the platform's shortfalls.
 
Jonathan also announced an update for his eSpeak text-to-audio speech synthesizer, enabling it to run on modern ARMv7 hardware.
 

Version 2.5 of web browser NetSurf is set to be unveiled at this year's Wakefield show - but its developers warn this could be the last release for the platform. The new version has a rewritten CSS engine to improve its ability to display web pages correctly, should be faster at processing web pages, and boasts big improvements to the way the freely available software caches pages and uses the computer's memory.
 
But as the developers of the open source browser no longer have the time to maintain the RISC OS port of NetSurf, it's likely that future improvements to the program will not make it into the RISC OS port - and automatically generated builds of the software are expected to stop if these new enhancements break the RISC OS-specific source enough to stop it compiling.