"Hello all, After much needless delay I'm pleased to announce the latest version of Emacs' AlsaPlayer (EAP); version 0.12 (codename 'Gaza Remembered'). With the addition of customisation groups (and several other improvements) I now believe this is ready for inclusion in Emacs.

The BBC's iPlayer site has been a target of open source community ire since it started. Originally delivering content via Microsoft DRM-protected technologies, it was condemned by the FSF (among others) for dictating unfree technology choices on viewers.

In this post I will interview Paul Battley, the man who wrote the program that worked around the DRM loophole at BBC. ... He wrote a script (in the Ruby programming language) to replace the blocked Firefox extensions. It worked a treat but the BBC blocked that too; however Paul, just like Kenny in Southpark, couldn’t be killed off so easily.

Two things piqued my interest recently. One was the iPlayer protests at the BBC, the other was the Wiki tracker project. More specifically, it was the reporting of these events. In the case of the former, it went virtually unreported and made me proud of our independent and open news sources and reporting network. The latter highlighted (again) the many issues of user-generated content.

The BBC has released a public beta of its own software application for watching video online, hoping to engage younger people who are consuming more of their content over the Internet.

The BBC Trust has asked to meet open source advocates to discuss their complaints over the corporation's Windows-only on demand broadband TV service, iPlayer.