As you may have heard, Greece isn't having the best fiscal time of things these days. Oddly, as Glyn Moody noted previously, such dire straits haven't really gotten the country to focus on the important things when it comes to the internet and technology. Now, unless a few open source software groups get their way, it appears that the country with money problems will once again turn a blind eye to open source software in upcoming government purchases.

The ministry published a request for tender in November, seeking suppliers of 26,400 laptops, 1760 servers and 1760 wifi access routers. The value of the contract is set at just over 15 million euro. The purchase will be partly financed by the European Regional Development Fund. The ministry is asking for laptops and servers that can run either a ubiquitous proprietary operating system or Linux. But, say the Greek Linux User Group (Greeklug) and Eel/lak, a Greek open source advocacy organisation founded by 25 universities and research centres, the technical requirements clearly favour proprietary solutions over open source. "The specification is a copy of the proprietary vendor's e-mail and office software."

As someone who gets to deal with government bid contracts, I can assure you that this is extremely common. It's often the case that these kind of request for bids begin with an end product in mind and then develop the bid language to conform to that product. For anyone who wants to actually put together their own effective solution for consideration, it's incredibly annoying. But for a country with the kind of money problems that would make a homeless guy with an addiction to gambling on crack consumption laugh, to linguistically exclude an open source and less expensive software option is simply dumb.

Unfortunately, Greeklug and Eel/lak aren't expecting the Greek government to listen, so they may have to take their complaints elsewhere.

Both are also appealing to the European Commission, hoping that Commissioner for the Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes and Commissioner for Regional Policy Johannes Hahn will pressure the ministry to correct the tender request. "To give free and open source a fair chance, the technical specification will have to be improved", the groups plead.

We'll see if that route works. Regardless, to have money trouble and not consider open source software is just plain irresponsible.

As you may have heard, Greece is having a spot of bother at the moment. Its economy shrank by 6.2% in the last three months alone, and the austerity measures imposed in return for international loans to keep the country running have contributed to a 40% jump in the suicide rate.

But the Greek music and audiovisual collecting society hasn't let a little thing like a national meltdown prevent it from tackling the really serious problems in life -- like stopping people sharing files online (Greek original):

The Court of First Instance Court in Athens accepted the request of the collecting society for music and audiovisual works to order, among other things, that the Greek ISPs should take technical measures to make it impossible for their subscribers to access Web sites through which illegal posting and exchange of works can take place.

Amidst the deepening Greek tragedy, it's good to see someone offering a little comedy.

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TorrentFreak has the details on yet another ridiculous story of "anti-piracy" groups going way too far. In this case, it's the Greek Society for the Protection of Intellectual Property (AEPI), who has sued the site LiveMovies.gr for infringement, claiming the site is making available unauthorized content, and saying that it has "suffered damages worth 10,000 euros for each illegal act." The only problem? LiveMovies.gr does not link to unauthorized content. It only links to content that is being officially streamed by the authorized rights holders. In other words, they've set up a "TV guide" of sorts to legitimate online streaming of content. They've explained this to the AEPI who apparently can't comprehend that the site is only linking to authorized content, and continues to press forward with the lawsuit. In response, LiveMovies.gr is filing a countersuit against AEPI, claiming both fraud and perjury. Should be interesting to see what happens next...

A bunch of folks have been sending in this story about how Greek firm Systemgraph, which is an official support partner of Apple in Greece, is apparently suing a customer who complained online about the bad experience he had with Systemgraph. Apparently, the customer, Dimitris Papadimitriadis, brought his iMac into Systemgraph to be repaired because he had noticed "dark patches" on the screen. The company said it would clean out the machine and replace the LCD. However, after Papadimitriadis got the machine back, he felt the problem had become worse, not better. The company offered to try to do the fix all over again, but the guy no longer trusted the company -- and noted that under Greek law, he's entitled to ask for a refund or a replacement for the machine. Systemgraph responded by noting that since the machine wasn't bought through them, they weren't responsible for offering a replacement machine.

I actually agree that it seems like a stretch to demand a new machine from the repair company, but I'm not familiar with the specifics of Greek consumer protection law on the subject. Even so, what happened next is pretty silly on the part of Systemgraph. After Papadimitriadis wrote about his bad experience with the company, Systemgraph sued him for defamation, demanding €200,000 for damaging its reputation. Of course, it wasn't Papadimitriadis who damaged the company's reputation -- but the company's failure to properly fix his machine. And, in the long run, it seems like suing a customer -- even a disgruntled one -- is much more likely to damage one's reputation, than any random online review.

Lots of people around the world have worked themselves into a lather over the supposed privacy invasions of Google Street View, as well as the security threat they say it creates. These fears are largely unfounded, since Street View displays images of public spaces, and since it really doesn't give would-be criminals information they couldn't easily find elsewhere; and most courts and governments have agreed. Still, the Street View backlash continues to spread, with groups in Japan and Greece the latest to take exception to it. Officials in Greece have forced Google to stop the project there until it provides more details on how long it will store photos and how it will protect people's privacy. In Japan, Google is being forced to re-shoot photos in a dozen cities because its car-mounted cameras were too high. It will lower its cameras there by 16 inches so they can't see over fences around people's homes. That's a nice gesture from Google, but will Japan also ban multi-story buildings that let people see over fences? Will ladders and scaffolding be next?

There's been a lot of discussion, here and elsewhere, about the dangers that expanded government surveillance pose to civil liberties. The Constitution protects the right to be free of unreasonable searches, which the courts have held includes electronic eavesdropping, and many people, myself included, think that recent proposals for expanded wiretapping threaten that right. But less attention has been paid to the security risks created by expanded eavesdropping programs. Matt Blaze and some other computer security experts have a new article documenting the risks concerning eavesdropping systems that themselves could be compromised, allowing unauthorized third parties to use government surveillance networks for their own ends. That's what happened in Greece, when someone managed to hack into the Greek surveillance infrastructure and listen in on dozens of senior government officials. Blaze and his co-authors argue that the more information collected by a wiretapping scheme, the greater the damage that will be done if it's ever compromised. The Protect America Act, which Congress passed last August and is due to expire in a few days, authorizes virtually unchecked government interception of communications between Americans and those overseas. The paper warns that the safeguards in the Protect America Act are inadequate to protect Americans from a compromised surveillance network. Congress would do well to listen.