Documents are increasingly being created and used in electronic form. Trade documents with legal import are no exception. The UK Electronic Trade Documents Act 2023 defines what such a document is, and requires it be produced by a “reliable system”. But “reliable system” is a concept of engineering, and has been for decades (I have…
Retired barrister Stephen Mason has been writing, editing and maintaining a legal practitioner’s handbook on electronic evidence since 2007. The latest edition, Stephen Mason and Daniel Seng (eds.), Electronic Evidence and Electronic Signatures, University of London Press, 2021, is available open-access at https://uolpress.co.uk/book/electronic-evidence-and-electronic-signatures/ Stephen was also editor until 2024 of the open-access journal Digital Evidence…
The Post Office Horizon scandal has highlighted two issues in the law of England and Wales. The first is that there is a common law Presumption (I use a capital “P” henceforth) that devices, including computer systems, are operating correctly unless there is evidence to rebut this assumption. The second is that evidence that would…
1. In 2019, Andrew Odlyzko published a paper in ACM Ubiquity in which he argued that cybersecurity was not as big a deal as some prognosticators had claimed http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/cyberinsecurity.pdf There are a number of insights, as well as some questionable arguments. I find it worth commenting. Paragraphs are numbered. I abbreviate the author’s name to AO.…
The Observer is one of Britain’s oldest newspapers. It is published Sundays (effectively as the Sunday edition of The Guardian). Its science and environment editor Robin McKie has an article about vaccination and “political folly” He considers the brouhaha surrounding Covid-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca (as it is now called. It used to be AZD1222. I shall call…
The German nonsense is unfortunately continuing, but is yielding some. The influential Minister-President of Bavaria (Bayern), Marcus Söder, had suggested that the over-65 negative recommendation for AZD1222 should be waived; he was joined by the MinPres’s of Baden-Wurttemburg, Hesse (Hessen), and Saxony (Sachsen). See this story from Sunday 2021-02-28. Those states represent 41.5% of the German…
A British colleague wrote to me a couple days ago about a newspaper story concerning “a vaccination centre in Berlin that had 3000 people booked in one day, but only a couple of hundred turned up.” Our vaccination centre in Bielefeld was ready to handle up to 2,000 vaccinations per day in mid-December, but only…
It has been over a year since I have written anything here. I have been concerned with reading myself in the medical-scientific and public health literature about SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19, because the deleterious consequences of this pandemic dwarf anything we system safety people have had to deal with during my career. Many believe that engineers…
The usual dilemma has surfaced in the Grenfell Tower inquiry. I must say I was expecting it to do so at some point. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jan/30/people-who-worked-on-grenfell-tower-could-face-life-sentences The dilemma in its current form amounts to this. 1. Civil engineers, regulators and others involved with buildings want to find out causally what went on during building and refurbishment of…