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…. Read moreAndrew Odlyzko on Cybersecurity not Being a Big Deal
The cybersecurity and public policy expert Susan Landau has published an article in the Lawfare blog about Problems with Evidentiary Software in English and US courts; the attitudes of English and US courts towards the evidence generated by, or about the behaviour of,… Read moreComputer Reliability in Legal Arguments, with Some Observations about Arguments
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… Read moreConcerning an Odd Comment on Covid-19 Vaccination
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),… Read moreGlimpses of Reason Concerning Vaccination
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… Read moreVaccination and Memes Around AZD1222 Reluctance in Germany
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… Read moreCovid-19, Safety Critical Systems Club Activity, Air Filtering
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… Read moreThe Usual Dilemma – Soliciting Information versus Ascribing Responsibility
IEC 61508, the the international standard for functional safety of systems involving E/E/PE subsystems (which nowadays means mostly every engineered system), is being revised, or “maintained” in the IEC jargon. It started, for the SW part, in November 2014 and… Read moreSystem Safety, Cybersecurity, the “Scope” of IEC 61508 and Broken Standards
[2019-07-02. Modified to add a working link to the Ladkin-Simons paper on Static Deadlock Analysis.] Bloomberg has an interesting article by Peter Robison on the difficulties Boeing seems to have been having with outsourced software development. Such outsourcing has been going… Read moreOutsourced Engineering-Software Development
I just found out from the local newspaper this morning that Bielefeld University had a “gala” celebration of its 50-year anniversary on Saturday evening, with a concert by the Bielefeld Philharmonic and a few speeches and refreshments in the local… Read moreOne Right Way to do Things in Education
