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“Reliable System” as a legal term and as a technical term
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…
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Horizon articles in the DEESLR journal and relevant handbook material
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…
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Addressing the common law Presumption of computer reliability is a separate issue from addressing failure of disclosure
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…
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The Usual Dilemma – Soliciting Information versus Ascribing Responsibility
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…
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Code Quality for Safety and Code Quality for Security
Some computer security experts put the majority of extant vulnerabilities down to poor code quality; for example, Martyn Thomas in his keynote at the 2016 IET System Safety and Computer Security conference in London. This was evidently the case in the late 1990’s, when some 80% of the newly-formed US CERT’s publicly-announced Internet-transmitted vulnerabilities were…
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Bremain/Brexit II
So, our European colleagues have been giving their opinions on how Brexit should proceed http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/25/eu-emergency-talks-brexit-berlin . To French colleagues Ayrault and Macron, Luxembourg colleague Asselborn, EC President Juncker and local boy Steinmeier, I say: how about you back off a little? You’re not helping. The UK is obviously in the middle of a political crisis. It happens.…
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Pete Seeger
Pete Seeger died early today. It popped up on my iPad as I was reading the morning news. There is lots to say about Pete, most of it not by me. The New York Times’s obituary by Jon Pareles does justice to the man. His music speaks for itself. Because, as he would probably say,…
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The Social Construction of Crime and Tort on the Internet
Can things that look like hard facts and indeed are hard facts be socially constructed? Sure. But many people, indeed quite a few scientists, think not. I remember being quite surprised a decade and a half ago when I realized how many facts were indeed socially constructed. It is more obvious that social facts such…
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Solar Storms (Coronal Mass Ejections) and Nuclear Power Plants
The British Royal Academy of Engineering, an institution whose membership is nominated and elected only, is conducting a study on the engineering and societal impacts of space weather and has issued a call for evidence. I sent the following note on Sunday 25th March to policyAT[theRoyalAcademyOfEngineering] with a copy to the Office of Nuclear Regulation.…