Evidencing the integrity of supply chain
The pharmaceutical supply chain has developed a set of integrity protections against fraud, using transparency and accountability in aid of human health. The same can apply to food, if a choice is made...
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Age Verification as the new cookie law?
Age Verification is just months away from becoming the law and, for all the criticisms to date, opposition to it has been ineffective. When the ‘cookie law’ was introduced in 2011, it was expected by...
View ArticleAI, data, the digital economy and a new myspace
I had a ticket for Max Tegmark’s lecture in Cambridge last night, and then comments by Vasili Arkhipov’s family on being awarded the Future of Life prize. Hopefully we will get through the week without...
View ArticleWhen the State meets the Street
Books like this one come along rarely. “When the State meets the Street” is a discussion of how public sector algorithm designers keep screwing up in practice – and is probably applicable to the...
View ArticleTravel Planning – Submission to the Independent Economic Review
This submission primarily addresses question 9, touching on 6 and 7. On 14th March 2015, the Tivoli pub in Cambridge caught fire. Shortly afterwards, the fire brigade closed the Mitcham’s Corner...
View ArticleCorporate integrity when the engineering effort on blockchain scaling has...
[From about paragraph 5, parts of this post assume familiarity with the plasma spec and proof of stake (relying on sharding) – it is not intended for a general audience]. It should be impossible to...
View ArticleFacebook now
The only ‘never event’ at Facebook was the site being down. Allow “malicious actors” to create a psychographic profile of “most people on facebook”? Fine, just keep the site up while they do it… As a...
View Article(Replacing) Facebook – Part 2
“Leave Facebook” is a luxury that many do not have. Like Google Reader, it has become the ubiquitous solution for a certain class of user needs. But like Google Reader, people will be able to cope...
View ArticleFalsified Medicines and beyond
One of the side conversations at the Mattereum Identity summit on Monday was the idea of tracking individual copies of objects (‘this bottle of Coke’), not just classes of objects, (‘a bottle of...
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Puntcon 2018
Conferences are fun, but don’t have ducklings. Or champagne. Many years ago the legendary Geek Punt Picnic morphed into PuntCon, the Cambridge leg of the alternative conference circuit. And after the...
View ArticleIdentity policy in practice
Policy wonks sometimes wonder what would happen if Ministers were forced to carry a reminder of their failed policies in their pocket for over a decade. A natural experiment now shows they learn...
View ArticleReplacing Instapaper
After instapaper went dark for Europe, I moved to pinboard. Instapaper turned off all EU access with 24 hours notice. They’ve still not fixed whatever GDPR problems they had, and while the website...
View ArticleOngoing trust in hierarchies with ZK-STARKS
A one off statement ‘X was not in the database today’ is very different in terms of public confidence and trust to the statement ‘X was not in the database on <<date>>, and no one with...
View ArticleTop public health issues by local authority
Public Health England publishes a load of data on different councils by topic, but doesn’t say whether one issue is more important than another for an area. So I have. Below is the answer to the...
View ArticleEmail Alerts for changes to the law made via Statutory Instruments
As “EU Exit” looms, the disconnect of Statutory Instruments from the normal tools of Parliamentary scrutiny is now glaring. TheGovernmentSays.com now does email alerts for keywords in SIs – when the...
View ArticleSpinning the Battle to control AI
Hal writes: Hassabis often cites Breakout, a videogame for the Atari console. A Breakout player controls a bat that she can move horizontally across the bottom of the screen, using it to bounce a ball...
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Puntcon 2019
So it’s been fifteen glorious years, and while we may all have aged (or been born, for some regular attendees), and the political system has been ‘challenged’, and atmospheric CO2 may have gone from...
View ArticleWhat hath digital good intentions wrought
It was uniquely powerful user research which demonstrated the bureaucratic brutality of the old carers allowance forms, and which changed that system for the better. The user research philosophy...
View ArticleThe first draft of the NHSX covid app
It’s notable from the NCSC blog and detailed paper which user needs it makes harder, resulting from the DHSC’s public statements the new app doesn’t expect to be true. What should the...
View ArticleWelcoming data protection friends to the cultures of the NHS
No one* goes to work for the NHS intending to cause harm. It’s easy to argue that Palantir are evil, and that they should have no place in the NHS, but that’s not going to change anything. Especially...
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