• Andrew Odlyzko on Cybersecurity not Being a Big Deal

    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.…

  • Computer Reliability in Legal Arguments, with Some Observations about Arguments

    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, computers in cases they consider. She uses the Post Office Horizon affair as the English…

  • Concerning an Odd Comment on Covid-19 Vaccination

    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…

  • Glimpses of Reason Concerning 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), and Saxony (Sachsen). See this story from Sunday 2021-02-28.  Those states represent 41.5% of the German…

  • Vaccination and Memes Around AZD1222 Reluctance in Germany

    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…

  • Covid-19, Safety Critical Systems Club Activity, Air Filtering

    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 – 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…

  • System Safety, Cybersecurity, the “Scope” of IEC 61508 and Broken Standards

    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 for the general-systems and HW part in November 2017, after a request for comments from…

  • Outsourced Engineering-Software Development

    [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 on for decades in all sorts of software-dependent companies, and is a well-developed model. Sometimes…

  • One Right Way to do Things in Education

    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 concert hall, the Oetkerhalle. Well, how nice. I worked there for 22 years. Obviously not…

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