Dan Shearer. Welcome.

• LumoSQL — A novel twist on the world’s most-used software, adding features of privacy and security. We found a way to add to SQLite without breaking compatiblity.
• Not Before Time — Assembles existing technologies to create a universal way to time‑lock information using everyday software tools.
• Samba — I co‑founded the Samba project, preventing Microsoft and the US Government from becoming the default store for everyone’s files. Samba is about digital freedom, as showin in the official history. I have developed a timeline of battles lost and won. Samba taught me that technical leadership is insufficient.
• Reversible Computers — These make it possible to rewind applications and entire systems backwards, and then trace forwards again to find complicated bugs and security problems. In a world where software is becoming more fragile all the time, this is an obvious answer, and its what I did in the second substantial startup I worked for.
• Not Forking — This tool addresses a difficult area in software reproducibility and reliability. Not‑forking largely automates change management in ways that version control systems such as Git, Fossil or GitHub cannot.
• Open Source to Chemical Rockets — Explains how I first found open source concepts.
• Sweet Lies — The Signal secure chat app is the most trustworthy mobile chat. Despite this, Signal depends on US cloud services. Sweet Lies addresses these privacy problems, also making it it possible for anyone to run their own equivalent to the Signal service.

• Opportunity in GDPR Article 28 — There is a surprise buried in the legalese of the GDPR. There is some precise Computer Science mandated, and the only good way to achieve this is with something that looks a bit like a blockchain. GDPR enforcement is intended to get tougher each year, which means there is a need for a new kind of cloud business implementing this blockchain. Many non-EU countries have copied the GDPR.
• EU‑US Privacy Shield et. al. in 2026 — The problem of US companies using coercion to achieve corporate and political goals is not a new one; this site documents how I have been doing it for decades! But in 2026 this is now a mainstream concern, part of global trade wars and also shooting wars. Court decisions in multiple countries, laws being passed and struck down, and mis-applied computer science and social science make for a very tricky time. My speciality is in trying to find solutions that minimise risk on the various axes.
• Software Patents — I have done a lot of work on copyright and software patents, which have now morphed into something else entirely when combined with technical protection measures. This is the key to the problem of technical sovereignty, something I have been speaking about since linux.conf.au 2004.
• Data Mobility Post‑Brexit — I am employed from time to time to look at post‑Brexit data mobility. This now involves the complexity of the data/trade wars. Planning for minimal disruption and cost is difficult.

• One Health and Epidemiology

• Code of Conduct — A concise code of conduct for open source projects after witnessing repeated serious incidents of aggression and intimidation. Started from the Mozilla Participation Guidelines, shrunk to the essentials for smaller projects.
• Security Standards and Certifications — How security standards (ISO27001/9001, GDPR, NIS, etc.) and certifications relate in practice for UK industry.
• Fossil — Git is ubiquitous but with some difficult‑to‑fix design flaws that hold back development for most projects. Fossil is very mature but needed to be easier to access, and to have a technical strategy for avoiding Git‑type lock‑in. I contributed to these improvements so my projects could abandon Git/GitHub for Fossil.
• Teaching Exercises — Exercises in the areas of CyberSecurity/CompSci and Technology.

These are my current topics in 2025 that are about the future. Older lectures and topics by definition are overtaken by time and so are not listed here.

• Fine‑grained data control — beyond row‑level RBAC in SQL (see LumoSQL).
• Reversible Computers — How it works practically in 2023, and prospects for infrastructure and debugging; effects on reliability and complexity.
• Complexity — creeps up imperceptibly, and covers much more than gigantic numbers of lines of code. Even the best of decomposed design and service architectures are fragile. Engineering Cybernetics helps identify the problems; I propose inverting the logic and keeping just those parts which evidence suggests are both essential and correct.
• Privacy law — combining human rights with CompSci and mathematics, privacy law appears to be turning the first twenty years of giant Internet cloud services upside‑down, starting in Europe; improves services for individual users and reduces barriers to new cloud entrants and culture‑specific solutions.
• IP law and 21st Century Knowledge — combating climate change requires scientific output to be increased, free‑flowing and reproducible; several strategies can combat the artificial IP wall that prevents reproducibility (not the same as reusability).
• Physical hardware and IP rights — practical, day‑to‑day applications of keeping IP available to all with integrity intact, in contexts where low‑quality/dangerous knockoffs are a risk in ways that do not apply to software.