From time to time I am engaged to help organisations in the UK and in the EU make decisions about where their data is stored, how it is accessed, and how to keep things as stable as possible over the next few years. This was a dizzying mess until 2025, and in 2026 there are some big decisions coming. Organisations need as much certainty as they can get for making decisions which are expensive to change in the future. ...
Aimed at scientists joining the new epidemiology, my research paper is an advanced draft heading towards preprint for epidemiological modelling work I am doing . The paper consists of 6 pages including diagrams and how-to boxes introducing scientists to epidemiology and advising how they can immediately apply their discipline. It gives a sense of where epidemiology came from, why it has proven to be insufficient, and what it has become in 2026. ...
Patents and the MIT License Some of my software projects use MIT so I have studied this issue. My notes are mostly kept as contributions to the Wikipedia page on the MIT License since that is where the decades-old knowledge of the MIT license origins is already maintained. The legal minds in many of the largest companies in the world seem to accept that at least in the US the MIT license implies a patent grant. As probably the most-used open source license, the MIT license has many wealthy corporate defenders if anyone wanted to test that idea.
This file is a Code of Conduct first written in 2020 for the LumoSQL project. Here is Version 1.6 – Updated 9th February, 2026. Heavily adapted and compressed from the large and repetitive version 3.1 of the Mozilla Participation Guidelines and published by LumoSQL under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Contents LumoSQL Code of Conduct This file exists because the LumoSQL Project needed it, less than one year after starting in 2019. We take it seriously, and hope that most English-reading adults can understand what is said. We hope this is not needed very often. ...
The detail of the GDPR and its implied computer science contain a solution for sharing secrets according to law. This continues to be true in 2026, as the Digital Omnibus Regulation takes shape. Executive Summary The GDPR sets up a conflict in trust between companies in particular circumstances, which can only be resolved by using the automation of a cryptographic audit trail with particular properties as described below. Problem Statement Under the EU’s GDPR law virtually every company is a Controller, and virtually all Controllers use at least one Processor. When a Processor is engaged, the GDPR requires that a contract is signed with the very specific contents spelled out in clause 3 of Article 28. The GDPR requires that Controllers and Processors cooperate together in order to deliver data protection, and this cooperation needs to be very carefully managed to maintain the security and other guarantees that the GDPR also requires. That’s what this mandatory contract is intended to achieve. ...
The immense Privacy Shield was a 2016 self-certification scheme for US companies to hold themselves to the strict EU privacy rules. In 2020 Privacy Shield was struck down by the EU Court of Justice. In non-technical terms, the Court said: There is no way Privacy Shield can work. So don’t use US-controlled cloud companies such as Google or Amazon. In late 2021 this decision started rippling out across Europe, as one place and then another moves away from these giant US companies, starting with government users. We all like familiarity and wish to avoid change, so this decision seems astonishing to many people. Once organisations get over their surprise, it is not so difficult to do. In 2023 I wrote It remains to be seen what these US companies will do in 2023. Some of them are wealthier than several smaller EU nations combined. By 2026 we had the answer - they used coercion by political, economic and legal means to prevent EU citizens using their own IP to build their own services. ...
I participated in many battles directly against Microsoft in the Ballmer era, 1998-2014. Every Samba feature release seem to further anger Microsoft. Copyright and then especially patents were weaponised, as well as well-funded hit teams aimed at spreading confusion and intimidating their own (Microsoft’s!) customers. In the Nadalla era from 2014-present, Microsoft and other tech giants are using even more brutal ways (paracopyright, technical protection measures and the Unitary Patent System), to coerce citizens and governments. ...
This timeline covers the period of most obvious abuses of power by Microsoft against free software and Samba in particular. It was more difficult to bury open source like Samba in expensive litigation than a company, but they tried hard. This was the Ballmer era, named after the then-CEO, and the history of Samba’s triumphs feels highly relevant to 2026. What caused Microsoft’s new CEO in 2014 to dramatically change course from such directed hostility? Perhaps it was a fit of morality. Perhaps it was the intention to launch the much worse extortion racket we see today. ...
In 2026, the Samba Project is nearly 30 years old and has conservatively a billion users. It started when I got upset at Microsoft for wanting to monopolise all computer networking. I discovered some unmaintained but interesting open source software for sharing files and printers with workstation computers. And the rest is the official Samba history. Samba is implemented by talented software engineers with a very large number of total contributors. I was not one of the Samba core engineers, not being good at intensive protocol analysis combining encryption, obfuscation, historical anomalies and sheer overwhelming volume of old-school RPC design. I was (and remain) more interested in interoperability architecture and design, why these things are needed and make sense to users. Plus some protocol analysis, for example, technical readers may know the NTLMv2 encryption scheme was tricky, but turned out to be the same as used in the NTFS filesystem - NTLM* is deprecated in favour of Kerberos now but those were the days. ...