UK plan to digitise wills and destroy paper originals "insane" say experts
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
You have an institution - in this case the Ministry of Justice - who presumably at one point had senior employees who were acutely aware of the historical importance of preserving original documents like this. These were likely key values of that organization, but crucially they were recorded only in people's heads.
Time moves on, employees come and go, and now there's a push for savings around the UK government and someone pipes up and says "well, we could digitize those musty old documents, throw away the originals and save on archival costs" - and there just so happens to be nobody currently in a senior position who understands why that's a bad idea.
I have the same suspicion every time a tech company makes a howlingly obvious error - like that time GitLab said they were going to delete every free repo that hadn't been updated in a year (and later recanted after the entirely predictable outcry): https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/05/gitlab_reverses_delet...
Probably thousands of people have some means to tamper with that archive, but courts don't really care to revisit hundred year old wills in the ways soap operas imply.
Museums aren't just a store of "art", museums are a way to preserve our heritage, preferably in its original form.
I would add though that one of the top stories yesterday was about how the British Library website has been down for 10 days due to a ransomware attack. Digital information retrieval is only as reliable as your backup strategy.
And, given the performance of government IT projects in the past in so many countries, this will probably turn out to be more expensive than they hope.
paper itself isn't durable enough but I'd still be wary of purely digital encapsulation.
Think about what you are protecting here. Dave’s will. Ol’ davo from down pub. Literally meaningless beyond the potential for mild curiosity in a hundred years.
If the worst happened and we lose them, it’s insignificant. Planning for the preservation of davo’s will in the event of an apocalypse is a waste of our time.
Further, there is a difference between “knowing what a computer is” and “recognizing a specific manifestation of computing technology”. For example, this picture [0]. The URL is somewhat descriptive, but say you were presented with that piece of technology. Would you recognize it? Would you think that it could be important? Would you be able to get it running? For me, personally, it would be a significant effort in terms of time spent… and I certainly wouldn’t be able to recognize it just from that picture.
0. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/ZIP_Driv...
Yes, theoretically, it should be practical /s
Things could be written on the back, or the type of paper could be an important point.
It will likely inadvertently make them susceptible to remote cyber attacks.
How much do you trust the government to keep these digital wills secure? I'm fairly confident they can keep physical wills secure. A country's army provides a good deterrent to vandalizing physical objects. In the digital world, those threats are muted, especially if the hacker is in a jurisdiction that doesn't care.
Consider this: please pull the tape backups? What do you mean we don’t have a tape reader anymore and the tape has all gone bad? What about the archival DVD? They only last 25 years? Surely the Zip drive has it on it? The plastic wore out on the read heads? Is that even a thing? Amazon glacier? No SLA? No, ColeSLA isn’t a funny joke Steve. This is serious. Wait. So, where are the land records from 1870 to establish ownership of the property then?
Digital record preservation is hard and gets a lot harder the longer term you try to do it.
Governments do NOT have the proper time horizons or actual costs of preservation in realistic order or top of mind when they talk about these projects being “cost saving.”
On a related topic, and perhaps more importantly/scary, the Land Registry has already gone digital so that deeds to properties are only kept in digital form...
That’s a strange sounding verbiage.
It just sounds so Douglas Adams.
With more redundancies, multi-location replication and all that jazz of course.
https://cdn.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/information-ma...
Is that a certainty? "Crown Copyright" is a thing in the UK and other Commonwealth countries, and still seems to be in use:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_copyright#United_Kingdom
To save money.
Hmm.
However, it introduces the possibility that records won’t survive the government, and a plethora of other issues that come along with locking into a storage format, the progression of technology, etc.
Bear in mind the average age of countries is only 158 years globally.
It’s not as cut and dry as it initially appears. Everyone is telling me how obvious it is to gain the cost savings, and perhaps it is. But it is by no means as clear cut, especially when you consider the solution of keeping both but reducing the cost of physical archives to pure storage only post-digitization to be a default against destruction. That use case complicates everything.
We also have a boatload of experience maintaining paper records and libraries. We don’t have nearly the track record with digital.
https://lifeshareproject.wordpress.com/2011/02/02/physical-c...
Keeping paper records is not a solution, it is an admission of failure. We have to figure this stuff out now, because the overwhelming majority of important documents being written today will never exist in printed form and need to be preserved for the future. If we don't trust ourselves to scan and shred old documents, then we have much bigger problems.
It's a little ironic to come down negatively on digital data because it can be accidentally deleted easily, when you're comparing it to a library that literally burned down.
> Digital record preservation is hard and gets a lot harder the longer term you try to do it.
Physical record preservation is not walk in the park, either. It's not like paper can just be stored in any old fashion and be expected to not degrade over time.
And with digital records, you can back them up in several different physical locations. With physical records, you're one fire, one burst pipe, one mistake in storage or handling from losing it.
There have been significant improvements in structure fireproofing and firefighting in the past 2071 years.
I love digital records, but historically people have been wrecked by the destruction of physical records.
There was nothing requiring the home office to start investigating these people in the first place, or to have these extremely stringent requirements for proof they had been living in Britain before 1973. Who has these kind of papers? Most of us don't – other than my passport, I don't really have any documentary proof from before I was in my 20s or so.
I could perhaps get some records from the school I attended, maybe? No idea if they still have records from decades ago. I certainly don't have anything from that lying around. Who still has records from their elementary school or high school? Some probably do, but I don't think it's uncommon for people to have nothing at all from that when they're in their 60s.
The thought of having to keep every one of these objects because some government bureaucrat ejaculated a thought prematurely to now require various forms of evidence you were in the country is ridiculous.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/cancellation-of-p...
Though, actually, the corner clipped off thing sounds familiar. I think we may do that too. I’ve probably got it somewhere…
You are supposed to send them back on replacement, but both countries with whom I maintain passports return them to you in an "unusable" state (mutilated).
I would never get rid of my old passports, they are reminder of travels. Also, expired passport can be used as identity document for driver's license (but not Real ID) or passport. You be able to bootstrap identity from expired passport.
You need to prove continuous residence for 5 years, the only accepted form of evidence in utility bills, bank statements and council tax.
You need 1 document per 3 months of residence, so at the very least 15 documents, and they have to be from 3 different organisations, without gaps. Do you have that?
There are obvious risks and downsides to identity cards and other kinds of national databases, but Windrush highlighted the downsides of not having them; Britain's decentralised and ad-hoc approach to identity allowed a lot of people to slip into a kind of legal limbo.
That can definitely be a problem, but it's also a problem with more strict identity systems, where certainly in my experience slipping in "legal limbo" can be just as easy if not easier, albeit under different circumstances. Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37239713 – there's a lot more detail to that by the way I won't bore you with, but eventually the easiest "solution" was to just leave the country.
While British-style systems are somewhat chaotic and messy and clearly imperfect, on balance I think they're profoundly better than strict registers. What was it again, "the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero"? If you try to be air-tight about these sort of things you're going to end up excluding a lot of non-fraudulent people, and it's better to have a bit of fraud.
Another important factor is that a lot of the Windrush generation weren't immigrating so much as British citizens moving from one part of the country to another part of the country. I believe that was more or less the situation legally, but that's also how many felt as they were raised to be British; if you listen to people talk about their childhood in Jamaica and whatnot then they were raised and always thought of themselves as British (whether the white people in Britain also saw them as such is a different matter – rivers of blood etc.).
A bit of a pedantic point perhaps, but I do think it matters and is an important reason why people didn't have much documentation, because would you keep detailed documentation if you were moving from Glasgow to Bristol?
Heck a lot of these systems need digitising more, it's crazy how many doucments have to be sent around to tell one dept about something another dept has declared.
> It is feared that wills of ordinary people, some of whom may become historically significant in the future, risk being lost.
> Wills are considered essential documents, particularly for social historians and genealogists, as they capture what people considered important at the time and reveal unknown family links.
Digitization is not a problem, but the destruction of the originals is.
> “You can see the indent of the pen and if the writer is excited or tense. There are minute details on the page which digitisation [can’t capture]. There is a thrilling sensation that you are looking at a document that a real human being wrote on. You get a connection to the past that digitised versions won’t give you.”
More importantly: the digitization process is prone to errors and mistakes. Anyone who's spent any time browsing digital collections will have encountered pages that were scanned out of focus, or where a part of the page was illegibly crumpled, or a page was missed or miscategorized.
I think this is it. This is about emotions and sentimentality, not fundamental practical concerns.
For the purpose of this discussion we of course assume that digitalisation is done correctly because this obviously has to be a comparison of the value of the original over a correct digital copy.
Plus my notes about digitization being error-prone.
I'm hoping that there are stronger arguments.
Furthermore the servers (hw+sw) are not for free and all government projects use to cost more than market prices.
And finally, why does storing paper documents on shelves cost 4.5 M per year?
Of course if I cared about those files (I don't) I should have copied them to a HDD, then to a SSD like I did with everything else. Think of archives on tapes and the plans to keep moving them across storage technology. That costs too and if you fail at that eventually all you have is an unreadable piece of plastic and silicon. Maybe you should save copies to at least two of the major could storages and let them do the job of keeping current.
I won't destroy the original though.
This may be about practical concerns taking priority over emotional ones, but don't mistake what is practical as being more fundamental than that which is emotional.
I’m not convinced that archival quality digital storage would be any cheaper than paper storage, and would likely be substantially more expensive in the long run.
Issues with scanning can be done by having the scan done at probate time and the person handling the estate validating the scan.
I don't know what they'll ultimately decide but it is right that they at least bring the issue up to debate it.
I asked ChatGPT 3.5 for some rough estimates on the storage costs. Ideally, we would be using archival quality scans (~75MB per page of a will) and a more or less random distribution of will length resulted in an estimate of ~700 million pages for the archived wills, or 50,000 PB. This number would need to increase each year, but this would be the baseline for the reported 100M wills.
If we assume $20/TB/month for archival quality distributed storage, the cost for the baseline storage is about $12B annually, and that's just for the storage. Indexing, retrieval, etc. adds up to 50% more per year on top of the cost to digitize and develop such a system in the first place. So we’re talking ~$18B or ~£14B annually.
Depending on storage density and overall reliability, 25,000 – 50,000 racks would be required without data redundancy, so the $20/TB/month baseline cost or $30/TB/month for redundancy, indexing, and retrieval does not sound too far out of line.
Are we really saying that the physical storage of wills is costing ~£20B annually? (It could be, but the likely highest cost as always is personnel. On the other hand, digital storage requires more climate control than document storage, which aside from humidity control, can mostly be kept underground without temperature controls.)
The chat, for consideration. The costs could be constrained by not using archival quality scans, but that would be the purposeful destruction of history — which, given that we're talking about the tories, isn’t that surprising, really.
https://chat.openai.com/share/edb569c0-30f9-45ea-8d9f-745631...
So you and ChatGPT think it will cost over £14B a year but the civil service team in the Department of Justice estimate it will save £4.5M by extending the digitisation to wills over 25 years old? All wills since 2021 (500,000) have been scanned and stored, because that is cheaper and less error prone than dealing with hard copies by the Probate Court - costs will be known and I'm guessing several orders of magnitude less than your estimates.
Price per TB can be as little as 50 cents but you'll want lots of redundancy so it'll be at least 3 times that. I think you could do sufficient amounts of redundancy for $5 or $10 not $20 or $30
IIRC, a 600dpi 8.5x11 uncompressed color tif is about 100MB.
A year past, and the customer found his copy of the contract while cleaning house or whatever. If turned out, his copy was radically different form the one provided to him by the bank. It turns out that the bank 'reconstituted' the contract from their digital records. And it turned out nothing like the original.
being serious: most wills are not sourced from the probate registry and are only sent there to obtain probate
As opposed to paper.
I always thought it was cool how some Ghost in The Shell movie/anime stuff involved storing very sensitive secrets as barcodes on paper, to be kept physically-secure before being read by cybernetic eyes.
There's also some line from one of the The Expanse books (Abbadon's Gate) which I can't easily call up here. The protagonist is inside an alien space-station following an AI's instructions to try to save the day, and he's curious why the AI doesn't just do it. The AI tells him that for the builders of that place, having physical existence was a kind of authority all on its own.
don't even have to torch the entire document, just enough to make it inadmissible for legal purposes.
The government can have the burden of proof to show that the chain is complete if ordered so by a court.
I did mull over something similar for voting a few years back, scrawling sides of A2-paper with notes and diagrams on the subject, but I'll be damned if I can make head or tail of whatever I wrote back then. I was a bit drunk at the time.
Same for "real estate on the blockchain" - when people argue for that, the bit they are usually arguing for is a trail of historical records that can't be corrupted. Certificate Transparency solves that really well.
We are talking about a mechanism to prove that no-one has tampered with the documents.
A blockchain is just a content-addressed linked list (that is: the "pointer" to the next node is actually hash of the contents of the next node, then you have a big hashmap of hash -> node contents). A merkle tree is the same thing in tree form. Git uses the directed acyclic graph version of the same thing. This approach is perfect for this use case. The decentralized Nakamoto consensus proof of work stuff is unnecessary here.
Keeping only a single copy seems insane to me, any number of things could go wrong and destroy all that's stored there[1]. Digital copies wouldn't so bad if there were redundant backups (tape[2], film[3], etc.).
[1]: https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nypd-warehouse-fire-evi...
"..."
I don't know about the UK, but according to an old episode of Dallas that I watched recently, in the US there are usually three official copies of a will kept: one in a government records office, one at the office of the lawyer who drafted it, and one with the individual.
It sounds like this proposal is for wills >25 years old, so the biggest impact would be on historical-research use cases.
Pretty much all that needs to happen in the US is somebody shows up with a document signed by a few people (dead guy and some notaries). Whether that document was stored under the fridge or a law office -- nobody cares.
Not a lawyer, but uh talk to people before you make a will to see if there's certain possessions that they want. Maybe you have a signed baseball that your brother was in attendance at and he'd want it when you die. It'd certainly look weird if a bunch of people you knew showed up at probate court saying you said you'd give them X item and the (forged) will only showed everything going to the housekeeper.
There's a bunch of old celebrities coming up; you could try forging their wills and see how it goes ;)
[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=tiger%20king%20forged%20will...
Until you set the password to Password123! because that's the only password that everyone can remember, and the attackers go in delete the originals and previous versions and then keep all the data only for themselves.
Paper, at least in theory, requires noticeable human action to achieve destruction at similar scale. One hopes, of course, that the environmental controls of the archival facilities aren't cloud connected...
[0] https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...
Article 17 is "Right to erasure (‘right to be forgotten’)" and even without Recital 27 a deceased person cannot ask anything anymore.
They can prevent a company to operate in the EU and/or fine them.
> Can't see why it would apply to UK citizens in the UK at all.
Exactly.
No. There are many exemptions to the Article 17 right to erasure, including a specific exemption for historical archives.
there should at least be 1 paper copy somewhere
You may have all the paper documents you want, but if they do not match what's in the government's databases, you're going to have a bad time.
Fortunately, The National Archives are very competent at digital archival. They have created a comprehensive set of guidelines and tools for preserving digital records.
https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/information-management/m...
How can anyone seriously see this as being anything other another massively costly mistake? Maybe someone like Infosys will make consultancy money off the back of it I guess.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-6339202...
Why not digitize them, and then offer to give them to some sort of private/non-profit entity that's dedicated to historical document preservation, or something like that? Only snag I can think of is that maybe these documents are not supposed to be public? (Especially for the wills of the more recently-deceased people.)
It seems a bit much to ask taxpayers to spend that money because some of those wills (ultimately probably a very tiny, sub-1% fraction of them) might become historically significant someday.
Examples in many contexts (some darker than others) abound, and quite aside from some of them being intentionally self-serving, others are simply bizarre. This is one of them.
For documents as fundamental as these, the basic premise should be that sure, you create digital copies, but for the sake of having such as backups in case some extreme situation causes the destruction of the hard copies, not as a bloody substitute and excuse to destroy them.
https://youtu.be/7FeqF1-Z1g0?si=FvBoSQ90yi4MQKsd
So similar projects existed and were so disastrous that they were quietly buried. To this day if a document was xerox scanned before the Bugfix it might be nil and void in court.
How about "stop having the taxpayers pay directly for the preservation of the physical records; and instead donate them to a museum / archive / historical society, who will preserve them for their own reasons"?
Museums, archived, and similar institutions have warehouses of junk that essentially never get looked at. Baring an infinite budget, you have to start throwing stuff out eventually.
> The apparent vulnerability was also revealed this month when the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, and the former prime minister Boris Johnson both claimed they could no longer access WhatsApp messages sought by the UK Covid-19 public inquiry.
But I'm sure the UK government will do a great job of protecting these super important and valuable documents.
If you’re willing to store hundreds of millions of individual physical documents for eternity, free of charge then feel free to pipe up. I’m sure they’d be willing if you have the means to do so. But you don’t.
So you want us to spend billions pointlessly keeping a warehouse full of documents nobody ever reads. When it’s trivial to just scan them in enough quality that you would never need them.
A government can be thought of as an abatraction that fulfills a similar purpose. The problem is that sometimes the non-mutability of dead tree publishing is a critical feature, not a bug.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Verbatim-M-Disc-BD-R-Branded-Surfac...
I'm siding with the UK until someone can tell me how these are NOT safer than paper archives.
This is something people are already thinking about, and it's a hard problem. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/02/13/386000092...
But it does. To preserve the paper, you need a warehouse with HVAC, power, and constant maintenance. You could bury them in the dirt for 1000 years, but then you lose accessibility.
and deep ground is not ridiculous. we’re expecting the storage to be in the “mostly write only” regime, after all.
- Wills are considered essential documents, particularly for social historians and genealogists, as they capture what people considered important at the time and reveal unknown family links.
Digital copies preserve this, so this is a non-issue
- amid growing concern at the fragility of digital archives, after a cyber-attack on the British Library left the online catalogue and digitised documents unavailable to users since late October.
Were these documents lost? Are wills going to be stored in the same centralized-only way? Are non-digitized documents more available because the cost of accessing them is much higher than a few clicks in a browser even if the browser is down for a month in X year? Paper isn't immortal either, how do you square it with those concerns?
The WhatsApp example is just not at all relevant in this context
> Hardware goes out of date and so it might not be available in the future to recall the scanned documents,
Is there not a trivial solution to address this concern that a huge number of people employed in their daily lives?
Than the other half isn't much better with repeating nonsense about data loss and people being forgotten while the opposite is true given that much easier access increases the chances of discovering the part of some future Mary Seacole
> The human connection of handling the original wills and “the feel of the old rag-based pulp paper” would be lost too, he said.
Just preserve a bunch of stacks of that old paper you can hug while reading the wills to keep the connection alive
> wills are “absolutely vital” social-historical documents > highlighted the emotional impact of seeing an original signature on a historic will for a family member.
You can see the signature in the image and have the same reaction, you know, people cry watching movies
You can get arrested for writing a Tweet, you need to show an ID to watch porn on the Internet, a kitchen knife is considered a deadly weapon. They shot their economy in the foot with Brexit. It's like they took the fucking worst policy ideas from both sides of the political aisle in the USA, and thought, hey, let's combine them, this will turn out great.
I'm genuinely asking, your comment triggered the thought.
You can't compare the actions of UK police arresting people for harmless tweets to things like threats of violence in the US.
That's obviously because a tweet is more public.
Again, there are lots of countries where you can get arrested for publicly saying something that's 'harmless' as far as the First Ammendment is concerned. There's nothing particularly notable about the UK in this respect.
A simple Google search will turn up examples of people being arrested and detained in the US for similarly silly reasons, e.g.: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/01/british_touri...
That doesn't justify it at all.
> Again, there are lots of countries where you can get arrested for publicly saying something that's 'harmless' as far as the First Ammendment is concerned. There's nothing particularly notable about the UK in this respect.
You're in denial. People in the UK get arrested for mundane things and there is no equivalent on the US.
> A simple Google search will turn up examples of people being arrested and detained in the US for similarly silly reasons, e.g.: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/01/british_touri...
I agree the example in the article was silly, but the people were not US citizens but were looking to enter the country, and had joked about destroying the USA. It was bad judgement to arrest them, but not the same as being arrested for wondering if transwomen competing in female sports is fair.
I did not say it was justified. But you can't seriously be wondering why people don't typically get arrested for things they say in private conversations. The question answers itself.
>You're in denial. People in the UK get arrested for mundane things and there is no equivalent on the US.
They occasionally get arrested for saying some things that would be protected under the First Amendment in the US.
I'll try making my point one more time:
Very few countries have the same level of protection for free speech as the US. So it is easy to find examples of people being arrested in countries other than the US for saying things that would have been protected under the First Amendment in the US. (For example, hate speech can get you arrested in many countries, but not in the US.) There is nothing particularly notable about the UK in this regard, either worldwide or compared to other European countries.
Also, you could stand to Google a bit harder for US examples:
https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/new-hampshire-police-a...
The point is people get arrested in the UK for mundane things, when they shouldn't. Just because it's public doesn't make it arrestable. People could stand in a park on a soapbox and not be arrested.
> There is nothing particularly notable about the UK in this regard, either worldwide or compared to other European countries.
The problem I have is that in the UK what constitutes hatespeech has been spread very, very thin. I've seen numerous stories about police showing up to someone's door in the UK for a tweet, for 'hatespeech'.
I've read no such stories of that happening in Australia, NZ, Canada, or western European countries. So saying it's common in countries that have some form of free speech without it being as strong as the first amendment doesn't seem to fly. It seems to happen far more frequently in the UK.
And the UK has recently started jailing protestors for their speech also. Not for hate speech or making violent threats. Free speech in the UK might just be the lowest of any first world country, and certainly of any English speaking country.
1. None of this has to do with tweets specifically.
2. The UK is no different in this respect from most other countries that aren’t the US.
You keep judging things by what you happen to have read in the news rather than actively looking for examples. This is leading you to make some inaccurate assumptions (such as e.g. that you can't be arrested in the UK for what you say in a park on a soapbox). Here are some relevant Google queries:
"speakers corner" man arrested hate speech -gun
arrested for tweet France
arrested for tweet Germany
arrested for tweet Spain -hack
I don't think we are, I just disagree with you. I think you're trying to downplay what's happening in the UK and act as though it's completely normal and common in other similar countries. It isn't.
> None of this has to do with tweets specifically.
Sure, it's general to online social media, but tweets are the main thing people are getting arrested for.
> The UK is no different in this respect from most other countries that aren’t the US.
And I've specifically outlined why I disagree with this.
> You keep judging things by what you happen to have read in the news rather than actively looking for examples.
Because people getting arrested for making tweets in the UK keeps making the news. There's a reason it doesn't make the news as much from other non-US countries - it isn't happening as often or as egregiously.
> This is leading you to make some inaccurate assumptions (such as e.g. that you can't be arrested in the UK for what you say in a park on a soapbox)
I'm not making any inaccurate assumptions, I'm sticking to cold hard facts. I didn't say you can't be arrested for saying something on a soapbox in the UK, I'm saying if the people who got arrested for their tweets said it from a soapbox they wouldn't have. Twitter was being treated differently.
> Here are some relevant Google queries:
And none of them return cases as egregiously as those in the UK. Again, in the UK what is being considered hate speech is far more general than other countries.
Just to reinforce my point again, free speech in the UK is likely the lowest of any first world country. People were arrested just for protesting the new king, not being violent, no hate speech, nothing. Think about that before you come back so quick to defend the crown.
We're really not lol. I said defend the crown as shorthand for you defending the UK, which is exactly what you are doing.
> You seem to keep missing the point that I agree with you that the people we’re talking about should not have been arrested.
My point, said repeatedly by this point, is that the UK is worse than other similar countries.
> What I disagree with are your hyperbolic statements about the UK based on a particular emphasis in the English-speaking media on the “arrested for a tweet” trope.What I disagree with are your hyperbolic statements about the UK based on a particular emphasis in the English-speaking media on the “arrested for a tweet” trope.
It's not hyperbolic in the least. It's a much bigger problem in the UK than for other countries, and it's entirely accurate.
> You dismiss the results of the Google queries I provided, but they all turn up similar stories that simply weren’t as widely reported in English-speaking media
It's about the quantity. It happens far more in the UK, for less egregious things.
Here's a thought: Maybe your blind patriotism has you being in denial? You dismiss any instance because "that happens in other countries too, it's no different here", which just isn't true.
How do you defend people protesting the new kings coronation being arrested, when they were not engaging in hate speech or rioting or anything that deserved an arrest?
UK has the worst free speech of any the anglo countries, by a large margin.
AGAIN: My point is that free speech in the UK is significantly worse than in other similar countries.
I don't care that you agree that the people we're talking about shouldn't have been arrested. That's not related to the point I was making.
UK is really good at combining incombinable - also combined worst aspects of USA and EU when it comes to policy. We don't the don't have the high levels of protections, redundancy pay, etc. that Europe enjoys, and we don't have USA's high salaries.
This is not true, FWIW.
/s
Q: In the Singularity is Near, you also discussed an intriguing invention, which you called the "Document Image and Storage Invention", or DAISI for short. But you concluded that it really wouldn't work out. Could you talk a little bit about that?
RK: ... The big challenge, which I think is actually important almost philosophical challenge -- it might sound like a dull issue, like how do you format a database, so you can retrieve information, that sounds pretty technical. The real key issue is that software formats are constantly changing. People say, "well, gee, if we could backup our brains and I talk about how that will be feasible some decades from now. Then the digital version of you could be immortal, but software doesn't live forever, in fact it doesn't live very long at all if you don't care about it if you don't continually update it to new formats.
Try going back 20 years to some old formats, some old programming language. Try resuscitating some information on some PDP1 magnetic tapes. I mean even if you could get the hardware to work, the software formats are completely alien and [using] a different operating system and nobody is there to support these formats anymore. And that continues. There is this continual change in how that information is formatted. ...
Q: You said there's no technological solution. What about creating standards that would be maintained by the community, or would be widespread enough that future …
RK: We do use standard formats, and the standard formats are continually changed, and the formats are not always backwards compatible. It's a nice goal, but it actually doesn't work. I have in fact electronic information that in fact goes back through many different computer systems. Some of it now I cannot access. In theory I could, or with enough effort, find people to decipher it, but it's not readily accessible. The more backwards you go, the more of a challenge it becomes.
And despite the goal of maintaining standards, or maintaining forward compatibility, or backwards compatibility, it doesn’t really work out that way. Maybe we will improve that. Hard documents are actually the easiest to access. Fairly crude technologies like microfilm or microfiche which basically has documents are very easy to access.
So ironically, the most primitive formats are the ones that are easiest.
[reposted from the discussion on "I found my Grandpa’s notes 20 years after he died (2020)" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27034087)]
One thing that could possibly be done better, though, is self-describing formats. I don't think it would require that much extra space to basically attach a terse but unambiguous description of how to interpret the data to most if not all binary container formats out there. Something that has minimal encoding, so much so that doing the equivalent of "strings" on the file would be sufficient to see it.
That £4.5 million per year is a small price for social stability.
In addition the digital option has a likelihood of costing a lot more
The UK budget is 1.045T of which this represents 0.00043%.
What do you expect the liability to the state would be for all the wills getting wiped out, or modified, etc. Another way to think about it is, what would a private company charge the UK government to insure all liability costs of digitizing the wills? Especially since there are likely many individuals who are highly motivated to modify the wills database (many would benefit simply from destroying it).
I don't know the answer to that question, and even though I suspect it will be far greater than 4.5mm, the point is that's the correct way to look at this cost, set against all the liabilities and risks digitization opens you up to. And most never seem to consider the costs and risks of moving to a new system when pointing out the cost of the existing system as a reason to move.
They are also planning to keep some number of wills, if you kept say everything over a certain value you'd probably cover the cases you're imagining.
Abolish the police, which will result in far greater savings. Then if you feel strongly that your house shouldn't be broken into, maybe you should pay for costs for private security out of pocket?