Day: 6 May 2020

No prizes for guessing what story dominated this morning's papers: Professor Pantsdown. A couple of weeks ago I dubbed Neil Ferguson "Dr Strangelove", trying to capture the mesmeric effect he seems to have had on successive British Prime Ministers. But it turns out the "Strange Love Doctor" would have been more appropriate. According to the Telegraph's spellbinding scoop – a marmalade-dropper if ever there was one – Ferguson has been carrying on an affair with a married mother-of-two during the lockdown. Talk about breaking the social distancing rules! And the icing on the cake is that the name of his 38 year-old mistress is Antonia Staats! You couldn't make it up, as we say on Fleet Street. The punning possibilities are endless. (Guido Fawkes: "Who could blame a boffin for wanting to massage his staats?") Incidentally, if you can't get past the Telegraph's paywall, not to worry. The story is also in the Mail, the Guardian, the Metro, the Independent, the New York Times... it's everywhere. The BBC even has it, although in a very muted form. The latest development is that Matt Hancock says it's now in the hands of the police. Are we about to see Imperial's Professor of Mathematical Biology led away in handcuffs? The intellectual architect of Britain's draconian coronavirus policy may be about to experience what ...

More specifically… As its own disclaimer points out, regardless of what this paper says, what really matters is what the running code actually does. “Code is truth” as they put it. That is why open sourcing it is so important, so we can all read the code and see what it really does, not what the management thought they’d asked the developers for. They say they are going to open source it in the future. When they do, let’s see how much of it they open source. Because it is a centralised system we need to see not just the code on the phones but all the code on the servers in “the back end”. It will be difficult to know if they have opened up absolutely everything. For example there could be GCHQ code in the backend that they don’t open source and we would never know. So there could be parts of the system that don’t get scrutinised, have security or other problems, and we would never know until it was too late.The whole scheme is based on self diagnosis. This leads to many problems, as they admit. For example malicious users, (p.5, item number 7). Their mitigation is, unbelievably, that “expert clinicians” will be able to spot malicious events, plus, seeing if any contacts report symptoms within ...

by Sue Denim Imperial finally released a derivative of Ferguson's code. I figured I'd do a review of it and send you some of the things I noticed. I don't know your background so apologies if some of this is pitched at the wrong level. My background. I have been writing software for 30 years. I worked at Google between 2006 and 2014, where I was a senior software engineer working on Maps, Gmail and account security. I spent the last five years at a US/UK firm where I designed the company's database product, amongst other jobs and projects. I was also an independent consultant for a couple of years. Obviously I'm giving only my own professional opinion and not speaking for my current employer. The code. It isn't the code Ferguson ran to produce his famous Report 9. What's been released on GitHub is a heavily modified derivative of it, after having been upgraded for over a month by a team from Microsoft and others. This revised codebase is split into multiple files for legibility and written in C++, whereas the original program was "a single 15,000 line file that had been worked on for a decade" (this is considered extremely poor practice). A request for the original code was made 8 days ago but ignored, and it will probably ...