This strikes me as an example of a pattern I've become increasingly aware of over the years.
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...
For the reasons already articulated in the article we're discussing; It's a waste of people's time to reiterate them.
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.
Let's not forget that even that is prone to problems. I had some archives (30-35 years old) that no longer can be unpacked. The application that made them is no longer working. Source code isn't available. I also had a few "rotting" CDs (not CD-R, but factory pressed CDs). You need a very good strategy to make digital information survive the next 100 years, and keep it up to date, at least yearly.
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.
I had some Bitcoin on a USB along with the operating system and program used to read the wallet. After 8 years or so, I couldn't open my wallet despite using the same OS and same program but different hardware. (I did eventually recover the coin but it was much harder than I anticipated. and no, the USB wasn't my only copy, I wasn't quite that foolish)
I disagree with you that “Hardware goes out of date” is, in fact, a solvable problem. The truth is, macroscopic writing, in the sense of scratching or applying pigment / dye to a surface, is a very old technology, and we know very well what the revealed points of weakness are, and in many cases, how to avoid these points of weakness. Perhaps most importantly, a minimally-trained individual can recognize the content and potentially the importance of a physical document. This is not the case with modern technologies that require a separate apparatus to be decoded and displayed. In many cases, this apparatus is not available, and it is possible that the layperson will not recognize the reel, cartridge, cassette, slide, disc, drive, wax cylinder, etc, for what it is and simply discard it. This is by far the greatest risk for data preservation.
If we reach a point where people working in the archive don’t know what a computer is, we’re at the point where we don’t need to know what Dave’s will had in it.
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.
What if that is not Dave’s will, but Dave’s first novel? Or the technical manual to Dave’s computer system, where the onboard help files are just a URL that points to a dead server?
Knowledge preservation in the face of disaster is not a pointless effort.
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.
Not art, historical artifacts. There’s tons of info that a picture wouldn’t capture. Type of paper and ink used, isotopic analysis, etc. Who knows what questions future historians or archeologists will want to ask?
Even ignoring the historical value, it's easier to hack into a server and edit a file than it is to forge a legal document and break into an archive. Suddenly, you're the legitimate heir to a castle.
If the point is continued legal meaning then it would be better to digitally publish in any way that allows distributed verification of the record as what was published and not challenged.
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.
True. You're at the mercy of whatever information was captured at the time using means available at the time. One reason we (hopefully) don't get rid of physical evidence from criminal cases.
It’s more that the risks and expenditure of effort are so different between changing files on a server vs breaking and entering that it becomes a separate category.
Just hope they aren't using Xerox to digitize those documents. That glyph substitution bug from a few years ago made quite a few would be digital archivists rather unhappy.
Speculating here, but carbon dating is potentially one useful vector for protecting against forgery/manipulation. Conversely, once something is digitized, you cannot incontrovertibly authenticate the origin time of the relevant bit flips and you also introduce the (now seemingly just on the horizon) possibility of AI-optimized digital forgeries that are indistinguishable from originals. That's off the top of my head, but the OP may have further insight.
If only there was a technology for storing unforgeable timestamps in a way that didn't depend on the honesty and competence of any one person or organization
It would have to have some intrinsic mechanism to encourage people to store and interact with the system though..maybe people could prove they worked on it and then trade it for other things of value?
You can trivially implement this using a timestamp authority (TSA). This can be done without the blockchain, and there are several free publicly available services that do this.
You know what's easy to read 150, 500, and even 1000 years later? Physical writing on paper. No matter what changes, these documents can and will continue to be legible as long as they're properly stored.
Destroying the original destroys some information that could have legal relevance.
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.
Lots of reasons but I'll list two:
1) These documents are historical artifacts like the declaration of independence or the magna carta. They may not seem important now but in 300 years people will care about them A LOT.
2) Redundancy. If the digital records are destroyed or say encrypted in a massive ransomware attack then the UK government can simply reconstruct those digital records using the paper records without having to deal with terrorists and that's a good thing.
Digital technology means that 1) the intern can burn down the entire library of Alexandria with the wrong SQL statement (“what’s ‘where?’”), and 2) we still have no real long-term archival solution for data storage that isn’t prohibitively expensive or subject to non-retrieval due to technology advancement
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.”
> the intern can burn down the entire library of Alexandria with the wrong SQL statement
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.
The parties involved don't understand that they're trading the problem of maintaining paper records for the problem of maintaining digital media. Humanity has a lot of experience maintaining paper records with reasonable success. Digital media, not so much.
The issue they have is that the number of wills they have to keep is large and increasing, and will increase forever or at least until they change the rule that they must be kept in some form forever.
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...
The government department responsible for managing archives has a very good understanding of these issues and has an active remit to help other government departments understand and manage them.
Is this the same UK government that deliberately destroyed landing records as part of their policy of creating a "hostile environment" for dark skinned immigrants from the Empire? The government has form deleting the past. Why make it easier?
If these were digitised, they'd be public domain; anyone would have the right to create their own copy. Quietly shredding paper documents is a lot easier than getting a court order against Internet Archive. Open digitisation is a very powerful tool to stop governments from throwing things down the memory hole.
And leaving history aside for a moment, by now government probably produces lots of native digital records, but that in no way means that they're automatically publicly accessible.
From old news reports, it was at least as much about not wanting to expend the effort to move the boxes when they relocated offices at some point. Not that that is any better.
The National Archives are already responsible for managing paper documents held by the government for historical reasons. Given that most of the new documents being added to that archive are digital, it is entirely logical for them to also have responsibility for digitisation.
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.
That absolutely would save money. The costs of the actual digital storage would be much much lower than for physical items. And once you have an agency that's set up to be experts in digital archival, you can use that for anything, not just these wills.
I think the breakeven is generally around 50 years.
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.
The whole Windrush affair was mostly caused by just ridiculous and cruel policy, not digitisation.
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.
The home office horrendously botched the Windrush issue - possibly maliciously - but a key factor is that Britain has historically had an unusually laissez-faire approach to immigration, residence and proof of identity. Windrush couldn't have happened in France or Germany, because they require people to register their residence and have an ID card or passport. It's really quite unusual to be able to move to a country, rent a house, get a job and use public services, all without identity documents or any real proof of your right to live in that country. We have only comparatively recently introduced a requirement to perform identity checks on prospective tenants or employees and it's still relatively straightforward to access most public services without any real proof of your identity.
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.
> 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?
Other than the school diploma that wouldn't really prove anything for the Windrush people because it was about residency rather than nationality. The immigration laws changed in the early 1970s so you had to prove you were in Britain before the change (and, IIRC, in some cases provide evidence for every single year you were in Britain for it to be considered valid).
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.
You can lose it, it can be stolen, burned, flooded - you name.
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.
In the UK, they return your old passport with a corner clipped off if you make a paper renewal. You don't have to return your passport to renew it, because passports can be renewed online in most circumstances.
The US sends back the old passport with hole punched after renewal.
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.
I do. I have most of my old passports (all of them since I was an adult). My wife also has all of hers (she might even have a childhood one).
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).
For a person without passport, just citizenship - none of that would prove anything.
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?
That's intense. And a lot of fucking companies won't give you any documents more than about 18 months old and even that's assuming you still have an account you can log in to.
Having had to deal with a death in the last year or so, this makes a lot of sense to me; this actual part (the gov record of the will) is VERY rarely used.
Now if we can digitise the ones held with lawyers as well that would be great; IMHO the biggest problem for that is most of the lawyers handling this stuff are digitally inept.
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.
You're only considering one use case. There are others:
> 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.
The originals don't have to be destroyed; perhaps these private organizations who are so interested in preserving them can pony up the cash to store them. Why should taxpayers be footing this bill?
I would think that for historical or genealogical research it actually makes no difference if the paper original is destroyed because what matters is the text: the assets the person had and how they wanted them dispersed, and the names of the people mentioned, maybe the wording.
> “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.
But having paper wills after 25 years in case one becomes significant costs £4.5M a year! I’m sure any historian could come up with much better uses for those resources.
Issues with scanning can be done by having the scan done at probate time and the person handling the estate validating the scan.
And they think that the digitization and digital storage (as well as regular updating) will be cheaper than that? I don't.
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.
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.
ChatGPT is especially prone to fudging numbers. 75MB per page is suspect. I think a 300 or 400 dpi 8.5x11 sheet of paper saved as high quality tiff is about 10MB IIRC. Not at my computer to verify though. I think you can do a lot better with JXL or a modern format.
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
> ChatGPT is especially prone to fudging numbers. 75MB per page is suspect. I think a 300 or 400 dpi 8.5x11 sheet of paper saved as high quality tiff is about 10MB IIRC.
IIRC, a 600dpi 8.5x11 uncompressed color tif is about 100MB.
Yes. And an additional point is that, since there is no time limit the number of wills kept on record increases continuously forever. They said they currently have 110 million and that they started only mid-19th century.
I don't know what they'll ultimately decide but it is right that they at least bring the issue up to debate it.
>There is a thrilling sensation that you are looking at a document that a real human being wrote on
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.
This applies only if the will is handwritten by the person and one has to wonder how important an artifact the indent of the pen is (it does not matter at all for genealogical research and it's probably not that important for historical research).
My bet is that in 2124 we will be able to use our eyes to read the original paper documents but we won't be able to read the 2024 digital copies anymore, unless we keep migrating them to the next standard.
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?
Computing environments haven't changed a whole lot in the last 25 years, and current environments aren't that much bother to emulate. The ongoing integrity of the storage seems like a much larger concern than displaying the documents.
I have the floppy disks of my first Slackware Linux installation. I'm not sure if I can still read them. I should have a Toshiba laptop from year 2000 with a floppy disk reader but will it work?
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.
OCR is error-prone, but once you've scanned the document, you don't have to delete the raw scan. If errors are found, the digitized text can be updated. This is no worse than a physical record that you have to manually look at to figure out what it says.
That won't help much for "scanned out of focus, or where a part of the page was illegibly crumpled, or a page was missed or miscategorized" - from my earlier comment.
> This is about emotions and sentimentality, not fundamental practical
concerns.
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.
Only if you trust digitalisation to be a perfectly faithful process, and digital artefacts fundamentally unmodifiable or falsifiable. Which we all know is totally the case... oh wait
10 years ago lloyds bank was in a dispute with the customer about their mortgage. Customer alleged one thing, the bank alleged another. The customer no longer had their contract, but the bank did. The customer lost the case, and ended up owing the bank significant sums of money.
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.
Not only will they save money on record keeping, it’s a way to create sunken treasure chests. When people die, digital files can easily be removed without trace. I expect this move will allow the government to purge lost records of dead people who never alerted their next-of-kin.
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.).
> 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, film[2], etc.).
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.
That might be how it works in TV but that's not how it works in real life.
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.
If you're holding the original it would be easy; ex. Carol Baskin [1]. I think it's only low-risk if there would be very few heirs as otherwise you run the risk of other people knowing the contents of the original will.
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 ;)
I'm fairly blockchain-ignorant despite having read up on it quite a bit, but THIS sort of task seems to me a pretty good use of blockchain. It wouldn't need to necessarily run in an entirely de-centralised set up, but how that would work (eg. sharing amongst a limited number of trustable centralised parties), I don't know.
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.
This is one of those cases where terminology matters.
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.
Paper is much harder to secretly vanish (A) at scale and/or (B) remotely.
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.
People are remarkably more hesitant to destroy physical records than digital ones, in my experience. Also, you have to go to a place and find the thing to destroy it - with digital records, you can press a button from across the world.
In the US, this could be done by monitoring the social security death master file published on a cadence. Currently advocating for a citizen friendly system to notify chosen parties at death event. Financial institutions consume this SSA data to freeze accounts, for example.
This is more or less a solved problem. Tamper-resistant/tamper-evident datastructures like blockchains and merkle trees make it fairly hard to make things vanish without a trace. You dont need all of the Nakamoto consensus machinery of crypto currencies, you just need your central authority to publish the latest hash on a ~daily basis.
> It's hard for hackers to ransom ... cloud backups or versioned cloud storage as well, so that's not really an issue here.
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.
Ransoming cloud storage is just a matter of finding a dev who has production keys on their laptop and getting them to install some CLI that promises to butter toast or whatever.
Under a "right to be forgotten" [0] society there's no such thing as an append-only backup or storage, or even offline snapshots in time. As soon as a mechanism to overwrite all existing records (or, equivalently, to destroy the keys necessary to decrypt those records) exists, a sufficiently determined hacker/ransomeer will be able to compromise that mechanism.
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...
GDPR doesn't apply to the UK but one of the provisions of GDPR is that it does not apply to deceased people. Recital 27: "This Regulation does not apply to the personal data of deceased persons"
Article 17 is "Right to erasure (‘right to be forgotten’)" and even without Recital 27 a deceased person cannot ask anything anymore.
You can't keep everything from the past, even if it might have historical value in the future. Perhaps they can set up a foundation that keeps these records or force people to pay a yearly/10 yearly fee to keep the physical records, but I don't see why the government should keep wasting 4.5 million pounds each year. The argument that you read here is that it's a rounding error but if you apply that same logic to all costs of similar size you suddenly end up with a number that is not a rounding error.
Not only is this bad for historians in the future, I very, very much doubt it will save even the paltry £4.5 million GBP they claim it will. Even after the initial, massive digitization is amortized, they'll still have to pay people to digitize wills and maintain a public database to search them, and my word does £4.5m go really fast when the government is involved. I'd bet money that they'll figure out a way for it to cost more and destroy history.
If these plans are "insane", then we have a much more serious problem on our hands - the overwhelming majority of important documents being created today are digital-only, so if we can't trust digital archival, we're doomed to create a black hole in our history.
Fortunately, The National Archives are very competent at digital archival. They have created a comprehensive set of guidelines and tools for preserving digital records.
The UK government has a track record of embarking on huge IT procurement projects that are dismal failures which prove to be more expensive than doing nothing at all. See the Covid app for example. They even lost Covid case data by storing it in an excel spreadsheet for pity's sake.
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.
After the Land Registry debacle [1] this seems like a terrible idea. It is now possible in the UK to steal a house, resell it, and for the new "owner" to have good title.
While £4.5M is perhaps small potatoes when it comes to a government budget, it's not nothing. (And presumably this archive will only grow over time, increasing the cost.)
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.
The more I read about just about anything coming from the UK Government, the more I suspect that its bureaucrats and government leaders have all collectively flushed their brains down a vast stinking toilet.
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.
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.
It doesn't seem to me that "preserve the physical records" or "destroy the physical records" are the only two options.
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"?
It's easy to take the stance that nothing should ever be thrown out. It's always possible, if unlikely, it will be important.
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 proposal comes 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.
> 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.
I'm inclined to believe that the problem with Rishi and Boris handing over those messages is more about their lack of motivation, rather than ability, to do so.
I'm sure these Tory politicians accused of enabling stealing from the tax-payer (and in Johnson's case of needlessly choosing to allow COVID to spread in a way he knew would cause thousands of excess deaths), will be eager to mandate cross-platform open messaging systems so all their messages can be well preserved in the future!
It’s not insane at all. You’re all whining but you’ve never requested a physical copy of these wills.
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.
There was a Stargate SG-1 episode in which people were entirely reliant on a network info store to act as an arbiter of truth, and to maintain a handful of other things that superseded the objective of returning a truthful representation of reality to the end user.
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.
Paper doesn't require specialized hardware or software to read. Sure, the discs are cheap and durable. But will the authorities keep a store of BD-readers? Maintain legacy computers compatible with those readers? Software to read archived files from those discs, with no online dependencies (e.g., license activation)?
>Paper doesn't require specialized hardware or software to read.
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.
Are you referring to the original Domesday Book, or the issue with difficulty reading the Domesday Book laserdiscs, produced in the 1980s, as the hardware became obsolete?
The digital one. The paper Domesday Book has lasted nearly a thousand years; the digital version could scarcely make it to twenty. I don't think we've seen a more stark illustration of the difficulties of digital archiving.
What's to stop someone from hashing the original document and committing it to the bitcoin blockchain? The 1st instance of this image will obviously have the keys of the trust and 3rd party witness from when it was signed.
A hash doesn't do you much good if the document that corresponds to it is lost. And storing the document itself in the blockchain is hilariously cost-prohibitive, on the order of $100,000 per MB.
Read half the article and not a single cogent argument presented besides some highly emotional statements:
- 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
Watching UK policy from a distance has been like watching a dumpster fire.
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.
> 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
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 framing doesn't make sense. The issue isn't the medium but what was said. You can be arrested for a tweet in the US too if you say something that's not protected by the First Amendment (e.g. a death threat). The UK, like almost all other countries in the world, has less stringent free speech protections than the US. For this reason you can be arrested for saying some things (whether on Twitter or not) that would be protected under the First Amendment in the US. The same is true of a vast number of other countries (including many other European countries, e.g. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/09/09/pimmelgate-g...), but HN likes to get particularly excited about a few examples of this happening in the UK.
It's certainly the medium playing a role. People in the UK get arrested for expressing an opinion on Twitter that they wouldn't if they were talking to a friend.
You can't compare the actions of UK police arresting people for harmless tweets to things like threats of violence in the US.
> People in the UK get arrested for expressing an opinion on Twitter that they wouldn't if they were talking to a friend.
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.
> That's obviously because a tweet is more public.
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.
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:
> 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.
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.
We’re mostly talking at cross purposes here. My points were:
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:
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 are definitely talking at cross purposes if you think I’m here to “defend the crown”. You seem to keep missing the point that I agree with you that the people we’re talking about should not have been arrested. 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. 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. (The Spanish guy was even arrested just for insulting the King on Twitter, a tweet which certainly wouldn't get you arrested in the UK. Private Eye would have been shut down decades ago if this were a crime!)
> We are definitely talking at cross purposes if you think I’m here 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.
Now you are just insisting on your point without providing any evidence, other than whatever subjective impression of frequency you have from the news stories that you happen to read. The news isn't a random sample of current events.
"subjective impression", sigh. At every step of this conversation you're made an effort to be as dismissive as possible.
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.
You keep repeating yourself. I am listening to you and have been with every previous post where you make the same claim while ironically ignoring and not addressing my actual points. I understand your point perfectly. If anyone is not listening to anyone, it's you not listening to me.
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.
The UK government has great form when it comes to handling historical documents affecting the lives of thousands, as proven by the Windrush saga. I also have particular confidence that this executive should take irrevocable steps, since they have a clear electoral mandate and are very likely to remain in power for the next decade.
I was just commenting a couple of days ago how ridiculous that the British library melts down when their computers fail. Turns out these people don't learn.
I interviewed Ray Kurzweil not long after "The Singularity Is Near" came out. I asked him about a concept that he brought up in the book but didn't get much attention in light of the other more startling predictions he made. Excerpt follows:
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.
I think a lot of this is based on the trends in the industry at the time that no longer necessarily hold true. Once you get past the ways to encode bits and bytes, the stack has been remarkably stable if anything. E.g. PNG is still the most common lossless bitmap image format and there's no risk of support for it being dropped anytime soon - and it's over 25 years old at this point. Similarly, there was a big mess with text encodings, but now Unicode is pervasive and is not going anywhere anytime soon. We also have large archives of information on how to interpret all kinds data in even larger archives (e.g. Wikipedia has lots of details on specific file formats, even fairly obscure ones). I'm actually fairly confident that anything that is actually archived today would remain readable for a very long time to come.
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.
Paper records of wills are not going to have any impact on "social stability". The connection is so tenuous that using this line of argument there is almost no expense that the government shouldn't pay for.
Over a 100 years the 4.5mm is 450mm pounds. Less than half a billion.
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.
Virtually nothing? I can't think of anything you'd likely get out of destroying a 25+ year old will. There are time limits for most claims against the executors.
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.
> If these historians feel so strongly about this maybe they should pay the yearly £4.5m out of pocket?
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?
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...