[HN Gopher] UK plan to digitise wills and destroy paper original...
___________________________________________________________________
UK plan to digitise wills and destroy paper originals "insane" say
experts
Author : ilamont
Score : 137 points
Date : 2023-12-19 17:57 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| dfgfek wrote:
| If these historians feel so strongly about this maybe they should
| pay the yearly PS4.5m out of pocket?
| febeling wrote:
| The numbers to support political decisions are usually made up
| adaml_623 wrote:
| Running a society costs money. The court system costs money.
| The alternative is very undesirable.
|
| That PS4.5 million per year is a small price for social
| stability.
|
| In addition the digital option has a likelihood of costing a
| lot more
| jdsully wrote:
| 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.
| arcticbull wrote:
| 4.5m GBP rounds to zero in this context.
|
| The UK budget is 1.045T of which this represents 0.00043%.
| asdajksah2123 wrote:
| 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.
| IanCal wrote:
| 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.
| tivert wrote:
| > If these historians feel so strongly about this maybe they
| should pay the yearly PS4.5m 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?
| waihtis wrote:
| Privatizing security? Now you're talking.
| earthboundkid wrote:
| A nice thing about paper is it is very hard for hackers to ransom
| all of the wills.
| crazygringo wrote:
| It's hard for hackers to ransom tape backup or cloud backups or
| versioned cloud storage as well, so that's not really an issue
| here.
| jl6 wrote:
| Maybe in theory. But a lot of orgs like to automate their
| backups, meaning their backup infrastructure is online and
| available and thus exploitable.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| A lot of orgs like to not bother testing their backups as
| well, meaning that their backup infrastructure functionally
| doesn't exist.
| gustavus wrote:
| > 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.
| btown wrote:
| 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...
|
| [0] https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-
| and-re...
| pmontra wrote:
| 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.
| multjoy wrote:
| It very much does apply to the UK.
| jdietrich wrote:
| _> 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._
|
| No. There are many exemptions to the Article 17 right to
| erasure, including a specific exemption for historical
| archives.
|
| https://gdpr-info.eu/art-17-gdpr/
| earthboundkid wrote:
| 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.
| count wrote:
| Except, you're assuming extreme competence here, when, if
| govt and hospital IT systems are to be any indicator, it's
| the exact opposite position.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| all the more reason for the 3-2-1 backup approach.
|
| there should at least be 1 paper copy somewhere
| 1-6 wrote:
| 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.
| blibble wrote:
| how do dead people alert their next of kin?
|
| being serious: most wills are not sourced from the probate
| registry and are only sent there to obtain probate
| oniony wrote:
| With automation. I have my Google account transfer to my wife
| after _n_ months of inactivity, for example.
| Uehreka wrote:
| That's not a thing most people have set up (even if they
| should).
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.ssa.gov/dataexchange/request_dmf.html
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| > digital files can easily be removed without trace
|
| As opposed to paper.
| Terr_ wrote:
| 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.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| fire is pretty effective at that.
|
| don't even have to torch the entire document, just enough to
| make it inadmissible for legal purposes.
| Two4 wrote:
| 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.
| quonn wrote:
| You could hand out signed records that contain a hash of the
| previous record, similar to a blockchain.
|
| The government can have the burden of proof to show that the
| chain is complete if ordered so by a court.
| detritus wrote:
| 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.
| simonw wrote:
| Right - you don't need a wasteful proof-of-work blockchain
| for this. The mechanism used for Certificate Transparency
| would work great here:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_Transparency
|
| 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.
| peyton wrote:
| How? It's not designed for consensus.
| simonw wrote:
| You don't need consensus for this, unless I've missed
| something.
|
| We are talking about a mechanism to prove that no-one has
| tampered with the documents.
| pdpi wrote:
| 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.
| e2le wrote:
| >digital files can easily be removed
|
| 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...
|
| [2]: https://www.ibm.com/tape-storage
|
| [3]: https://archiveprogram.github.com/
| chefkoch wrote:
| "Did anyone try to restore the backup recently?"
|
| "..."
| tivert wrote:
| > 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.
| lesuorac wrote:
| 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.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| Wouldn't that make forging wills pretty easy and low
| risk?
| pdpi wrote:
| 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.
| gustavus wrote:
| > 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.
| meepmorp wrote:
| 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.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| 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!
| pcdoodle wrote:
| 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.
| teraflop wrote:
| 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.
| trebligdivad wrote:
| 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.
| tivert wrote:
| 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.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| 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.
| toyg wrote:
| 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
| simonw wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > "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.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| > _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.
| simonw wrote:
| "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]".
|
| Plus my notes about digitization being error-prone.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| 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).
|
| I'm hoping that there are stronger arguments.
| pmontra wrote:
| 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?
| maxerickson wrote:
| 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.
| kelnos wrote:
| 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.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > 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.
| halostatue wrote:
| That would be "alleged" practical concerns, IMO.
|
| 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.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| But having paper wills after 25 years in case one becomes
| significant costs PS4.5M 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.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| 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.
| halostatue wrote:
| 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
| ~PS14B 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 ~PS20B 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-745
| 631...
| trebligdivad wrote:
| You could ask, for new ones, that Executors verify the
| scans after the Probate office issues the certificate
| kelnos wrote:
| 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?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| 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.
| simonw wrote:
| 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...
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| So why is it a bad idea? There's a difference between
| destroying information and destroying the original copy of it.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Destroying the original copy would be destroying information.
| A picture of an artifact is not the same as the artifact
| itself.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| True, however these are legal documents and not art for a
| museum.
| notthemessiah wrote:
| 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.
| potatopatch wrote:
| 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.
| mayank wrote:
| Very debatable, if both are done right.
| rsynnott wrote:
| In practice these are more of historical than legal
| interest.
| ahnick wrote:
| That must be why that Bitcoin thing didn't pan out.
| phs318u wrote:
| This argument makes it seem like forged documents were
| never a thing.
| teh_klev wrote:
| Should we then destroy all legal documents, for example
| The Magna Carta?
|
| Museums aren't just a store of "art", museums are a way
| to preserve our heritage, preferably in its original
| form.
| sp527 wrote:
| 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.
| woah wrote:
| 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
| Avicebron wrote:
| 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?
| calebh wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping
| anigbrowl wrote:
| 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.
| tgv wrote:
| 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.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| So the only legitimate reason is "Hardware goes out of
| date" That is a real but solvable problem. Everything else
| was pure speculation.
| simonw wrote:
| Ask a historian! There are several quoted in the linked
| article.
| jacobwilliamroy wrote:
| 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.
| josefx wrote:
| 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.
| rsynnott wrote:
| The digitised version isn't a faithful copy; see the mention
| of the indent of the pen in the article. Information is
| destroyed in doing this.
| housebear wrote:
| 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.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| The same can be said for microfiche.
| brnt wrote:
| The seminal answer: an archivist explains.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKNbhMCB_3g
| j-bos wrote:
| Lessons never learned: - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-
| news/2018/apr/09/special-need... -
| https://www.amazon.com/Windrush-Betrayal-Exposing-Hostile-En...
|
| I love digital records, but historically people have been wrecked
| by the destruction of physical records.
| arp242 wrote:
| 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.
| ponector wrote:
| Don't you have a birth certificate? A school diploma? Old
| passports?
| arp242 wrote:
| 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.
| data_maan wrote:
| 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.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Who keeps _old passports_? Actually, I think at least here
| you're supposed to send them back on replacement.
| jdietrich wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/cancellation-
| of-p...
|
| https://www.gov.uk/renew-adult-passport/renew
| rsynnott wrote:
| Last time I renewed mine was about 9 years ago (oops,
| should probably renew it soon); at least in Ireland you
| couldn't renew online at that point.
|
| Though, actually, the corner clipped off thing sounds
| familiar. I think we may do that too. I've probably got
| it somewhere...
| halostatue wrote:
| 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).
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| 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?
| jdietrich wrote:
| 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.
| arp242 wrote:
| > 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?
| oceanplexian wrote:
| 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.
| chatmasta wrote:
| Keep in mind most of what you read is UK policy _proposals_.
| They 're always proposing a bunch of whacky stuff. Hardly any
| of it gets implemented.
| orwin wrote:
| Does that makes bureaucracies weirdly whacky-resiliant in
| exchange for more bullshit and red tape on the edges?
|
| I'm genuinely asking, your comment triggered the thought.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| Getting arrested for writing a Tweet is certainly
| implemented.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > 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.
| flenserboy wrote:
| This is a great way to ensure that the past can be modified as
| contemporary needs demand.
| echelon_musk wrote:
| Exactly my thoughts.
| toyg wrote:
| 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.
|
| /s
| cinntaile wrote:
| 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.
| ilamont wrote:
| 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._
|
| [reposted from the discussion on "I found my Grandpa's notes 20
| years after he died (2020)"
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27034087)]
| int_19h wrote:
| 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.
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| Most people do not understand that nowadays we're ruled by
| databases.
|
| 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.
| rthkljlkrj wrote:
| 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.
| happytiger wrote:
| 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."
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| 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.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| 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...
| LunaSea wrote:
| Cries in flooded, moist or burnt down physical archives.
| happytiger wrote:
| Government could ruin civilization with unexpected moisture.
|
| That's a strange sounding verbiage.
| notpachet wrote:
| > ruin civilization with unexpected moisture
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_myth
| happytiger wrote:
| Civilization has ended once through fire, once through
| flood, and finally through unexpected moisture.
|
| It just sounds so Douglas Adams.
| tempestn wrote:
| I don't think anyone's arguing they shouldn't be digitized,
| just that the originals shouldn't be destroyed.
| jdietrich wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://cdn.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/information-ma...
| michael1999 wrote:
| 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?
| jdietrich wrote:
| 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.
| andylynch wrote:
| 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.
| golergka wrote:
| Did the UK government ever had a regime change since 1066?
| happytiger wrote:
| So we should build another new bureaucracy to make sure that
| our digitization continuity and archive efforts are
| successful.
|
| To save money.
|
| Hmm.
| kelnos wrote:
| 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.
| happytiger wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://lifeshareproject.wordpress.com/2011/02/02/physica
| l-c...
| INTPenis wrote:
| Well, it also means we can build X number of copies of the
| Library of Alexandria, in different countries.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _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.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Not only is this bad for historians in the future, I very, very
| much doubt it will save even the paltry PS4.5 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
| PS4.5m 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.
| bitwize wrote:
| You'd think the UK of all places would learn what with that
| Domesday Book kerfuffle.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| 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?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| 1,000 year BDs are _very_ cheap:
|
| 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.
| the_snooze wrote:
| 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)?
|
| 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...
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| >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.
| foxhill wrote:
| only if you want to store them in the open air. vacuum
| sealing them would obviate the need for an expensive hvac
| bill.
|
| and deep ground is not ridiculous. we're expecting the
| storage to be in the "mostly write only" regime, after all.
| jdietrich wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/information-management/m...
| derefr wrote:
| 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"?
| nuc1e0n wrote:
| 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.
| kelnos wrote:
| While PS4.5M 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.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| 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.
| skrbjc wrote:
| The obvious right answer is digitize them and then keep the
| originals, perhaps in a less easily accessible and potentially
| cheaper storage location.
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