Dan Shearer

My website ↗ you’re reading is nice enough, but it needs work.

A bootable conference CD ran speakers' software in a network of virtual computers.

The problem: Most computer users manually save versions of files with names like Presentation-2027-Jan-11, followed later by Presentation-2027-Jan-11-UPDATED and Presentation-2027-For-Sally-Only, perhaps with Presentation-panic-edits-before-event.

In responding to a recent security problem I had to consider the idea of intent in computer software, so I looked to see what Margaret Hamilton ↗ has to say.

R code generating the quadrant plots for the Medical Snapshot comparative review.

This page contains the working behind the Health Observer Systems comparative review of the Medical Snapshot system: feature definitions, search and source notes, and the full scoring table.

I looked for every health data system that shares features with my Medical Snapshot proposal, something I’ve been working on since 2007.

The Rule-based Epidemic Modelling (RBEM) Project was funded by the UK Medical Research Council project (grant X/011658/1) to make rule-based modelling methodology more accessible to the infectious disease modelling community.

This is about an Observer-only Medical system, which can be immensely useful to society and governments, helping understand health and reducing suffering.

Not Before Time is a public broadcast facility built on existing technology.

The Active Heat Exchanger (AHE) research programme started as an engineering development project, and discovered first an engineering research question and then a health research question.

In 2026, Anthropic’s operational judgment failed twice in the same way, leading to the leak of the Claude Code source code ↗.

I am using my personal Perseverance engine as I help develop the code, and I’m watching carefully to see how useful it is for developing analysis, review and writing.

💡 Advised not to have a scan due to radiation risk?

AI is slow, and Agentic AI ↗ is even slower.

AI ethics and safety work mostly focuses on making individual models smarter and better-behaved via guidelines and persuasion, with not much hope ↗ this will succeed.

There are many problems with the AI billions of people use in 2026, discussed endlessly at all levels of society.

These matters of complicated jurisdiction and sovereignty law require the advice of an experienced international lawyer.

Patents and the MIT License Some of my software projects use MIT so I have studied this issue.

While working with the Rule-based Epidemic Modelling group at the University of Southampton ↗ I began to consider the wider context, outside our core area of studying malaria.

I made a new website in 2026.

The detail of the GDPR and its implied computer science contain a solution for sharing secrets according to law.

This file is a Code of Conduct first written in 2020 for the LumoSQL project, with the heading: This file exists because the LumoSQL Project needed it, less than one year after starting in 2019.

This is the second time ↗ the Court of Justice has decided the same question.

When Linux was a Struggling Challenger 💡 Key Point This is a 2026 restoration of my (Dan Shearer’s) 1998-2001 guide, preserved at archive.org ↗.

The Fossil ↗ source code management system is the most fully-featured alternative to Git, and has decades of development and testing starting in 2007.

LumoSQL ↗ protects data on mobile phones and other computers using a new data storage technology which is highly compatible with most existing devices.

I participated in many battles directly against Microsoft in the Ballmer era, 1998-2014.

In 2014, Microsoft got a new CEO and dramatically changed course from explicit hostility to embracing open source.

In 2026, the Samba Project ↗ is over thirty years old and has conservatively a billion users.

I have an interest in non-electronic computers as an educational tool.

How to manage BibLaTeX across time and cultures I wrote a paper in English using LaTeX ↗ on the topic of Epidemiology and One Health.

(written in 2008) How a young Australian discovered Open Source and a career, eventually learning that a mixture of code, law and mathematics is a frontier for human rights battles.

I have been lead implementer of the main security and privacy standards several times each.

Reversible execution creates computers that seem to run backwards, applying time shifting techniques with simulation/virtualisation to address software unreliability and complexity.

Not-forking ↗ exists to solve a difficult problem presented in the LumoSQL project: how could we graft two very active source trees together in an ongoing way to produce a third, independent tree?

Large Language Models are subject to the laws of physics in a bad way, because they use so much electricity and make so much heat.

These exercises assume a CS graduate-level background and familiarity with the tools mentioned; they are for mentors to adapt for their students.

Random humans and computers Humans are terrible at randomness.

Co-founder of Samba and founder of LumoSQL, working in open source, privacy law, health research and AI safety.

Adversarial interoperability… Here is the history of our project Samba as it stood in the Adversarial Interoperability ↗ days, recorded in the file history.txt from the Samba source code tree ↗.