What is to be done about the SRCF? Late last century I co-founded a club ("the SRCF") for providing UNIX shell access to people, on a machine that would remain connected to the Internet at a stable address. A key feature of this organisation was that it was democratic and independent: the users had to be members of the club, and elected a committee, which granted root access to competent…
RTM: implementing a lower threshold It could be done in a one-clause bill: omit subsections (3) (4) and (5) of section 79 of the Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Act 2002, and the cross-reference to those subsections made in section 85 This would remove the minimum participation threshold, which stands at 2 or 50%, whichever is higher. Without the threshold, the minimum participation defaults to…
Removing another restriction on Right To Manage In England there is a no-fault collective right for the owners of flats in a block to have the management of the block transferred to a company they control, called a Right To Manage company or RTMco. It is one of the more effective remedies to the problems of long leases on flats. To claim the right, an RTMco must comprise at least half of the…
Dispatches from FUN Ocaml 2025 I have just got my sleep pattern restored after a superb two days at the FUN OCaml conference in Warsaw. OCaml is an unusual computer programming language reputed to be a bit of a productivity boost and agreeable to use to boot. https://fun-ocaml.com/#schedule The conference comprised a series of fine talks and workshops, interspersed liberally with breaks for…
Extensibility and weekend projects tl;dr: There is a binary choice between a protocol being inextensible, or that protocol ending up controlled by a small number of Big Tech organisations. In the early days of Gemini, much was made of the notion that an implementation could be completed in a weekend. A statement to this effect still stands in the FAQ on the geminiprotocol.net capsule. There was…
The Commonhold White Paper is good news for leasehold reform. (this post will be revised in a few days) In particular, it signals that the government is going to be hard-headed about driving through reform. You can't make an omelette without cracking some eggs, as the saying goes, and that is what is implied by today's white paper. There are some areas where they are also watering commonhold down…
What did Labour actually promise on leasehold? There's this weird idea about, that the UK Labour party promised to end "leasehold". That's not what they've actually been saying, and is not logically compatible with what they stated in their manifesto before they won this year's election. Labour didn't say they'd end leasehold; they said they'd end the "leasehold system ", which can't be the same…
The Right To Manage allows the owners of flats to appoint the manager for their apartment block. RTM was introduced in England and Wales in 2002, since when a few thousand blocks have taken it up. As there is no effective legal right to inspect invoices behind the service charges for flats, the power to replace the manager is generally the only available means of preventing unvouched or fraudulent…
For common ownership of blocks of flats in England and Wales, there are only two viable solutions: share-of-freehold, and reformed commonhold. The two leasehold models In England and Wales there are two primary patterns of ownership for blocks of flats which occur when each flat is owned by a different person: conventional leasehold (never mutual) share-of-freehold (potentially fully mutual)…
Who would be upset by abolishing leasehold? Actually, some leaseholders who can't afford their share of their freeholds would. And people shouldn't be compelled to pay what they can't afford, so it follows that commonhold should not be made mandatory on existing blocks without some mitigation of this issue. This blog post is partly an answer to James Creedy's tweet . Some leaseholders cannot…
I recently surveyed the UK's resident management companies (RMCs). There is a proper paper write-up here . You can do this by querying data provided by Companies House, plus a lot of spadework. The code for doing this is currently here . Roughly speaking, there are about 50,000 RMCs. I took a random sample of 100 of these and manually read through all of their articles of association. It took many…
Commonhold in the UK is a system of land ownership that can be used as an alternative to leasehold. However, it is currently very seldom used. Leasehold has a number of problems, and I know my own situation as a leaseholder without these problems makes it much harder to empathise with people in situations that seem fairly extreme and unjust. But leasehold is a tool that is used to solve some…
Please note, this blog post has been significantly extended and updated since it was first circulated. I have recently discovered that the members of the subpostmaster's trade association were not actually permitted to vote in the association's affairs: the National Federation of Subpostmasters' members are required to nominate a board-approved intermediary to exercise their vote on their behalf!…
There's a recurring problem I've observed in voluntary organisations: potential volunteers have different levels of ability and experience, across different areas. There is a key area that affects the cohesiveness and effectiveness of a voluntary organisation: if volunteers have to interact with each other , how well do they do so? The sorts of interactions I'm concerned with are really things…
I loved email. It's dead. We should start thinking of email addresses only as attack vectors . An email address a piece of information which, once disclosed, allows someone or something to communicate with you forever. The consequence of this communication is that you may get interrupted by a notification, and bear the cost of storing, reading, and/or deleting the message; the message also…
A few weeks ago I experimented with CompCert , a C compiler from INRIA, written largely in Coq, with chunks in OCaml; this allows the Coq parts of CompCert to be formally verified (see below for more on this). Now I have no need of a guarantee that my compiler is bug-free, but to the extent that translation my code into the subset of C supported by CompCert reduces the bugcount rather than…
We're often reminded that Churchill supported the ECHR or European integration more broadly, as though there were no better argument in favour or against these things. For a bit of perspective, here's a broader list of stuff Churchill liked: "using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes" the Gold Standard denying India's right to be independent using the army against strikers politicians issuing…
Today is the anniversary of the Roswell Incident, which is the subject of various conspiracy theories. I don't like conspiracy theories; that way of thinking always tends to involve being selective about whether particular things are plausible. There's no reason to suppose that life necessarily exists outside our solar system, or that it is impossible for life to exist elsewhere, but that is not…
Scientific and mathematical reasoning are much more different from each other than people intuitively realise: they differ in what sort of ideas they start with, what consequence erroneous reasoning has, and the structure of the network of ideas they create. Science starts with a very small set of assumptions, basically that the whole of the observable universe behaves in a regular, mechanical…
Anyone watching the Microsoft anti-trust or SCO litigation would have concluded that competition policy and the judicial system are so slow as to be ineffectual. Now they are slow because they have to be; to be faster would involve undermining the legitimate interests of citizens, communities and companies. In effect, the general Turing machine and the Internet have combined such that the existing…