Re: Not to incite a language war but apparently the Corona lockdown was based on 13 year old undocumented C-Code

["Niocláisín Cóilín de Ghlostéir" <Spamassassin@irrt.De>]

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On Thu, 14 Aug 2025, Kevin Chadwick wrote:
"Seems to be a 404 not found"

Dear Mister Chadwick,

I had also gotten a 404 error each time for this webpage (but I have 
successfully retrieved this webpage as I explain below).

I did not remark about it because I actually remarked about "code
written in the C language that isn't even commented", as complained by 
Rick Newbie.

As for accessing old, badly presented ex-webpages including this 404 
ex-webpage in question . . .

HTTP://web.Archive.org
is a possibility for a well behaved ex-webpage. Some badly behaved 
examples do not work well with e.g. a normal, bad, GUI webbrowser. This is 
one such example. So instead w3m can rescue us as follows . . .

w3m HTTP://web.Archive.org/web/20200516145237https://ChrisVonCsefalvay.com/2020/05/09/imperial-covid-model
said inter alia:
|----------------------------------------------------------------------|
|"[. . .], the computational epidemiologist who has advised the [. . .]|
|government on COVID-19 related steps until his recent resignation. I  |
|have previously been a staunch defender of [. . . his] approach – his |
|model was (and is) theoretically sound, and probably as good as such  |
|models will ever get. [. . .]                                         |
|                                                                      |
|And looking at the code, that raises some extremely serious           |
|questions. I would like to explore some of these issues, but will not |
|go into a detailed analysis of the code, for one reason – the code    |
|eventually (and reluctantly) shared by [. . .] is almost              |
|definitely not the code used to generate forecasts for [. . .]        |
|Government. We know that at some point, Github [. . .]                |
|has been involved in cleaning up some of the                          |
|quality issues. [. . .] obstinately resists releasing                 |
|original code – both via Github and under a valid FOIA request that   |
|[. . .] lawyers are entirely misinterpreting.1) We can, however,      |
|safely assume from the calibre of the people who have worked on the   |
|improved version that whatever was there was worse.                   |
|                                                                      |
|The quality issue                                                     |
|First of all, the elephant in the room: code                          |
|quality. It is very difficult to look at the [. . .] code with any    |
|understanding of software engineering and conclude that this is good, |
|or even tolerable. [. . .] attempts a very thin apologia              |
|for this:                                                             |
|                                                                      |
|[Indentation apparently as a block quotation:]                        |
|       I’m conscious that lots of people would like to see and run the|
|       pandemic simulation code we are using to model control measures|
|        against COVID-19. To explain the background – I wrote the code|
|     (thousands of lines of undocumented C) 13+ years ago to model flu|
|                                                            pandemics…|
|                                                                      |
|                                              — [. . .] March 22, 2020|
|[. . . indentation apparently as a block quotation.]                  |
|                                                                      |
|That, sir, is not a                                                   |
|feature. It’s not even a bug. It’s somewhere between negligence and   |
|unintentional but grave scientific misconduct.                        |
|                                                                      |
|For those who are not in the computational fields: “my code is too    |
|complicated for you to get it” is not an acceptable excuse. It is the |
|duty of everyone who releases code to document it – within the        |
|codebase or outside (or a combination of the two). Greater minds      |
|[. . .] have a tough enough time                                      |
|navigating a large code base, and especially where you have           |
|collaborators, it is not unusual to need a second or two to remember  |
|what a particular function is doing or what the arguments should be   |
|like. Or, to put it more bluntly: for thirteen years, taxpayer funding|
|[. . .] and all it produced was                                       |
|code that violated one of the most fundamental precepts of good       |
|software development – intelligibility.                               |
|                                                                      |
|The policy issue                                                      |
|[. . .] I don’t, of course, know whether that is                      |
|what indeed happened, but I doubt anybody would want to trust their   |
|lives to thousands of lines of cobbled-together code.                 |
|                                                                      |
|[. . .]                                                               |
|                                                                      |
|The community issue                                                   |
|Perhaps the biggest issue is, however, the                            |
|response to people who dare question the refusal by [. . .] to        |
|release the original source code. This is best summarised by the      |
|responses of their point man on Github, who is largely spending his   |
|time locking issues and calling people dumb & toxic:                  |
|                                                                      |
|[An apparent quotation which does not prove what it is apparently     |
|supposed to demonstrate . . .]                                        |
|                                                                      |
|It may merit attention that [. . .] is taxpayer-funded – the self-same|
|taxpayer who is deemed unfit to even behold what he paid for. This is |
|the worst of ‘closed science’, something many scientists (myself      |
|included) have worked hard to dismantle over the years. Publicly      |
|funded science imposes a moral obligation to present its results to   |
|the funder (that is, the taxpayer), and it should perhaps not be up to|
|the judgment of a junior tech support developer to determine what the |
|public is, or is not, fit to see. Perhaps as an epidemiologist, I take|
|special umbrage at the presumption that everyone who wishes to see the|
|original code base would be “confused” – maybe I should write to      |
|reassure Dr [. . .] that I do understand a little about               |
|epidemiology. It is, after all, what I do.                            |
|                                                                      |
|The science issue                                                     |
|None of these issues are, of course, anywhere near                    |
|as severe as what this means – a massive leap backwards, erosion of   |
|trust and a complete disclaimer of accountability by publicly funded  |
|scientists.                                                           |
|                                                                      |
|There is a moral obligation for epidemiologists to work for the common|
|good – and that implies an obligation of openness and honesty. I am   |
|reminded of the medical paternalism that characterised Eastern Bloc   |
|medicine, where patients were rarely told what ailed them and never   |
|received honest answers. To see this writ large amidst a pandemic by  |
|what by all accounts (mine included) has been deemed one of the       |
|world’s best computational epidemiology units is not so much          |
|infuriating as it is deeply saddening.                                |
|                                                                      |
|One of my friends, former Navy SEAL Jocko Willink, counseled in his   |
|recent book to “take the high ground, or the high ground will take    |
|you”. Epidemiology had the chance to seize and hold the narrative,    |
|through openness, transparency and honesty about the forecasts        |
|made. It had the chance, during this day in the sun of ours, to show  |
|the public just how powerful our analytical abilities have            |
|become. Instead, petty academic jealousy, obsessions with             |
|institutional prestige and an understandable but still                |
|disproportionate fear of being ‘misinterpreted’ by people who ‘do not |
|understand epidemiology’ have given the critics of forecasting and    |
|computational epidemiology fertile breeding ground. They are entirely |
|justified now in criticising any forecasts that come out of the       |
|[. . .] model – even if the forecasts are correct. There will no      |
|doubt be public health consequences to the loss of credibility the    |
|entire profession has suffered, and in the end, it’s all due to the   |
|outdated ‘proprietary’ attitudes and the airs of superiority by a few |
|insulated scientists who, somehow, somewhere, left the track of       |
|serving public health and humanity for the glittering prizes offered  |
|elsewhere. With their abandonment of the high road, our entire        |
|profession’s claim to the public trust might well be forfeited – in a |
|sad twist of irony, at a time that could well have been the Finest    |
|Hour of computational epidemiology.                                   |
|                                                                      |
|[. . .]                                                               |
|                                                                      |
|(c) Chris von Csefalvay, 2015-. For syndication and reprint           |
|queries, please use the contact form."                                |
|----------------------------------------------------------------------|

A theme in
HTTP://web.Archive.org/web/20200516145237https://ChrisVonCsefalvay.com/2020/05/09/imperial-covid-model
which is broader than diseases and software is similar to
HTTP://Gloucester.Insomnia247.NL/Evil_which_is_so-called_science/

An ex-website of "the Journal of Scientific Practice and Integrity" used 
to use bad Scholastica so it is too hard to archive. HTTrack; lftp; Pavuk; 
Wget Version 1.21.3; and Wget2 Version 1.99.1 all failed to archive it so 
I manually archived it:
HTTP://Gloucester.Insomnia247.NL/Evil_which_is_so-called_science/Journal_of_Scientific_Practice_and_Integrity/

My condolences to persons who need to archive bigger Scholastica websites!

Archives other than Archive.org might also had archived
HTTPS://ChrisVonCsefalvay.com/2020/05/09/imperial-covid-model
- I did not check. I hyperlink to webpages about many other archives 
websites in the last sentence of
HTTP://Gloucester.Insomnia247.NL/Evil_which_is_so-called_science/devastating_harassment_and_bullying/maladministration_action_or_inaction_of_a_serious_nature_contrary_to_law_or_unreasonable_unjust_oppressive_discriminatory_improper.HTM

If one wants to manually archive something without needing it to be still 
available after this century, then I would recommend
HTTPS://Archive.Li