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UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’

314 points by ashergill 5y ago

jibbit 5y ago
Such a terrible story. I'm surprised it hasn't been more prominent within the tech community. Many dozens of lives were ruined.
- spacemanmatt 5y ago
  I just came from another thread (here) where the subject was Google arbitrarily ruining businesses and lives based on algorithmic fraud detection gone wrong. I'd estimate the issue is alive with U.S. techies at the very least.
- _joel 5y ago
  Unfortunately people died during this time too and did so with this hanging over their head. An absolute scandal, but there's no inquiry into the directors involved. Not yet, at least.
raesene9 5y ago
An (IMO) Interesting question is how to reduce the risks of things like this happening. Where evidence from IT systems is being used as a large part of a prosecution, it seems that it should have some kind of scrutiny as to how those systems operate. One option would be allowing the defence to see details of how the system works, testing that was done and known bugs, but that would require a lot of expensive work by legal defence teams, especially where the system is complex. Another option would be some kind of certification of IT system operation, but again it would be hard/expensive to do and very incompatible with rapid development techniques.
- BillinghamJ 5y ago
  I'm very sure this system was certified in a multitude of ways. No certification process would prevent this. The real issue here was that Post Office refused to recognise that, although computers themselves are mostly infallible, computer programs are never infallible. They conducted their activities and took actions based on assuming the reporting was flawless. Then the really serious problem is that in cases where the fallibility became more visible, they consistently and systematically covered it up and pressed forward with their incredibly aggressive enforcement work anyway, knowing how much damage it was doing. This is unquestionably an issue of abuse of power and position.
  - citrin_ru 5y ago
    > although computers themselves are mostly infallible What do you mean? Hardware is fallible too, just less often than software. This may cause problem on its own e. g. bit flips in non-ECC memory, HDD which lie (reply to flush cache before data is actually written) or HW can trigger software errors, e. g. HW can crash at random moment and SW can be not designed to handle this properly.
    - BillinghamJ 5y ago
      That is why I said "mostly", at least in comparison to programs or humans. Obviously yes there are very occasional problems as you've described.
- mikehollinger 5y ago
  > An (IMO) Interesting question is how to reduce the risks of things like this happening. I look forward to finding out if this was a “fraud system gone wrong” or a more basic ledger system failing to do sums correctly. Partially addressing your question though, if you were to insert the words “AI” and “bias” into the sentence we as an industry are starting to figure this out. The certification and testing processes you mentioned are there in cases where a team’s mature enough to have both a data and model lifecycle worked out. You see words like MLOps trying to describe how to do that effectively in production. For example, my work has both a design approach (in both the product design touchy/feely sense and software architecture sense) that includes questions and practices that will help to reason through data needed to address a problem, what can go wrong with that, and how things look when it goes wrong. The last bit is the most interesting one to me. In terms of practical engineering, inference results generally should have some sense of lineage - of data, model, and training services which explain how you got to a given answer, including what inputs were considered or ignored. An interesting side topic with this is that poor implementations can result in inexcusable differences that affect downstream systems. For example, if a particular model has predicted something like “this transaction is suspected to be fraud” it better be consistent from run to run, and the input data better be consistent over time. If either of those changed - explaining that to the consumers of the data is essential to them understanding that either the model changed, the data changed, or both.
- spideymans 5y ago
  >An (IMO) Interesting question is how to reduce the risks of things like this happening. Corroborating evidence. In this case, where was the evidence that this money was ever in their possession? Was it ever sitting in their bank account? Was it buried in the back yard? Did they buy fancy sports cars or houses? The prospect of thousands of people stealing money without a trace of the cash is fantastical. In general, I'd say electronic evidence should need to be corroborated with physical or other types of evidence to achieve a conviction. It's too easy for electronic records to be falsified, either through software bugs or outright malicious intent.
simonswords82 5y ago
Outrageous that so many people's lives were blown up by this. Relieved to hear the court ordered in their favour. I wonder if the post masters can now go after the Post Office for damages?
- mnw21cam 5y ago
  The phrase "Affront to justice" is key here. To be honest, I am completely shocked that this wasn't sorted out several years ago when it was all over the papers and it was completely obvious what had happened. But that key phrase allows the wholesale claiming of damages.
  - Silhouette 5y ago
    It's also noteworthy that these injustices originated from private prosecutions brought by the Post Office. That is a relatively unusual legal action in this country, where almost all criminal prosecutions are brought by the state. Given the damage that a wrongful criminal prosecution can cause, including imprisonment and having a criminal record, the compensation awarded could be considerable and there is already talk of the Post Office needing extra government funding to cover the cost. Another small point of interest that doesn't seem to be making the mainstream reporting yet is that under our legal system the state prosecutor (the Crown Prosecution Service) has the power to take over and, if appropriate, shut down any private prosecution. When the inevitable inquiries publish their conclusions, the fact that so many bad prosecutions were successfully brought over such a long period might reflect poorly not only on the Post Office and on the courts and lawyers involved in the convictions but also on the CPS for not intervening. This could become politically significant, because the current Leader of the Opposition was in charge of the CPS around 2009-2013, the last five years when most such prosecutions were being brought. That could leave him in an awkward position if he's attacked over his record during the next general election campaign, given that his party is exactly the one that's supposed to stand up for working class "little guys" like the victims in these cases.
Vuska 5y ago
The company I work for ships hundreds of packages through RM. The RM tech I've seen is a mess. Makes me wonder what it's like behind the scenes. Just one lowlight I've come across, this comment can be found in the HTML for one of their portals: 
- emdowling 5y ago
  One nitpick: Royal Mail and Post Office are two separate companies with independent boards. Royal Mail is the network and carrier, while the Post Office is the primary entry point into that network (they also offer access to a bunch of other services not related to the Royal Mail). Doesn't make your point any less valid, but wanted to call out the distinction.
  - BillinghamJ 5y ago
    As a sub-nitpick, I would definitely say Royal Mail itself is certainly the primary entry point into the network too. But Post Office is super helpful in providing supporting services for many government-related things like passport photos, certification, applying for things etc
  - lloydatkinson 5y ago
    Sounds like the kind of bullshit BT and OpenReach pull too. Claim to be two unrelated companies and yet one owns parts of the other and the same boards run both - all so they can pass customer problems between the two I definitely.
    - DanBC 5y ago
      They have different boards. https://www.openreach.com/about-us/our-leadership-and-governance/our-board https://www.openreach.com/about-us/our-leadership-and-govern... https://www.bt.com/about/bt/our-company/group-governance/board-of-directors https://www.bt.com/about/bt/our-company/group-governance/boa... Openreach Mike McTighe Chairman Clive Selley CEO Matt Davies Chief Finance Officer Edward Astle Non-executive Board member Liz Benison Non-executive Board member Andrew Barron Non-executive Board member Jon Furmston Secretary to the board Simon Lowth BT Group nominee BT Jan du Plessis Chairman Philip Jansen Chief Executive Simon Lowth Group Chief Financial Officer Adel Al-Saleh Non-independent, non-executive director Sir Ian Cheshire Independent non-executive director Iain Conn Senior independent director and independent non-executive director Isabel Hudson Independent non-executive director Mike Inglis Independent non-executive director Matthew Key Independent non-executive director Allison Kirkby Independent non-executive director Leena Nair Independent non-executive director Sara Weller Independent non-executive director Rachel Canham Company Secretary & General Counsel, Governance
switch007 5y ago
For background and more information, Private Eye Special Report: "JUSTICE LOST IN THE POST: How the Post Office wrecked the lives of its own workers" (PDF) https://www.private-eye.co.uk/pictures/special_reports/justice-lost-in-the-post.pdf https://www.private-eye.co.uk/pictures/special_reports/justi...
DanBC 5y ago
There's a short but good podcast about the trial and how it affected people here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/m000jf7j https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/m000jf7j
notimetorelax 5y ago
A lesson to test your code and take action based on costumer feedback. I’m curious to learn what was Fujitsu’s position during those investigations.
- noir_lord 5y ago
  Not sure I'd take action based on what someone who makes fancy dress/theatrical clothes suggests tbh.
  - jedimastert 5y ago
    What is this in reference to? Edit: I get it.
    - noir_lord 5y ago
      > costumer I think he/she meant customer, I found the idea of someone who makes fancy dress giving technical feedback amusing.
    - frameset 5y ago
      The typo of "Costumer" where they probably meant "Customer".
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
kristjankalm 5y ago
This is unreal. Shitty software sending people to prison without anyone in the process considering what exactly is the likelihood of hundreds of postmasters simultaneously becoming thieves overnight.
- himinlomax 5y ago
  This reminds me of what happened after 9/11, the fear of dirty bomb was all the rage so the US government deployed a network of Geiger counters. They arrested a number of dangerous dirty bombers, all of whom were cancer patients spotted by the detector at the subway station nearest Johns Hopkins radiation treatment facility. It took weeks to fix the problem.
  - LorenPechtel 5y ago
    At least when my wife hit that in the Shanghai/Pudong airport (residue from a heart scan, not cancer) they resolved it in a few minutes of talking. On the other hand, I think Shanghai didn't check well enough--there was one simple test they could have done but didn't: Hand held geiger counter, see what's hot. Body equally hot, baggage not hot, it's medical. Why couldn't the US cops do the same thing?
    - himinlomax 5y ago
      They implemented the system without even thinking of the false positives. Eventually they added that to the procedures, but they harassed quite a few people before that happened. Cancer patients on top of that, many of whom were probably half dead already.
      - LorenPechtel 5y ago
        It seems to me that's an awful lot of stupid on their part. Patient claims medical--call the facility and ask if they should be hot. However, having read about their stupidity I would be inclined to get a card from the facility even if I didn't expect to be going anywhere with radiation scanners. (My wife had a card--which was sitting at home in the pocket of the jacket she had planned to wear. She changed her mind on flight day and didn't think about the card until she tripped the scanner. Note that she probably had an easier time of it than a typical tourist would have as she speaks Mandarin at native level.)
mavhc 5y ago
They made a computer that can't add
reedf1 5y ago
Anyone have more technical detail on the software or the bugs therein?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
robalfonso 5y ago
Did no one ever ask where was the money? These people all had these huge short falls, why did no one go to find the cash? That's financial crimes 101
- DanBC 5y ago
  Post Office told the post masters that they were short, so many post masters made up the shortfall from their own pocket, expecting the books to eventually balance and to get repaid. When people were unable to continue making up that shortfall this was seen as further evidence of their criminality: "they've spent the money", "they've hidden the money", and not "they never had the money".
  - robalfonso 5y ago
    It’s insane they stopped pulling the thread and the defence didn’t push that, even if you spent it there would be evidence. I would have been highly skeptical that all of it just disappeared Into thin air across the entire group....nuts
gertrunde 5y ago
Also - more technical background: https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252496560/Fujitsu-bosses-knew-about-Post-Office-Horizon-IT-flaws-says-insider https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252496560/Fujitsu-bosses...
lovetocode 5y ago
This is insanity. We need legislators, lawyers and judges who are tech competent.
PaulKeeble 5y ago
Software is in the walls. At some point legislators are going to come and ask the question how we stop things like this happening and if the Fujitsu's of the world don't have an answer then we can expect regulation that will likely embed practices that don't help. I don't think we take software reliability seriously enough, most of our focus is on speed of release, ever quicker cycles and it being OK to break things. This culture ruined these peoples lives. Things must change. This isn't a unique issue to Fujitsu it is something most of the software industry is doing, this story could be about just about any piece of software.
- jedimastert 5y ago
  > I don't think we take software reliability seriously enough, most of our focus is on speed of release, ever quicker cycles and it being OK to break things. The phrase "move fast and break things" should be seen as cautionary, not aspirational.
- mnw21cam 5y ago
  I still think https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/ has to be taken seriously. You can put a whole load of verification effort into your software, which will undoubtedly make it more reliable. But you are still likely to have some kind of corner case where it breaks down. Software is complex enough for this to be universally true. The key is how we respond when the software fails. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 case shows an example of what not to do - when hospitals started reporting their machines giving lethal radiation doses to people, the manufacturer doubled down on the computers-are-infallible rhetoric, where they should have put every last effort into investigating. Likewise, the post office should have noticed that a rather excessive number of postmasters were apparently fiddling the books, and investigated. Instead, after it was fairly obvious that the computer was wrong, they pushed the computers-are-infallible line right through the courts, and that is what earned them the "affront to justice" judgment.
  - Silhouette 5y ago
    The key is how we respond when the software fails. I agree, but if the first step to solving a problem is understanding that it exists then the first principle here must be to acknowledge that software systems are fallible and therefore any surprising or reasonably contested result they produce should be treated with proper caution until further information can be gathered. So many of the problems we see when modern technology goes wrong start with assuming it didn't. At that point, it's not even about how you respond to the failure, because you're denying that the failure ever happened. Big software companies with considerable lobbying power seem to be particularly good at convincing people who aren't technical experts, including most politicians, judges, juries and reporters, that this is the case. A corollary to this is that we desperately need more technological awareness among our politicians, lawyers, journalists and other relevant professions. Tech has become too big to be a minor issue you delegate to some random advisor in a basement office. It affects almost everything we do today, sometimes profoundly, and failing to understand that will inevitably lead to some horrible outcomes as we've seen all too vividly today.
unpopularopp 5y ago
>So far, nobody at the Post Office or Fujitsu has been held accountable And this is the most important part.
- WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
  See, now I'm looking at US & UK Gov corruption and can't tell who is mimicking who.
cmsefton 5y ago
Private Eye magazine (a satirical investigative news magazine) has covered this for many years, and have an excellent report for anyone interested: https://www.private-eye.co.uk/pictures/special_reports/justice-lost-in-the-post.pdf https://www.private-eye.co.uk/pictures/special_reports/justi... [PDF] Glad to see them finally have their names cleared, and can only hope prosecutions will follow as a result, utterly shameful how the Post Office, Fujitsu and others behaved. For example: > A Fujitsu programmer from the time, Richard Roll, who would become a key witness in the sub-postmasters’ high court case against the Post Office in 2019, told the Eye that Horizon was one the company’s few profitable contracts. Among other private sector deals, it was also lining up a key role in the mother of all government IT splurges, New Labour’s £12bn NHS IT project (Eyes passim ad nauseam). Fujitsu could ill-afford either bad publicity or the penalties that came with software faults. “We would have been fined,” said Roll, who worked at the company between 2001 and 2004. “So the incentive was to pretend it [software error] didn’t happen”, while running “a constant rolling programme of patches to fix the bugs”. Fujitsu “would basically tell the Post Office what they wanted to hear”. So prolific did Roll’s bug-fixing team become it won the company’s President’s Award for outstanding corporate contribution in 2002. And the quick-fix, ask-no-questions approach that suited Fujitsu financially enabled the Post Office to hold the line that blame for all branch shortfalls must lie with the sub-postmaster.The Fujitsu insider concluded that errors leaving sub-postmasters out of pocket were inevitable. Could that mean hundreds of them? “Given there were [about] 20,000 post offices when I was at Fujitsu and the sort of problems we were dealing with all the time, yeah,” he told the Eye. “Sounds reasonable.”
- justincormack 5y ago
  The judgement is a good (long) read https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/bates-v-post-office-judgment.pdf https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/bates-v-...
temporama1 5y ago
As: a postmaster When: I use this software Then: I should not be falsely imprisoned for 3 years.
- temporama1 5y ago
  Tough crowd
haunter 5y ago
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252496560/Fujitsu-bosses-knew-about-Post-Office-Horizon-IT-flaws-says-insider https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252496560/Fujitsu-bosses... >For the first 10 years of Horizon’s existence, transaction and account data was stored on terminals in each branch before being uploaded to a central database via ISDN. Our source says this part of the system simply did not work. >“The cash account was a piece of software that sat on the counter NT box, asleep all day,” he said. “At the end of the day, or a particular point in the day, it came to life, and it ran through the message store from the point it last finished. It started at a watermark from yesterday and combed through every transaction in the message store, up until the next watermark. >“A lot of the messages in there were nonsense, because there was no data dictionary, there was no API that enforced message integrity. The contents of the message were freehand, you could write whatever you wanted in the code, and everybody did it differently. And then, when you came back three weeks later, you could write it differently again.” And down further >Speaking to Computer Weekly in 2015, the anonymous source told us: “The asynchronous system did not communicate in real time, but does so using a series of messages that are stored and forwarded, when the network connection is available. This means that messages to and from the centre may trip over each other. It is perfectly possible that, if not treated properly, messages from the centre may overwrite data held locally.” >Four years later, former Fujitsu engineer Richard Roll wrote in a witness statement to the High Court: “The issues with coding in the Horizon system were extensive. Furthermore, the coding issues impacted on transaction data and caused financial discrepancies on the Horizon system at branch level.” BUT the most important part >So far, nobody at the Post Office or Fujitsu has been held accountable
- WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
  The crappy state of rural UK broadband (circa 2010) is proudly on display here. ref: https://www.ingenia.org.uk/Ingenia/Articles/c05470e5-337f-4b4b-896e-71d7e1aeab5b https://www.ingenia.org.uk/Ingenia/Articles/c05470e5-337f-4b... Maybe the FCC went all NYPD-World-Police on the UK - popped over there to run things for a while.
  - Mauricebranagh 5y ago
haunter 5y ago
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252496560/Fujitsu-bosses-knew-about-Post-Office-Horizon-IT-flaws-says-insider https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252496560/Fujitsu-bosses... >For the first 10 years of Horizon’s existence, transaction and account data was stored on terminals in each branch before being uploaded to a central database via ISDN. Our source says this part of the system simply did not work. >“The cash account was a piece of software that sat on the counter NT box, asleep all day,” he said. “At the end of the day, or a particular point in the day, it came to life, and it ran through the message store from the point it last finished. It started at a watermark from yesterday and combed through every transaction in the message store, up until the next watermark. >“A lot of the messages in there were nonsense, because there was no data dictionary, there was no API that enforced message integrity. The contents of the message were freehand, you could write whatever you wanted in the code, and everybody did it differently. And then, when you came back three weeks later, you could write it differently again.” And down further >Speaking to Computer Weekly in 2015, the anonymous source told us: “The asynchronous system did not communicate in real time, but does so using a series of messages that are stored and forwarded, when the network connection is available. This means that messages to and from the centre may trip over each other. It is perfectly possible that, if not treated properly, messages from the centre may overwrite data held locally.” >Four years later, former Fujitsu engineer Richard Roll wrote in a witness statement to the High Court: “The issues with coding in the Horizon system were extensive. Furthermore, the coding issues impacted on transaction data and caused financial discrepancies on the Horizon system at branch level.” BUT the most important part >So far, nobody at the Post Office or Fujitsu has been held accountable
- coldcode 5y ago
  Is there no legal support for challenging the source code of the product in the UK?
  - moomin 5y ago
    There’s barely any legal support at all these days. That’s what all that “tough on crime” and “stop waste” nonsense in newspapers gets you: large chunks of the criminal justice system barely work anymore.
tyingq 5y ago
The link out to another story[1] has some interesting details... "In December 2019, at the end of a long-running series of civil cases, the Post Office agreed to settle with 555 claimants." So settlements in 555 of the original 700+ prosecutions. "It accepted it had previously "got things wrong in [its] dealings with a number of postmasters", and agreed to pay £58m in damages. The claimants received a share of £12m, after legal fees were paid." But 80% of the settlement money went to lawyers. Ugh. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56718036 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56718036
- FpUser 5y ago
  Since the government was in a wrong I do not understand at all why they are not ordered to compensate all legal expenses as well.
  - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
    Government gets to write the laws. That is, when lobbyists let them.
    - FpUser 5y ago
      My understanding is that the court still has the power (at least in theory) to order legal expense compensation.
- lupire 5y ago
  The percentage isn't the problem. The problem is of the settlement amount doesn't include damages and also legal fees, both of which should be the responsibility of the perpetrators.
  - tyingq 5y ago
    "The percentage isn't the problem" I disagree. Even the ambulance chasers here in the U.S. take around 40% as their contingency fee. 80% is just...wow. Edit: "ambulance chasers" in this context means very opportunistic lawyers that are primarily motivated by money, and not helping their clients. I don't see how that term is disparaging any victims/clients. The comparison is that even outright greedy lawyers aren't taking half+ of the settlement. In this case, using £250/hr, the lawyers spent 88 lawyer years worth of time (184k hours).
lupire 5y ago
> the convictions of 39 former postmasters ... the UK's most widespread miscarriage of justice. There's no way this is true. > There were more than 700 prosecutions based on Horizon evidence. The commission and the Post Office are asking anyone else who believes their conviction to be unsafe to come forward. On second thought, I guess it may be, since even after the abuse was proven they are still holding innocent people on false charges.
- FpUser 5y ago
  >"since even after the abuse was proven they are still holding innocent people on false charges." Well, same government first destroyed immigration papers and then deported and otherwise ruined the lives of their own citizens ( Windrush scandal ). I'd love to see the perpetrators in jail but fat chance.
DanBC 5y ago
https://www.judiciary.uk/judgments/hamilton-others-v-post-office-limited/ https://www.judiciary.uk/judgments/hamilton-others-v-post-of... The judgment is blistering.
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  The previous judgements sent lots of people to jail, so let's not congratulate the criminal justice system very much.
lupire 5y ago
The idea that 700 people in the same job were all committing the same crime and constantly getting caught is insane. This is a perfect example of Orwell's description of fascist Britain, where the people are made slaves of the state.
- simonh 5y ago
  Over several years and 20,000 post office branches it's not a huge percentage. I suppose they assumed the new system was revealing corruption that had gone unnoticed under the previous system. That's in no way an excuse or justification for the knowing, deliberate suppression of evidence that went on here.
  - lupire 5y ago
    What job has 3.5% rate of criminal prosecutions, with 0 eyewitness evidence?
    - simonh 5y ago
      It wasn’t all in one year.
drcongo 5y ago
It's well worth listening to the radio show linked at the bottom of the article to understand just how heartbreaking this story is.
noja 5y ago
> software engineer Richard Roll Risky click.
- gm3dmo 5y ago
  Never gonna give you up.
cabernal 5y ago
This and the John Deere bug posted earlier make me a bit concerned over the accumulating evidence of unreliable software ruining people's lives... What can be done? Mandatory audits, pen testing? If this is an organizational problem, more vacation? limiting overtime? rethinking employee incentives?
- icegreentea2 5y ago
  It's not about positive incentives, it's about the lack of negative incentives. More true negative incentives need to be shifted onto the production side, back onto the corporations, its officers, its middle management, and if required down to the individual contributor. Corporate structure helps diffuse and deflect responsibility. Each group (executive leadership, middle management, and ICs) gets to diffuse and deflect responsibility and liability onto each other. We already have all the positive incentives in the world - cash money. It's not enough.
- viraptor 5y ago
  > What can be done? Not taking software results as a fact. Software report stating X in court should be equivalent to "the person who wrote this in a hurry would say X, but it's not a sworn testimony". We should have the person presenting any report like that be personally responsible for the contents. If they aren't willing, it shouldn't be presented.
  - Silhouette 5y ago
    We should have the person presenting any report like that be personally responsible for the contents. If they aren't willing, it shouldn't be presented. I don't think making it personal works at scale. You can't reasonably expect everyone giving evidence in court, say every individual police officer who is a witness to a speeding offence, to be a technical expert on the technological tools they are given to do their job. Instead, as you implied in the previous paragraph, the weight given to any evidence derived from technology should be proportionate to the credibility of that technology. If it's a device that has to be vetted and approved according to strict regulatory standards and in court there are two other concurring sources of evidence, that's clearly a much stronger case than a single reading from a single device whose calibration has reasonably been called into question at trial that is being presented as the only evidence in that trial.
lambda_dn 5y ago
What's more likely, hundreds of Postmasters where thieves or the system had a few bugs. How did this even happen?
_0o6v 5y ago
A shocking injustice. Innocent people went to prison for years. There was clearly a cover up at Fujitsu and the Post Office, and those accountable should now be prosecuted.
- WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
  I'd wager a stuck pig that Fujitsu was a major campaign contributor. If they still are, convictions are a lot less likely.
gpvos 5y ago
> In the latest chapter of one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in English legal history, 39 people who were prosecuted Meanwhile in the Netherlands, ~26000 people have been branded as fraudsters by the tax office due to a way too strict child benefits law. More than 100 probably entirely innocent people fled the country. Even the compensation that is now promised is only slowly trickling towards them, and likely to be snatched up by debt collectors - including even the tax office itself, which is still partly unrepentant. Okay, they haven't been sent to jail directly, but the scale of this is huge.
- toomanybeersies 5y ago
  We had a similar thing happen with unemployment benefits in Australia [1], which arguably led to several suicides. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme
blfr 5y ago
Was there actual wrongdoing that the buggy system allowed and made difficult/impossible to trace or was it bugs all the way down?
vanilla-almond 5y ago
Repeating this comment that I posted yesterday...it is unfair? Will any developers involved in this horrible scandal ever will be held accountable for their work? I wonder if the developers who were responsible for such a bug-infested piece of software realise their work has destroyed people's lives? (They presumably never met the users of their software or were so distant from end-users that they never considered the consequences of their actions.) Do those developers even realise it was their incompetence that caused untold misery? Or are they completely detached from the events in this scandal and see themselves as simply cogs in the 'system' and thus blameless? Blame must be apportioned to management. But also I feel it's too easy as a developer to see yourself as part of a team and thus absolved of any individual blame. You're subsumed in the "team" - and ultimately no-one takes responsibly. Even with management at fault, one cannot deny that it was the developers who produced absolute garbage. I hope the developers who worked on this system, no matter how much they feel they are not responsible for the failure of this project, will reflect on how the impact of software they built had devastating consequences on people's lives.
gandalfian 5y ago
Unfair but as a spectator so frustratingly lacking any proper answers. It seems nobody could ever even work out if any money was missing or not. Let alone why. No closure. Just official judgement that no one knows...
meowster 5y ago
duplicate -ish 175 and 53 comments also posted 3 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26913183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26913183
gadiyar 5y ago
Nick Wallis has been documenting the entire thing here for a long time: https://www.postofficetrial.com https://www.postofficetrial.com Today's update isn't there yet but should be shortly.
davidhyde 5y ago
Those postmasters defending charges of theft against them in the 2000s should not have had to prove that the computer system they were forced to use had bugs. In order to prosecute them in the first place, the Post Office should have had to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt and without risk of bias, that the computer system was correct. So, independent review at the very least, not testimony from parties with a vested interest in the outcome. This mess was as much a failure of the UK legal system as it was of the active efforts of the Post Office and Fujitsu to deceitfully protect their own interests above the postmasters affected. It's like a murderer giving evidence against a random stranger and being believed at face value because they provided all the evidence first hand.
- robk 5y ago
  Computer said so and they blindly followed. Offshoring victims :(
  - dd82 5y ago
    same with facial recognition. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/technology/facial-recognition-arrest.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/technology/facial-recogni...
    - lupire 5y ago
      An arrest based on (mechanical) eye witness evidence is not the same thing as a conviction, at all. The security photo is directly viewable by the police and the accused.
- lbriner 5y ago
  Unfortunately, that sounds straight-forward but isn't: Q) Did you or any of the people you got to examine the software found any way that what the defendents said was true? A) No Q) Then you are guilty beyond reasonable doubt. I think the bigger issue here is around the power that a large organisation wields to duck and dive and use corporate tricks to manipulate how it played out. For example, the fact that so many people had been accused could have been analyzed if it was known e.g. Last year 5 convictions, this year, 700!
robertlagrant 5y ago
An undermentioned problem: how could something this bad have held up in court?
whyleyc 5y ago
There's a great 10 episode Podcast on this debacle on BBC Sounds: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/m000jf7j https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/m000jf7j It's really well paced and includes contributions from many of the sub-postmasters affected by this scandal.
- gerjomarty 5y ago
  I hadn't heard about the story until the BBC started re-running this series this week. Absolutely shocking that flaws in the system were dismissed and suspicion thrown on the sub-postmasters instead.
mariuolo 5y ago
> The Post Office settled the civil claim brought by 555 claimants for £57.75m – amounting to £12m after legal costs – without admitting liability That's some £20'000 each. A pittance for years of suffering and inability to work.
switch007 5y ago
Typical BBC, not mentioning the man who committed suicide.
londons_explore 5y ago
Presumably to put someone in prison for being a money thief, one would need to prove where that money went... Were all these people accused of theft with not a single record of the yachts they bought with all the money they supposedly stole? I would assume most of these people would be able to turn over a complete financial record of their lives (ie. I was paid £x, I paid taxes of £y, and here is a bank statement showing how I spent it, and here is whats leftover). How exactly can you imprison someone for theft of money if they can present that?
- zinok 5y ago
  Post Offices handle a large amount of cash, much more than any other business of their size. Many of the sub-post offices in question would be paying out pensions and welfare benefits in cash to a large proportion of local customers. If someone was stealing from the post office, they could easily do so in cash.
  - lupire 5y ago
    It's hard to spend $70K in cash, though.
    - zinok 5y ago
      Perhaps it is, but if there had been credible evidence of a theft 'I would not have been able to spend all that money in cash' is not the basis of a solid defense. There have been genuine cases where accountants, bank managers, and so on have embezzled large sums of money, including in cash, and spent it all untraceably on things like feeding a gambling addiction.
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    So 500 peiple stole millions and the prosecution cannot show where a single penny went, noone even got a new car or TV? Did they eat the money? And all the evodence the prosecution has are electronic records, entirely in their control, which they could fake and which were never checked by a third party for basic errors? This is a colossal miscarriage of justice
cletus 5y ago
The first bizarre part to me about this fiasco is that accounting, as a discipline, is one that is designed to catch errors. Put it another way: it assumes errors will occur. This is why in shops, for example, you'll have manual stocktaking (ie let's verify what's in the store is what the computer thinks is in the store) and in any business you'll have reconciliation processes to find and remedy errors. This highlights a key part of systems design. A key question you should be asking is: what happens when this fails? Note that's "when" not "if". So something like Horizon should be used to flag cases for reviews. If a branch is found ot have a cash shortfall suggesting possible theft then there has to be a reconciliation possible to identify if the computer system was wrong. Bugs happen too. How do they ever have confidence in the system and fix bugs if they can't determine if a given flag is a false or true positive? But instead the system's output was taken as gospel with no possibility of verification. I'm of the belief that if you can't verify anything the system outputs, particularly for something in a discipline so used to verification as a concept, then that signal is worthless. The fact that convictions happened as a result of this is a crime. This is the UK and not the US so sadly that compensation will probably be limited to nonexistent. As an aside, this is exactly why electronic voting should be outlawed. You need paper ballots (that can be counted electronically) as a verification measure. And the fact that we even have to debate that makes me sad.
- throwaway823882 5y ago
  > electronic voting should be outlawed Nationally regulated, sure. Verified with a physical copy (or a different system), sure. But banned altogether? You might as well ban everything in the world that is digital, as none of them are fool-proof. Voting isn't even that important. The wrong guy gets picked, what happens? Same bullshit as if the right guy got picked. If your choices are "Hitler" or "Jesus", then your system is just fucked up, and making voting fool-proof isn't the way to fix it. In addition, electronic voting would be a boon to democracy. It would provide another avenue for maligned minorities in remote areas be able to vote, when things like paper ballot voting in the middle of a pandemic might fail or be error-prone (esp. when a fascist fucks with the postal system), or local authorities enforce racist requirements like a physical ID card.
LatteLazy 5y ago
The Real travesty here is that people can't afford to pay for their lawyers (let alone a software expert or QA to actually look at the code or test it) , they aren't entitled to representation, so they have no option but to plead guilty.
redis_mlc 5y ago
This is a similar story. When ATMs were introduced in Canada in the 70s/80s, it was common to believe they were infallible. When customers claimed they were short-changed by machines, often they were prosecuted for fraud or attempted theft. I'm sure HNers can think of dozens of ways a machine could be wrong ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_teller_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_teller_machine Also, regarding the Postmaster article, note that somebody working on that project would likely face great difficulty in convincing anybody there was a systems problem.
handelaar 5y ago
Of course it's Fujitsu, purveyor of nearly every nonfunctional hit-and-run government IT contract in the UK and Ireland. As far as I can gather this malignancy escapes permanent legal destruction primarily by shedding all of its staff every 20 minutes
hourislate 5y ago
What is the restitution in these cases? Will the victims be compensated for their losses and will the UK Gov and Fujitsu be held responsible?
martingoodson 5y ago
I'm sure it's a coincidence that Fujitsu was also heavily involved in the NHS IT fiasco which cost the NHS £10B. 'the biggest IT failure ever seen'. The Fujitsu UK chairman is also a large Conservative party donor of course - also a complete coincidence. https://www.vice.com/en/article/59x7wz/fujitsu-uk-sues-department-health-simon-blagden-tory-donor https://www.vice.com/en/article/59x7wz/fujitsu-uk-sues-depar...
PopGreene 5y ago
“It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.” – Thomas Sowell
milonshil 5y ago
https://ustreama.com/2021/04/23/ufc-261-live-stream-how-to-watch-usman-vs-masvidal-2-ppv/ https://ustreama.com/2021/04/23/ufc-261-live-stream-how-to-w...
segmondy 5y ago
I'm saving this article to show developers that your software can ruin lives. It doesn't have to be used in aerospace or health care to matter.
bennysomething 5y ago
BBC radio 4 did a thing about this, even when the post office knew they kept going throwing people in prison. It's so depressing. What's also depressing is that people trusted this software. How did the defence teams never question it properly the first time. I mean if it's a ledger, prove it works.
- vmception 5y ago
  > How did the defence teams never question it properly the first time. I mean if it's a ledger, prove it works. Post office employee can’t afford a lawyer that would do any extra work Earn enough so you can afford your rights... and appeals court where that actually matters :)
bennysomething 5y ago
I hope the people who served time get millions. I hope the people who covered it up go to prison.
fitblipper 5y ago
Crappy software sends people to prison. Crappy software keeps people in prison (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210222/12462746295/arizonas-24-million-prison-management-software-is-keeping-people-locked-up-past-end-their-sentences.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210222/12462746295/arizo...)
dang 5y ago
Related articles that submitters and commenters have pointed out: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56859357 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56859357 (also from today) https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252496560/Fujitsu-bosses-knew-about-Post-Office-Horizon-IT-flaws-says-insider https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252496560/Fujitsu-bosses... https://www.private-eye.co.uk/pictures/special_reports/justice-lost-in-the-post.pdf https://www.private-eye.co.uk/pictures/special_reports/justi... [pdf] https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/m000jf7j https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/m000jf7j [podcast series] Edit: posted later but might as well add it here: Convicted Post Office workers have names cleared - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26924882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26924882 - April 2021 (152 comments and counting) Some past related threads - pretty sure there have been others: UK Post Office: Error-laden software ruined staff lives - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26905528 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26905528 - April 2021 (3 comments) UK legal system assumes that computers don't have bugs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25518936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25518936 - Dec 2020 (24 comments) Post Office scandal: Postmasters celebrate victory against convictions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24661321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24661321 - Oct 2020 (2 comments) Faults in Post Office accounting system led to workers being convicted of theft - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21795219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21795219 - Dec 2019 (103 comments) Post Office hires accountants to review sub-postmasters' computer claims - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4143107 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4143107 - June 2012 (1 comment)
quickthrower2 5y ago
A reminder to people who think they are safe from their government because they’ve “done nothing wrong” or “have nothing to hide”
mcguire 5y ago
Anyone expect that Post Office Ltd. and Fujitsu will face any significant repercussions? Yeah, me neither.
SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
Another article on the same https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/23/22399721/uk-post-office-software-bug-criminal-convictions-overturned https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/23/22399721/uk-post-office-s... As a software person, I would like to read a more detailed post-mortem on the issue from a code, engineering and project management point of view: e.g. who built this software, when, with what process, with what safeguards, and how did they fail? Was it in-house or outsourced, and if so, to who? Did it run on-premises? What checksums, what backups? What lessons, if any, did they learn and what can we learn?
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
  In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think that a forensic post-mortem with lessons learned and changes made should not be optional: After an air disaster, it would be mandatory .And this really was a software equivalent of a plane crash.

314 points by ashergill 5y ago

Such a terrible story. I'm surprised it hasn't been more prominent within the tech community. Many dozens of lives were ruined.

spacemanmatt 5y ago
I just came from another thread (here) where the subject was Google arbitrarily ruining businesses and lives based on algorithmic fraud detection gone wrong. I'd estimate the issue is alive with U.S. techies at the very least.
_joel 5y ago
Unfortunately people died during this time too and did so with this hanging over their head. An absolute scandal, but there's no inquiry into the directors involved. Not yet, at least.

raesene9 5y ago

An (IMO) Interesting question is how to reduce the risks of things like this happening. Where evidence from IT systems is being used as a large part of a prosecution, it seems that it should have some kind of scrutiny as to how those systems operate. One option would be allowing the defence to see details of how the system works, testing that was done and known bugs, but that would require a lot of expensive work by legal defence teams, especially where the system is complex. Another option would be some kind of certification of IT system operation, but again it would be hard/expensive to do and very incompatible with rapid development techniques.

BillinghamJ 5y ago
I'm very sure this system was certified in a multitude of ways. No certification process would prevent this. The real issue here was that Post Office refused to recognise that, although computers themselves are mostly infallible, computer programs are never infallible. They conducted their activities and took actions based on assuming the reporting was flawless. Then the really serious problem is that in cases where the fallibility became more visible, they consistently and systematically covered it up and pressed forward with their incredibly aggressive enforcement work anyway, knowing how much damage it was doing. This is unquestionably an issue of abuse of power and position.
- citrin_ru 5y ago
  > although computers themselves are mostly infallible What do you mean? Hardware is fallible too, just less often than software. This may cause problem on its own e. g. bit flips in non-ECC memory, HDD which lie (reply to flush cache before data is actually written) or HW can trigger software errors, e. g. HW can crash at random moment and SW can be not designed to handle this properly.
  - BillinghamJ 5y ago
    That is why I said "mostly", at least in comparison to programs or humans. Obviously yes there are very occasional problems as you've described.
mikehollinger 5y ago
> An (IMO) Interesting question is how to reduce the risks of things like this happening. I look forward to finding out if this was a “fraud system gone wrong” or a more basic ledger system failing to do sums correctly. Partially addressing your question though, if you were to insert the words “AI” and “bias” into the sentence we as an industry are starting to figure this out. The certification and testing processes you mentioned are there in cases where a team’s mature enough to have both a data and model lifecycle worked out. You see words like MLOps trying to describe how to do that effectively in production. For example, my work has both a design approach (in both the product design touchy/feely sense and software architecture sense) that includes questions and practices that will help to reason through data needed to address a problem, what can go wrong with that, and how things look when it goes wrong. The last bit is the most interesting one to me. In terms of practical engineering, inference results generally should have some sense of lineage - of data, model, and training services which explain how you got to a given answer, including what inputs were considered or ignored. An interesting side topic with this is that poor implementations can result in inexcusable differences that affect downstream systems. For example, if a particular model has predicted something like “this transaction is suspected to be fraud” it better be consistent from run to run, and the input data better be consistent over time. If either of those changed - explaining that to the consumers of the data is essential to them understanding that either the model changed, the data changed, or both.
spideymans 5y ago
>An (IMO) Interesting question is how to reduce the risks of things like this happening. Corroborating evidence. In this case, where was the evidence that this money was ever in their possession? Was it ever sitting in their bank account? Was it buried in the back yard? Did they buy fancy sports cars or houses? The prospect of thousands of people stealing money without a trace of the cash is fantastical. In general, I'd say electronic evidence should need to be corroborated with physical or other types of evidence to achieve a conviction. It's too easy for electronic records to be falsified, either through software bugs or outright malicious intent.

simonswords82 5y ago

Outrageous that so many people's lives were blown up by this. Relieved to hear the court ordered in their favour. I wonder if the post masters can now go after the Post Office for damages?

mnw21cam 5y ago
The phrase "Affront to justice" is key here. To be honest, I am completely shocked that this wasn't sorted out several years ago when it was all over the papers and it was completely obvious what had happened. But that key phrase allows the wholesale claiming of damages.
- Silhouette 5y ago
  It's also noteworthy that these injustices originated from private prosecutions brought by the Post Office. That is a relatively unusual legal action in this country, where almost all criminal prosecutions are brought by the state. Given the damage that a wrongful criminal prosecution can cause, including imprisonment and having a criminal record, the compensation awarded could be considerable and there is already talk of the Post Office needing extra government funding to cover the cost. Another small point of interest that doesn't seem to be making the mainstream reporting yet is that under our legal system the state prosecutor (the Crown Prosecution Service) has the power to take over and, if appropriate, shut down any private prosecution. When the inevitable inquiries publish their conclusions, the fact that so many bad prosecutions were successfully brought over such a long period might reflect poorly not only on the Post Office and on the courts and lawyers involved in the convictions but also on the CPS for not intervening. This could become politically significant, because the current Leader of the Opposition was in charge of the CPS around 2009-2013, the last five years when most such prosecutions were being brought. That could leave him in an awkward position if he's attacked over his record during the next general election campaign, given that his party is exactly the one that's supposed to stand up for working class "little guys" like the victims in these cases.

Vuska 5y ago

The company I work for ships hundreds of packages through RM. The RM tech I've seen is a mess. Makes me wonder what it's like behind the scenes. Just one lowlight I've come across, this comment can be found in the HTML for one of their portals:

emdowling 5y ago
One nitpick: Royal Mail and Post Office are two separate companies with independent boards. Royal Mail is the network and carrier, while the Post Office is the primary entry point into that network (they also offer access to a bunch of other services not related to the Royal Mail). Doesn't make your point any less valid, but wanted to call out the distinction.
- BillinghamJ 5y ago
  As a sub-nitpick, I would definitely say Royal Mail itself is certainly the primary entry point into the network too. But Post Office is super helpful in providing supporting services for many government-related things like passport photos, certification, applying for things etc
- lloydatkinson 5y ago
  Sounds like the kind of bullshit BT and OpenReach pull too. Claim to be two unrelated companies and yet one owns parts of the other and the same boards run both - all so they can pass customer problems between the two I definitely.
  - DanBC 5y ago
    They have different boards. https://www.openreach.com/about-us/our-leadership-and-governance/our-board https://www.openreach.com/about-us/our-leadership-and-govern... https://www.bt.com/about/bt/our-company/group-governance/board-of-directors https://www.bt.com/about/bt/our-company/group-governance/boa... Openreach Mike McTighe Chairman Clive Selley CEO Matt Davies Chief Finance Officer Edward Astle Non-executive Board member Liz Benison Non-executive Board member Andrew Barron Non-executive Board member Jon Furmston Secretary to the board Simon Lowth BT Group nominee BT Jan du Plessis Chairman Philip Jansen Chief Executive Simon Lowth Group Chief Financial Officer Adel Al-Saleh Non-independent, non-executive director Sir Ian Cheshire Independent non-executive director Iain Conn Senior independent director and independent non-executive director Isabel Hudson Independent non-executive director Mike Inglis Independent non-executive director Matthew Key Independent non-executive director Allison Kirkby Independent non-executive director Leena Nair Independent non-executive director Sara Weller Independent non-executive director Rachel Canham Company Secretary & General Counsel, Governance

switch007 5y ago

For background and more information, Private Eye Special Report: "JUSTICE LOST IN THE POST: How the Post Office wrecked the lives of its own workers" (PDF) https://www.private-eye.co.uk/pictures/special_reports/justice-lost-in-the-post.pdf https://www.private-eye.co.uk/pictures/special_reports/justi...

DanBC 5y ago

There's a short but good podcast about the trial and how it affected people here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/m000jf7j https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/m000jf7j

notimetorelax 5y ago

A lesson to test your code and take action based on costumer feedback. I’m curious to learn what was Fujitsu’s position during those investigations.

noir_lord 5y ago
Not sure I'd take action based on what someone who makes fancy dress/theatrical clothes suggests tbh.
- jedimastert 5y ago
  What is this in reference to? Edit: I get it.
  - noir_lord 5y ago
    > costumer I think he/she meant customer, I found the idea of someone who makes fancy dress giving technical feedback amusing.
  - frameset 5y ago
    The typo of "Costumer" where they probably meant "Customer".
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

kristjankalm 5y ago

This is unreal. Shitty software sending people to prison without anyone in the process considering what exactly is the likelihood of hundreds of postmasters simultaneously becoming thieves overnight.

himinlomax 5y ago
This reminds me of what happened after 9/11, the fear of dirty bomb was all the rage so the US government deployed a network of Geiger counters. They arrested a number of dangerous dirty bombers, all of whom were cancer patients spotted by the detector at the subway station nearest Johns Hopkins radiation treatment facility. It took weeks to fix the problem.
- LorenPechtel 5y ago
  At least when my wife hit that in the Shanghai/Pudong airport (residue from a heart scan, not cancer) they resolved it in a few minutes of talking. On the other hand, I think Shanghai didn't check well enough--there was one simple test they could have done but didn't: Hand held geiger counter, see what's hot. Body equally hot, baggage not hot, it's medical. Why couldn't the US cops do the same thing?
  - himinlomax 5y ago
    They implemented the system without even thinking of the false positives. Eventually they added that to the procedures, but they harassed quite a few people before that happened. Cancer patients on top of that, many of whom were probably half dead already.
    - LorenPechtel 5y ago
      It seems to me that's an awful lot of stupid on their part. Patient claims medical--call the facility and ask if they should be hot. However, having read about their stupidity I would be inclined to get a card from the facility even if I didn't expect to be going anywhere with radiation scanners. (My wife had a card--which was sitting at home in the pocket of the jacket she had planned to wear. She changed her mind on flight day and didn't think about the card until she tripped the scanner. Note that she probably had an easier time of it than a typical tourist would have as she speaks Mandarin at native level.)

mavhc 5y ago

They made a computer that can't add

reedf1 5y ago

Anyone have more technical detail on the software or the bugs therein?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

robalfonso 5y ago

Did no one ever ask where was the money? These people all had these huge short falls, why did no one go to find the cash? That's financial crimes 101

DanBC 5y ago
Post Office told the post masters that they were short, so many post masters made up the shortfall from their own pocket, expecting the books to eventually balance and to get repaid. When people were unable to continue making up that shortfall this was seen as further evidence of their criminality: "they've spent the money", "they've hidden the money", and not "they never had the money".
- robalfonso 5y ago
  It’s insane they stopped pulling the thread and the defence didn’t push that, even if you spent it there would be evidence. I would have been highly skeptical that all of it just disappeared Into thin air across the entire group....nuts

gertrunde 5y ago

Also - more technical background: https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252496560/Fujitsu-bosses-knew-about-Post-Office-Horizon-IT-flaws-says-insider https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252496560/Fujitsu-bosses...

lovetocode 5y ago

This is insanity. We need legislators, lawyers and judges who are tech competent.

PaulKeeble 5y ago

Software is in the walls. At some point legislators are going to come and ask the question how we stop things like this happening and if the Fujitsu's of the world don't have an answer then we can expect regulation that will likely embed practices that don't help. I don't think we take software reliability seriously enough, most of our focus is on speed of release, ever quicker cycles and it being OK to break things. This culture ruined these peoples lives. Things must change. This isn't a unique issue to Fujitsu it is something most of the software industry is doing, this story could be about just about any piece of software.

jedimastert 5y ago
> I don't think we take software reliability seriously enough, most of our focus is on speed of release, ever quicker cycles and it being OK to break things. The phrase "move fast and break things" should be seen as cautionary, not aspirational.
mnw21cam 5y ago
I still think https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/ has to be taken seriously. You can put a whole load of verification effort into your software, which will undoubtedly make it more reliable. But you are still likely to have some kind of corner case where it breaks down. Software is complex enough for this to be universally true. The key is how we respond when the software fails. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 case shows an example of what not to do - when hospitals started reporting their machines giving lethal radiation doses to people, the manufacturer doubled down on the computers-are-infallible rhetoric, where they should have put every last effort into investigating. Likewise, the post office should have noticed that a rather excessive number of postmasters were apparently fiddling the books, and investigated. Instead, after it was fairly obvious that the computer was wrong, they pushed the computers-are-infallible line right through the courts, and that is what earned them the "affront to justice" judgment.
- Silhouette 5y ago
  The key is how we respond when the software fails. I agree, but if the first step to solving a problem is understanding that it exists then the first principle here must be to acknowledge that software systems are fallible and therefore any surprising or reasonably contested result they produce should be treated with proper caution until further information can be gathered. So many of the problems we see when modern technology goes wrong start with assuming it didn't. At that point, it's not even about how you respond to the failure, because you're denying that the failure ever happened. Big software companies with considerable lobbying power seem to be particularly good at convincing people who aren't technical experts, including most politicians, judges, juries and reporters, that this is the case. A corollary to this is that we desperately need more technological awareness among our politicians, lawyers, journalists and other relevant professions. Tech has become too big to be a minor issue you delegate to some random advisor in a basement office. It affects almost everything we do today, sometimes profoundly, and failing to understand that will inevitably lead to some horrible outcomes as we've seen all too vividly today.

unpopularopp 5y ago

>So far, nobody at the Post Office or Fujitsu has been held accountable And this is the most important part.

WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
See, now I'm looking at US & UK Gov corruption and can't tell who is mimicking who.

cmsefton 5y ago

Private Eye magazine (a satirical investigative news magazine) has covered this for many years, and have an excellent report for anyone interested: https://www.private-eye.co.uk/pictures/special_reports/justice-lost-in-the-post.pdf https://www.private-eye.co.uk/pictures/special_reports/justi... [PDF] Glad to see them finally have their names cleared, and can only hope prosecutions will follow as a result, utterly shameful how the Post Office, Fujitsu and others behaved. For example: > A Fujitsu programmer from the time, Richard Roll, who would become a key witness in the sub-postmasters’ high court case against the Post Office in 2019, told the Eye that Horizon was one the company’s few profitable contracts. Among other private sector deals, it was also lining up a key role in the mother of all government IT splurges, New Labour’s £12bn NHS IT project (Eyes passim ad nauseam). Fujitsu could ill-afford either bad publicity or the penalties that came with software faults. “We would have been fined,” said Roll, who worked at the company between 2001 and 2004. “So the incentive was to pretend it [software error] didn’t happen”, while running “a constant rolling programme of patches to fix the bugs”. Fujitsu “would basically tell the Post Office what they wanted to hear”. So prolific did Roll’s bug-fixing team become it won the company’s President’s Award for outstanding corporate contribution in 2002. And the quick-fix, ask-no-questions approach that suited Fujitsu financially enabled the Post Office to hold the line that blame for all branch shortfalls must lie with the sub-postmaster.The Fujitsu insider concluded that errors leaving sub-postmasters out of pocket were inevitable. Could that mean hundreds of them? “Given there were [about] 20,000 post offices when I was at Fujitsu and the sort of problems we were dealing with all the time, yeah,” he told the Eye. “Sounds reasonable.”

justincormack 5y ago
The judgement is a good (long) read https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/bates-v-post-office-judgment.pdf https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/bates-v-...

temporama1 5y ago

As: a postmaster When: I use this software Then: I should not be falsely imprisoned for 3 years.

temporama1 5y ago
Tough crowd

haunter 5y ago

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252496560/Fujitsu-bosses-knew-about-Post-Office-Horizon-IT-flaws-says-insider https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252496560/Fujitsu-bosses... >For the first 10 years of Horizon’s existence, transaction and account data was stored on terminals in each branch before being uploaded to a central database via ISDN. Our source says this part of the system simply did not work. >“The cash account was a piece of software that sat on the counter NT box, asleep all day,” he said. “At the end of the day, or a particular point in the day, it came to life, and it ran through the message store from the point it last finished. It started at a watermark from yesterday and combed through every transaction in the message store, up until the next watermark. >“A lot of the messages in there were nonsense, because there was no data dictionary, there was no API that enforced message integrity. The contents of the message were freehand, you could write whatever you wanted in the code, and everybody did it differently. And then, when you came back three weeks later, you could write it differently again.” And down further >Speaking to Computer Weekly in 2015, the anonymous source told us: “The asynchronous system did not communicate in real time, but does so using a series of messages that are stored and forwarded, when the network connection is available. This means that messages to and from the centre may trip over each other. It is perfectly possible that, if not treated properly, messages from the centre may overwrite data held locally.” >Four years later, former Fujitsu engineer Richard Roll wrote in a witness statement to the High Court: “The issues with coding in the Horizon system were extensive. Furthermore, the coding issues impacted on transaction data and caused financial discrepancies on the Horizon system at branch level.” BUT the most important part >So far, nobody at the Post Office or Fujitsu has been held accountable

WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
The crappy state of rural UK broadband (circa 2010) is proudly on display here. ref: https://www.ingenia.org.uk/Ingenia/Articles/c05470e5-337f-4b4b-896e-71d7e1aeab5b https://www.ingenia.org.uk/Ingenia/Articles/c05470e5-337f-4b... Maybe the FCC went all NYPD-World-Police on the UK - popped over there to run things for a while.
- Mauricebranagh 5y ago

haunter 5y ago

coldcode 5y ago
Is there no legal support for challenging the source code of the product in the UK?
- moomin 5y ago
  There’s barely any legal support at all these days. That’s what all that “tough on crime” and “stop waste” nonsense in newspapers gets you: large chunks of the criminal justice system barely work anymore.

tyingq 5y ago

The link out to another story[1] has some interesting details... "In December 2019, at the end of a long-running series of civil cases, the Post Office agreed to settle with 555 claimants." So settlements in 555 of the original 700+ prosecutions. "It accepted it had previously "got things wrong in [its] dealings with a number of postmasters", and agreed to pay £58m in damages. The claimants received a share of £12m, after legal fees were paid." But 80% of the settlement money went to lawyers. Ugh. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56718036 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56718036

FpUser 5y ago
Since the government was in a wrong I do not understand at all why they are not ordered to compensate all legal expenses as well.
- WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
  Government gets to write the laws. That is, when lobbyists let them.
  - FpUser 5y ago
    My understanding is that the court still has the power (at least in theory) to order legal expense compensation.
lupire 5y ago
The percentage isn't the problem. The problem is of the settlement amount doesn't include damages and also legal fees, both of which should be the responsibility of the perpetrators.
- tyingq 5y ago
  "The percentage isn't the problem" I disagree. Even the ambulance chasers here in the U.S. take around 40% as their contingency fee. 80% is just...wow. Edit: "ambulance chasers" in this context means very opportunistic lawyers that are primarily motivated by money, and not helping their clients. I don't see how that term is disparaging any victims/clients. The comparison is that even outright greedy lawyers aren't taking half+ of the settlement. In this case, using £250/hr, the lawyers spent 88 lawyer years worth of time (184k hours).

lupire 5y ago

> the convictions of 39 former postmasters ... the UK's most widespread miscarriage of justice. There's no way this is true. > There were more than 700 prosecutions based on Horizon evidence. The commission and the Post Office are asking anyone else who believes their conviction to be unsafe to come forward. On second thought, I guess it may be, since even after the abuse was proven they are still holding innocent people on false charges.

FpUser 5y ago
>"since even after the abuse was proven they are still holding innocent people on false charges." Well, same government first destroyed immigration papers and then deported and otherwise ruined the lives of their own citizens ( Windrush scandal ). I'd love to see the perpetrators in jail but fat chance.

DanBC 5y ago

https://www.judiciary.uk/judgments/hamilton-others-v-post-office-limited/ https://www.judiciary.uk/judgments/hamilton-others-v-post-of... The judgment is blistering.

robertlagrant 5y ago
The previous judgements sent lots of people to jail, so let's not congratulate the criminal justice system very much.

lupire 5y ago

The idea that 700 people in the same job were all committing the same crime and constantly getting caught is insane. This is a perfect example of Orwell's description of fascist Britain, where the people are made slaves of the state.

simonh 5y ago
Over several years and 20,000 post office branches it's not a huge percentage. I suppose they assumed the new system was revealing corruption that had gone unnoticed under the previous system. That's in no way an excuse or justification for the knowing, deliberate suppression of evidence that went on here.
- lupire 5y ago
  What job has 3.5% rate of criminal prosecutions, with 0 eyewitness evidence?
  - simonh 5y ago
    It wasn’t all in one year.

drcongo 5y ago

It's well worth listening to the radio show linked at the bottom of the article to understand just how heartbreaking this story is.

noja 5y ago

> software engineer Richard Roll Risky click.

gm3dmo 5y ago
Never gonna give you up.

cabernal 5y ago

This and the John Deere bug posted earlier make me a bit concerned over the accumulating evidence of unreliable software ruining people's lives... What can be done? Mandatory audits, pen testing? If this is an organizational problem, more vacation? limiting overtime? rethinking employee incentives?

icegreentea2 5y ago
It's not about positive incentives, it's about the lack of negative incentives. More true negative incentives need to be shifted onto the production side, back onto the corporations, its officers, its middle management, and if required down to the individual contributor. Corporate structure helps diffuse and deflect responsibility. Each group (executive leadership, middle management, and ICs) gets to diffuse and deflect responsibility and liability onto each other. We already have all the positive incentives in the world - cash money. It's not enough.
viraptor 5y ago
> What can be done? Not taking software results as a fact. Software report stating X in court should be equivalent to "the person who wrote this in a hurry would say X, but it's not a sworn testimony". We should have the person presenting any report like that be personally responsible for the contents. If they aren't willing, it shouldn't be presented.
- Silhouette 5y ago
  We should have the person presenting any report like that be personally responsible for the contents. If they aren't willing, it shouldn't be presented. I don't think making it personal works at scale. You can't reasonably expect everyone giving evidence in court, say every individual police officer who is a witness to a speeding offence, to be a technical expert on the technological tools they are given to do their job. Instead, as you implied in the previous paragraph, the weight given to any evidence derived from technology should be proportionate to the credibility of that technology. If it's a device that has to be vetted and approved according to strict regulatory standards and in court there are two other concurring sources of evidence, that's clearly a much stronger case than a single reading from a single device whose calibration has reasonably been called into question at trial that is being presented as the only evidence in that trial.

lambda_dn 5y ago

What's more likely, hundreds of Postmasters where thieves or the system had a few bugs. How did this even happen?

_0o6v 5y ago

A shocking injustice. Innocent people went to prison for years. There was clearly a cover up at Fujitsu and the Post Office, and those accountable should now be prosecuted.

WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
I'd wager a stuck pig that Fujitsu was a major campaign contributor. If they still are, convictions are a lot less likely.

gpvos 5y ago

> In the latest chapter of one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in English legal history, 39 people who were prosecuted Meanwhile in the Netherlands, ~26000 people have been branded as fraudsters by the tax office due to a way too strict child benefits law. More than 100 probably entirely innocent people fled the country. Even the compensation that is now promised is only slowly trickling towards them, and likely to be snatched up by debt collectors - including even the tax office itself, which is still partly unrepentant. Okay, they haven't been sent to jail directly, but the scale of this is huge.

toomanybeersies 5y ago
We had a similar thing happen with unemployment benefits in Australia [1], which arguably led to several suicides. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme

blfr 5y ago

Was there actual wrongdoing that the buggy system allowed and made difficult/impossible to trace or was it bugs all the way down?

vanilla-almond 5y ago

Repeating this comment that I posted yesterday...it is unfair? Will any developers involved in this horrible scandal ever will be held accountable for their work? I wonder if the developers who were responsible for such a bug-infested piece of software realise their work has destroyed people's lives? (They presumably never met the users of their software or were so distant from end-users that they never considered the consequences of their actions.) Do those developers even realise it was their incompetence that caused untold misery? Or are they completely detached from the events in this scandal and see themselves as simply cogs in the 'system' and thus blameless? Blame must be apportioned to management. But also I feel it's too easy as a developer to see yourself as part of a team and thus absolved of any individual blame. You're subsumed in the "team" - and ultimately no-one takes responsibly. Even with management at fault, one cannot deny that it was the developers who produced absolute garbage. I hope the developers who worked on this system, no matter how much they feel they are not responsible for the failure of this project, will reflect on how the impact of software they built had devastating consequences on people's lives.

gandalfian 5y ago

Unfair but as a spectator so frustratingly lacking any proper answers. It seems nobody could ever even work out if any money was missing or not. Let alone why. No closure. Just official judgement that no one knows...

meowster 5y ago

duplicate -ish 175 and 53 comments also posted 3 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26913183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26913183

gadiyar 5y ago

Nick Wallis has been documenting the entire thing here for a long time: https://www.postofficetrial.com https://www.postofficetrial.com Today's update isn't there yet but should be shortly.

davidhyde 5y ago

Those postmasters defending charges of theft against them in the 2000s should not have had to prove that the computer system they were forced to use had bugs. In order to prosecute them in the first place, the Post Office should have had to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt and without risk of bias, that the computer system was correct. So, independent review at the very least, not testimony from parties with a vested interest in the outcome. This mess was as much a failure of the UK legal system as it was of the active efforts of the Post Office and Fujitsu to deceitfully protect their own interests above the postmasters affected. It's like a murderer giving evidence against a random stranger and being believed at face value because they provided all the evidence first hand.

robk 5y ago
Computer said so and they blindly followed. Offshoring victims :(
- dd82 5y ago
  same with facial recognition. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/technology/facial-recognition-arrest.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/technology/facial-recogni...
  - lupire 5y ago
    An arrest based on (mechanical) eye witness evidence is not the same thing as a conviction, at all. The security photo is directly viewable by the police and the accused.
lbriner 5y ago
Unfortunately, that sounds straight-forward but isn't: Q) Did you or any of the people you got to examine the software found any way that what the defendents said was true? A) No Q) Then you are guilty beyond reasonable doubt. I think the bigger issue here is around the power that a large organisation wields to duck and dive and use corporate tricks to manipulate how it played out. For example, the fact that so many people had been accused could have been analyzed if it was known e.g. Last year 5 convictions, this year, 700!

robertlagrant 5y ago

An undermentioned problem: how could something this bad have held up in court?

whyleyc 5y ago

There's a great 10 episode Podcast on this debacle on BBC Sounds: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/m000jf7j https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/m000jf7j It's really well paced and includes contributions from many of the sub-postmasters affected by this scandal.

gerjomarty 5y ago
I hadn't heard about the story until the BBC started re-running this series this week. Absolutely shocking that flaws in the system were dismissed and suspicion thrown on the sub-postmasters instead.

mariuolo 5y ago

> The Post Office settled the civil claim brought by 555 claimants for £57.75m – amounting to £12m after legal costs – without admitting liability That's some £20'000 each. A pittance for years of suffering and inability to work.

switch007 5y ago

Typical BBC, not mentioning the man who committed suicide.

londons_explore 5y ago

Presumably to put someone in prison for being a money thief, one would need to prove where that money went... Were all these people accused of theft with not a single record of the yachts they bought with all the money they supposedly stole? I would assume most of these people would be able to turn over a complete financial record of their lives (ie. I was paid £x, I paid taxes of £y, and here is a bank statement showing how I spent it, and here is whats leftover). How exactly can you imprison someone for theft of money if they can present that?

zinok 5y ago
Post Offices handle a large amount of cash, much more than any other business of their size. Many of the sub-post offices in question would be paying out pensions and welfare benefits in cash to a large proportion of local customers. If someone was stealing from the post office, they could easily do so in cash.
- lupire 5y ago
  It's hard to spend $70K in cash, though.
  - zinok 5y ago
    Perhaps it is, but if there had been credible evidence of a theft 'I would not have been able to spend all that money in cash' is not the basis of a solid defense. There have been genuine cases where accountants, bank managers, and so on have embezzled large sums of money, including in cash, and spent it all untraceably on things like feeding a gambling addiction.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  So 500 peiple stole millions and the prosecution cannot show where a single penny went, noone even got a new car or TV? Did they eat the money? And all the evodence the prosecution has are electronic records, entirely in their control, which they could fake and which were never checked by a third party for basic errors? This is a colossal miscarriage of justice

cletus 5y ago

The first bizarre part to me about this fiasco is that accounting, as a discipline, is one that is designed to catch errors. Put it another way: it assumes errors will occur. This is why in shops, for example, you'll have manual stocktaking (ie let's verify what's in the store is what the computer thinks is in the store) and in any business you'll have reconciliation processes to find and remedy errors. This highlights a key part of systems design. A key question you should be asking is: what happens when this fails? Note that's "when" not "if". So something like Horizon should be used to flag cases for reviews. If a branch is found ot have a cash shortfall suggesting possible theft then there has to be a reconciliation possible to identify if the computer system was wrong. Bugs happen too. How do they ever have confidence in the system and fix bugs if they can't determine if a given flag is a false or true positive? But instead the system's output was taken as gospel with no possibility of verification. I'm of the belief that if you can't verify anything the system outputs, particularly for something in a discipline so used to verification as a concept, then that signal is worthless. The fact that convictions happened as a result of this is a crime. This is the UK and not the US so sadly that compensation will probably be limited to nonexistent. As an aside, this is exactly why electronic voting should be outlawed. You need paper ballots (that can be counted electronically) as a verification measure. And the fact that we even have to debate that makes me sad.

throwaway823882 5y ago
> electronic voting should be outlawed Nationally regulated, sure. Verified with a physical copy (or a different system), sure. But banned altogether? You might as well ban everything in the world that is digital, as none of them are fool-proof. Voting isn't even that important. The wrong guy gets picked, what happens? Same bullshit as if the right guy got picked. If your choices are "Hitler" or "Jesus", then your system is just fucked up, and making voting fool-proof isn't the way to fix it. In addition, electronic voting would be a boon to democracy. It would provide another avenue for maligned minorities in remote areas be able to vote, when things like paper ballot voting in the middle of a pandemic might fail or be error-prone (esp. when a fascist fucks with the postal system), or local authorities enforce racist requirements like a physical ID card.

LatteLazy 5y ago

The Real travesty here is that people can't afford to pay for their lawyers (let alone a software expert or QA to actually look at the code or test it) , they aren't entitled to representation, so they have no option but to plead guilty.

redis_mlc 5y ago

This is a similar story. When ATMs were introduced in Canada in the 70s/80s, it was common to believe they were infallible. When customers claimed they were short-changed by machines, often they were prosecuted for fraud or attempted theft. I'm sure HNers can think of dozens of ways a machine could be wrong ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_teller_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_teller_machine Also, regarding the Postmaster article, note that somebody working on that project would likely face great difficulty in convincing anybody there was a systems problem.

handelaar 5y ago

Of course it's Fujitsu, purveyor of nearly every nonfunctional hit-and-run government IT contract in the UK and Ireland. As far as I can gather this malignancy escapes permanent legal destruction primarily by shedding all of its staff every 20 minutes

hourislate 5y ago

What is the restitution in these cases? Will the victims be compensated for their losses and will the UK Gov and Fujitsu be held responsible?

martingoodson 5y ago

I'm sure it's a coincidence that Fujitsu was also heavily involved in the NHS IT fiasco which cost the NHS £10B. 'the biggest IT failure ever seen'. The Fujitsu UK chairman is also a large Conservative party donor of course - also a complete coincidence. https://www.vice.com/en/article/59x7wz/fujitsu-uk-sues-department-health-simon-blagden-tory-donor https://www.vice.com/en/article/59x7wz/fujitsu-uk-sues-depar...

PopGreene 5y ago

“It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.” – Thomas Sowell

milonshil 5y ago

https://ustreama.com/2021/04/23/ufc-261-live-stream-how-to-watch-usman-vs-masvidal-2-ppv/ https://ustreama.com/2021/04/23/ufc-261-live-stream-how-to-w...

segmondy 5y ago

I'm saving this article to show developers that your software can ruin lives. It doesn't have to be used in aerospace or health care to matter.

bennysomething 5y ago

BBC radio 4 did a thing about this, even when the post office knew they kept going throwing people in prison. It's so depressing. What's also depressing is that people trusted this software. How did the defence teams never question it properly the first time. I mean if it's a ledger, prove it works.

vmception 5y ago
> How did the defence teams never question it properly the first time. I mean if it's a ledger, prove it works. Post office employee can’t afford a lawyer that would do any extra work Earn enough so you can afford your rights... and appeals court where that actually matters :)

bennysomething 5y ago

I hope the people who served time get millions. I hope the people who covered it up go to prison.

fitblipper 5y ago

Crappy software sends people to prison. Crappy software keeps people in prison (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210222/12462746295/arizonas-24-million-prison-management-software-is-keeping-people-locked-up-past-end-their-sentences.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210222/12462746295/arizo...)

dang 5y ago

Related articles that submitters and commenters have pointed out: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56859357 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56859357 (also from today) https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252496560/Fujitsu-bosses-knew-about-Post-Office-Horizon-IT-flaws-says-insider https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252496560/Fujitsu-bosses... https://www.private-eye.co.uk/pictures/special_reports/justice-lost-in-the-post.pdf https://www.private-eye.co.uk/pictures/special_reports/justi... [pdf] https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/m000jf7j https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/m000jf7j [podcast series] Edit: posted later but might as well add it here: Convicted Post Office workers have names cleared - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26924882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26924882 - April 2021 (152 comments and counting) Some past related threads - pretty sure there have been others: UK Post Office: Error-laden software ruined staff lives - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26905528 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26905528 - April 2021 (3 comments) UK legal system assumes that computers don't have bugs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25518936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25518936 - Dec 2020 (24 comments) Post Office scandal: Postmasters celebrate victory against convictions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24661321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24661321 - Oct 2020 (2 comments) Faults in Post Office accounting system led to workers being convicted of theft - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21795219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21795219 - Dec 2019 (103 comments) Post Office hires accountants to review sub-postmasters' computer claims - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4143107 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4143107 - June 2012 (1 comment)

quickthrower2 5y ago

A reminder to people who think they are safe from their government because they’ve “done nothing wrong” or “have nothing to hide”

mcguire 5y ago

Anyone expect that Post Office Ltd. and Fujitsu will face any significant repercussions? Yeah, me neither.

SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago

Another article on the same https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/23/22399721/uk-post-office-software-bug-criminal-convictions-overturned https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/23/22399721/uk-post-office-s... As a software person, I would like to read a more detailed post-mortem on the issue from a code, engineering and project management point of view: e.g. who built this software, when, with what process, with what safeguards, and how did they fail? Was it in-house or outsourced, and if so, to who? Did it run on-premises? What checksums, what backups? What lessons, if any, did they learn and what can we learn?

SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think that a forensic post-mortem with lessons learned and changes made should not be optional: After an air disaster, it would be mandatory .And this really was a software equivalent of a plane crash.