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Ex Post Office CEO hands back award after IT failures lead to false convictions

146 points by alibarber 3y ago

sorokod 3y ago
This has the unfortunate optics that Paula Vennells did the decent thing. The title should have been taken away from her ages ago.
mike_hearn 3y ago
I feel like we in the software industry should do more reflection on what happened here. Yes, many of the most evil acts were the result of social non-technical problems like terrible management, stupid legacy UK laws allowing PO prosecutions, and so on. But the root cause was bugs. So many bugs. There isn't much the average HN poster can do about the political and justice problems, which are firmly in the realm of the British government. But there are people here who work on databases and app frameworks. What can be learned from the Horizon scandal? Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be much discussion of this. Compare vs the airline industry where failures are aggressively root caused. I'll start: 1. Transaction anomalies can end lives. Should popular RDBMS engines really default to non-serializability by default (non repeatable reads, for example). 2. Offline is very hard. A lot of bugs happened due to trying to make Horizon v1 work with flaky or very slow connections, and losing transactional consistency as a result. The SOTA here has barely advanced since the 90s, instead the industry has just given up on this and now accepts that every so often there'll be massive outages that cause parts of the economy to just shut down for a few hours when the SPOF fails. Should there be more focus on how to handle flaky connectivity in mission-critical apps safely? 3. What's the right way to ensure rock-solid accountability around critical databases, given that bugs are inevitable and data corruption must sometimes be manually fixed? A lot of the Horizon problems seemed to involve Fujitsu manually logging in to post offices and "fixing" the results of bugs, in such a way that they didn't realize their fix created ledger imbalances that the SPMs would be blamed for. A part of why big enterprises got so excited about blockchains was this notion of an immutable ledger in which business records can't go magically changing around you without anyone knowing how. There are clearly ways to do this, but they're not the default. 4. IIRC at least some failures were traced back to broken touch screens generating false random touches, which could lead at night to random transactions being entered and confirmed when nobody was around. Are modern capacitative touch screens immune to this failure mode? If not, are consoles in embedded applications always reliably engaging screen locks? I guess there are bazillions more you could come up with.
- pjc50 3y ago
  You can't technical your way out of a social problem. It doesn't matter how many best practices you define if the management aren't going to follow them, and get their mates to award them a CBE for services to misconduct. > Are modern capacitative touch screens immune to this failure mode? No, this is basically impossible.
- sgt101 3y ago
  There is an organizational axis too. The technical capabilities of the GPO went off with BT in 1984. The remaining organisation was anything but a competent customer for IT implementations. Outsourcing has definite limits and potentially catastrophic results - as does the demolition of corporate technical capability. An empowered technical architecture function could have vetted this system and prevented this all. But gut it and stamp it under the heal of the CFO and you may as well not bother.
  - g_p 3y ago
    > Outsourcing has definite limits and potentially catastrophic results - as does the demolition of corporate technical capability. A lot of what seems apparent in this case is that contractual and commercial factors weren't set up correctly - they were set up to deliver predictable prices (loved by public sector clients), but not necessarily to deliver good outcomes. An example - it appeared much of the rush to ship the point of sale terminals was to get through customer acceptance (and presumably the payment milestone), despite scope creep and quality issues. And there was a cost for PO to access audit logs, and limits on capacity of these logs which could be handled. Presumably this delivered a lower headline price for an accountant negotiating the price down, but it ultimately made a poorer solution that wasn't for for purpose. It seems like (from what I've seen of the evidence) nobody internally in PO really had full understanding and ownership of the project and they'd outsourced that (but kept the suppliers tightly commercially managed, creating the incentives for shipping poor quality code, rather than spending the time to polish it, as some had tried to do in the development team). Some interesting evidence here in the inquiry on software development practices and low competency and quality of code - https://postofficeinquiry.dracos.co.uk/phase-2/2022-11-16/#david-mcdonnell https://postofficeinquiry.dracos.co.uk/phase-2/2022-11-16/#d...
tonyedgecombe 3y ago
The Post Office were told about the problems in 2003 but decided to sack the contractor they had hired to check their software rather than deal with the problems. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-67921974 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-67921974 Why aren't management in the dock over this.
- ericfrazier 3y ago
  Gross negligence. Claw back their wages to compensate the postmasters.
  - donmcronald 3y ago
    Not even close. They conspired to cover up deficiencies while people were being criminally prosecuted for the discrepancies caused by those deficiencies. The knew about it and they belong in jail. Nothing less.
    - Clubber 3y ago
      Yes, they deserve the jail time they so effortlessly dolled out to the innocent people.
- game_the0ry 3y ago
  The problem with modern management is that they are rarely accountable to those that have been wronged. Rather, they are accountable to their bosses. And the are fine as long as they are sycophantic bootlickers.
  - heresie-dabord 3y ago
    From TFA: "The Post Office said the honour was given for [Former Post Office boss Paula Vennells'] work on "diversity and inclusion", and her "commitment to the social purpose at the heart of the business and her dedication in putting the customer first".
- 3y ago
127361 3y ago
All those people that ostracized or otherwise hurled abuse at the postmasters, they can go to hell.
- malka 3y ago
  Good news everyone. We are hurling toward hell at an increasing pace !
sgt101 3y ago
Here is the private eye report. 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... For those who don't know, Private Eye is a UK published satirical magazine which takes it as it's mission to go after liars, fraudsters, bent politicians, and all those who are a disgrace. It plays a pivotal role in British democracy and consequentially may be closed any day soon. It has been doing this since 1961 and everyone involved is a hero.
- secondcoming 3y ago
  > may be closed any day soon. It has been doing this since 1961 Kind of contradictory, no? Nobody is going to shut Private Eye down any time soon.
  - pjc50 3y ago
    It's pretty much a personal project of Ian Hislop these days, who is a mere mortal. And it would only take a few libel lawsuits going against them to bankrupt the business.
  - sgt101 3y ago
    Ian Hislop (the editor) is apparently the most sued man in history! (I may be exagerating). Seriously though, they are roped around with super injunctions and actions of every type intended to bring them down. I agree that they seem to be in rude health now (mostly because of my subscription I am sure) but it's really possible that some bastard will get them. After all - they got Twitter...
    - alibarber 3y ago
      > (mostly because of my subscription I am sure) I enjoyed this, thank you.
    - zimpenfish 3y ago
      > Ian Hislop (the editor) is apparently the most sued man in history! (I may be exaggerating). Wikipedia says he's in the Guinness Book of Records for that but equally a whole bunch of links say it's unverified (and I believe he himself has said he isn't recently.)
fidotron 3y ago
It is curious how the BBC keep going on about it being Fujitsu and them being Japanese, yet the problematic system was developed by ICL in the UK prior to the Fujitsu acquisition. The whole episode is an utter disgrace.
- alibarber 3y ago
  The final page of the company returns for ICL in 1996 (thanks to Wikipedia) notes that the ultimate controller of the company was indeed Fujitsu at that time. The rebrand happened in 2002, but it is correct to say that the system was developed by a part of Fujitsu. https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/03011561/filing-history/OTM1OTYwNTZhZGlxemtjeA/document?format=pdf&download=0 https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...
game_the0ry 3y ago
American, here. I remember first hearing about this (maybe a couple of years) and just being in complete shock. And not much can shock me nowadays. And reading this article just...I dont know what to say, honestly. How could there a complete and total lack of justice? And in the modern western world - it feels like the western world is turning into one big failed state. Those that have been wronged are owed a great deal. I am not religious, but if I was, I would pray for them.
- sp332 3y ago
  The article says the public inquiry started in 2021 and is ongoing.
  - pjc50 3y ago
    Public inquries are 100% pointless. They have no power to jail people or impose fines.
  - game_the0ry 3y ago
    > The article says the public inquiry started in 2021 and is ongoing. ...? That wont assuage the 700 people who were already wronged, 4 of whom committed suicide. Damage has been done, the inquiry is too little too late, and I am confident nothing will come of it.
  - madaxe_again 3y ago
    It will conclude in the 2030s, when anybody who could have been held accountable is long dead, or retired and overseas or too infirm to stand trial. This is how it goes in the U.K., far too frequently - particularly when public bodies or government connected parties are involved. They also aren’t typically about finding fault or figuring out who to blame, and don’t often result in criminal proceedings - they are about preventing reoccurrence.
- ed_elliott_asc 3y ago
  Part of the problem is that for historical reasons the post office can charge and prosecute people without the police needing to investigate. The post office was a part of the country /government (I’m not sure what the right term is tbh) and it was privatised but kept those powers.
OldGuyInTheClub 3y ago
Now Palantir has its hooks into their Health Service.
NikolaNovak 3y ago
A decade ago, as I was stressing out about an upcoming go-live, my boss at the time (a wonderful, caring, thoughtful person) provided well-intended advice; he said something like "My wife is a doctor; when she does her job poorly people die! Cheer up, we just move code around". It was intended to a relatively junior architect to provide some perspective; and perspective is indeed important. But I think in IT, much more often we commit the opposite error - we are too disconnected from consequences of our seemingly abstract, technical, impersonal work. I currently work on a massive Payroll ERP. In many ways a boring, uncool system. But if we don't do our job right, people don't get paid right, and while that may not have the same immediate impact as a doctor mistake, it's... very much a real human impact. And more of us could probably draw a line from IT error to human impact if we consciously actively tried to. Devastating story, every time I read about it. Should be taught in Computer Science universities alongside the Therac-25 and few other choice cases :|
- jareklupinski 3y ago
  > we are too disconnected from consequences of our seemingly abstract, technical, impersonal work i think it's important to be connected to your work (when it matters, like your former boss said), but I realized that we're all just human beings, and we each have a set capacity for such things a few people may be able to knock out life-saving operation after operation and just pound a stiff drink before going back to the OR the next day for years on end, but the rest of us can only do that sort of thing for a year or two tops before 'shutting off' (or burning out) going back and forth between 'boring, but dependable' and 'exciting, but mercurial' seems to keep my personal trajectory interesting at least :)
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    I think there's also a lot of engineers with a, shall we say, hands off attitude about ethics and the downstream effects of the software they are writing. Like it's "Boss told me to do it" or "Boss told me not to do it" and that's the end of the ethical quandary! Software engineers need to take at least partial responsibility for the code they are physically typing in and causing to come into existence. If that software is going to fail and cause harm to people, it's literally your job and responsibility as a professional engineer to raise that concern and stop it from shipping. A lot of software teams have too much of a "JIRA ticket is closed, so my work here is done" attitude.
hermitcrab 3y ago
There is an excellent Computerphile video discussing some of the issues in the Horizons software system at the heart of this scandal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBJm9ZYqL10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBJm9ZYqL10
Devasta 3y ago
Stuff like this shows that licensing for certain software development activities is long overdue. Could you imagine if software engineering was like real engineering, with you having to sign off on work done and accepting personal liability, including fines and jail time for negligence? So much of software development as it is practiced today simply wouldn't be tolerated in such a world.
- Clubber 3y ago
  Perhaps a 3rd party, unaffiliated QA requirement or something would help.
- donmcronald 3y ago
  Yeah, the software was broken, but the real harm was caused by people much further up the chain of command when they refused to admit the software was broken, even after they were explicitly told so by a contractor they hired. > with you having to sign off on work done and accepting personal liability I think that makes it even easier for those at the top who are willing to lie and cheat because it becomes easy to use the lowly developers as scapegoats. I think the only way you stop stuff like this scandal is to prosecute every c-suite executive that knew about the problem and helped cover it up instead of blowing the whistle on it. Claw back their wealth and send them to jail.
- blibble 3y ago
  > Could you imagine if software engineering was like real engineering, with you having to sign off on work done and accepting personal liability, including fines and jail time for negligence? some sections of the industry have this (notably finance)
- SilverBirch 3y ago
  I think you've taken the complete wrong lesson from this. The problem wasn't the software - the software had bugs, all software does. The problem was that people in the Post Office and Fujitsu asserted there were no bugs, no bugs could happen and made all sorts of statements that weren't even plausible and those that went against them got prosecuted and destroyed. Not because the software didn't work but because the people in charge covered up the software not working rather than dealing with the fallout. These exact shortfall issues could've happened and with an open and honest process of investigating the problems they could have been sorted decades ago. It wasn't the software that was the problem, it was the systematic cover up that was the problem.
cf100clunk 3y ago
Canada's Phoenix pay system (IBM and PeopleSoft) was quite problematic and caused financial suffering of federal employees for years, but thankfully without the outrageous legal pain inflicted on Horizon's victims. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/families-suffer-phoenix-pay-government-minister-embarrased-1.4543130 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/families-suffer-phoeni...
Rapzid 3y ago
Reminds me of the Kern County child abuse convictions but an even larger scale. In both cases the sheer numbers make no sense, but nobody stopped to question why that was.
michael1999 3y ago
One of the worst things about dealing with SaaS is that you might have no practical way to generated your own audit records for reconciliation during a dispute. You have to ask the vendor for data to dispute the vendor! The organizational incentives are all against you. Just a cursed relationship.
- ncallaway 3y ago
  > You have to ask the vendor for data to dispute the vendor! Isn’t that literally the purpose of discovery in lawsuits (a practice that long predates digital records at all, much less SaaS)
  - varispeed 3y ago
    If administrator can change entries and audit logs, there is no real way to prove the data has or has not been tampered with.
  - donmcronald 3y ago
    There's nothing to discover if they simply don't collect information that proves your case. My favorite is "we have no evidence that XYZ was stolen" when a company gets compromised. Why would you want high quality logging at that point? Don't log access to sensitive information and then there's no evidence it was "stolen" (copied or cloned is the correct term). Retention policies are a huge issue too. There have been a lot of cover-ups discovered by people going through old boxes of papers. That's not going to happen in the future because tech companies are providing enterprise grade tooling to continually scrub history via retention policies. No one is going to find a 10 year old "smoking gun" email if you have a 7 year retention policy on all communications.
  - michael1999 3y ago
    No! The problem here is the the Royal Mail had bad records. Discovery doesn't help at all! Discovery just gets you a copy of the bad data. You need good data, and nobody has it! This is why we invented double-entry bookkeeping 500 years ago. And even if, by fluke, discovery might help because there was actually a good copy somewhere, that means you've already lost by spending a fortune on lawyers in a dispute with a crown corporation! Look at these disputes - lives were ruined over $44k pounds. Suing the Post Office wouldn't be cheaper than that. In a traditional paper based flow, I have my own copies. I talk to a salesperson, get a price, and fax a PO. I keep a copy of that PO on file. The vendor delivers the order along with a waybill. My staff receive the order and count it, reconciling against my order. If the count is short, we check the waybill. Is the waybill short too? Then there was a problem in order flow. If the waybill matches my order, but the shipment is short, then the problem is in fulfillment. I call sales and hash it out. Honest errors happen, and reasonable people resolve them when given the facts. If the salesperson says their copy of the PO looks different, and calls me a liar when I send them my copy, then we have a real dispute. We might have to get a lawyer involved. But this is well beyond honest error. But in most SaaS environments (GB egress, bytes storage, etc), you are dependent on the vendor for the data. There is no practical way to disagree with AWS if they tell you your usage was 20TB and you expected 15. You are trusting the vendor not to lie (maybe reasonable), and also to never make an error (totally unreasonable!). We now have no defense against honest error. B2C is in a similar boat. In olden-times, I knew people who kept a log book and stop watch by the phone and logged all their calls. Every month, they reconciled their phone bill against their log. Just like they reconciled their bank statement against their cheque stubs and deposit slips. But who in this day keeps their own log of PayPal transactions safely outside Paypal? My main safety with PayPay is short latency - they report significant transactions right away so any errors can be corrected quickly.
hermitcrab 3y ago
Interestingly the TV drama doesn't mention Adam Crozier, who was CEO of Royal Mail 2003-10. I wonder if this is at all related the fact that Crozier was also CEO of ITV 2010-2017, the company that made the TV drama? Hmmm. https://forums.digitalspy.com/discussion/2458110/itv-boss-and-the-post-office-scandal https://forums.digitalspy.com/discussion/2458110/itv-boss-an...
- pjc50 3y ago
  Stupidly, "Royal Mail" and "Post Office" are separate organizations.
  - hermitcrab 3y ago
    They only separated in 2012.
at_a_remove 3y ago
She should hand back the money she got for her work on "diversity and inclusion."
- alibarber 3y ago
  By the sounds of this article, I'd have to agree with you. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-67929650 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-67929650
datadeft 3y ago
Software is eating the world.
bufio 3y ago
Well, then. All is forgiven.
rytor718 3y ago
This is so tragic. Ive tried reading the reports in this thread that have more info about the cases, but I don't understand how there wasn't enough evidence to exonerate these people at the time of the accusations. It doesn't seem the post office had to prove their software worked as they claimed it did. I may have missed this or misunderstood something but there are access logs, receipts given to customers, the money itself vs the stock/services sold ...these are can all be counted by hand no? There should be a 1-to-1 relationship between the business that came in and the products/services that went out, physical evidence. I feel like I've missed or misunderstood something about this situation. Its horrific to imagine management would ruin lives over something like this. They really ought to be prosecuted and thrown in jail today, even if they're 90 yrs old. Anyone who took part in this cover up really shouldnt be let off the hook here.

146 points by alibarber 3y ago

This has the unfortunate optics that Paula Vennells did the decent thing. The title should have been taken away from her ages ago.

mike_hearn 3y ago

I feel like we in the software industry should do more reflection on what happened here. Yes, many of the most evil acts were the result of social non-technical problems like terrible management, stupid legacy UK laws allowing PO prosecutions, and so on. But the root cause was bugs. So many bugs. There isn't much the average HN poster can do about the political and justice problems, which are firmly in the realm of the British government. But there are people here who work on databases and app frameworks. What can be learned from the Horizon scandal? Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be much discussion of this. Compare vs the airline industry where failures are aggressively root caused. I'll start: 1. Transaction anomalies can end lives. Should popular RDBMS engines really default to non-serializability by default (non repeatable reads, for example). 2. Offline is very hard. A lot of bugs happened due to trying to make Horizon v1 work with flaky or very slow connections, and losing transactional consistency as a result. The SOTA here has barely advanced since the 90s, instead the industry has just given up on this and now accepts that every so often there'll be massive outages that cause parts of the economy to just shut down for a few hours when the SPOF fails. Should there be more focus on how to handle flaky connectivity in mission-critical apps safely? 3. What's the right way to ensure rock-solid accountability around critical databases, given that bugs are inevitable and data corruption must sometimes be manually fixed? A lot of the Horizon problems seemed to involve Fujitsu manually logging in to post offices and "fixing" the results of bugs, in such a way that they didn't realize their fix created ledger imbalances that the SPMs would be blamed for. A part of why big enterprises got so excited about blockchains was this notion of an immutable ledger in which business records can't go magically changing around you without anyone knowing how. There are clearly ways to do this, but they're not the default. 4. IIRC at least some failures were traced back to broken touch screens generating false random touches, which could lead at night to random transactions being entered and confirmed when nobody was around. Are modern capacitative touch screens immune to this failure mode? If not, are consoles in embedded applications always reliably engaging screen locks? I guess there are bazillions more you could come up with.

pjc50 3y ago
You can't technical your way out of a social problem. It doesn't matter how many best practices you define if the management aren't going to follow them, and get their mates to award them a CBE for services to misconduct. > Are modern capacitative touch screens immune to this failure mode? No, this is basically impossible.
sgt101 3y ago
There is an organizational axis too. The technical capabilities of the GPO went off with BT in 1984. The remaining organisation was anything but a competent customer for IT implementations. Outsourcing has definite limits and potentially catastrophic results - as does the demolition of corporate technical capability. An empowered technical architecture function could have vetted this system and prevented this all. But gut it and stamp it under the heal of the CFO and you may as well not bother.
- g_p 3y ago
  > Outsourcing has definite limits and potentially catastrophic results - as does the demolition of corporate technical capability. A lot of what seems apparent in this case is that contractual and commercial factors weren't set up correctly - they were set up to deliver predictable prices (loved by public sector clients), but not necessarily to deliver good outcomes. An example - it appeared much of the rush to ship the point of sale terminals was to get through customer acceptance (and presumably the payment milestone), despite scope creep and quality issues. And there was a cost for PO to access audit logs, and limits on capacity of these logs which could be handled. Presumably this delivered a lower headline price for an accountant negotiating the price down, but it ultimately made a poorer solution that wasn't for for purpose. It seems like (from what I've seen of the evidence) nobody internally in PO really had full understanding and ownership of the project and they'd outsourced that (but kept the suppliers tightly commercially managed, creating the incentives for shipping poor quality code, rather than spending the time to polish it, as some had tried to do in the development team). Some interesting evidence here in the inquiry on software development practices and low competency and quality of code - https://postofficeinquiry.dracos.co.uk/phase-2/2022-11-16/#david-mcdonnell https://postofficeinquiry.dracos.co.uk/phase-2/2022-11-16/#d...

tonyedgecombe 3y ago

The Post Office were told about the problems in 2003 but decided to sack the contractor they had hired to check their software rather than deal with the problems. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-67921974 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-67921974 Why aren't management in the dock over this.

ericfrazier 3y ago
Gross negligence. Claw back their wages to compensate the postmasters.
- donmcronald 3y ago
  Not even close. They conspired to cover up deficiencies while people were being criminally prosecuted for the discrepancies caused by those deficiencies. The knew about it and they belong in jail. Nothing less.
  - Clubber 3y ago
    Yes, they deserve the jail time they so effortlessly dolled out to the innocent people.
game_the0ry 3y ago
The problem with modern management is that they are rarely accountable to those that have been wronged. Rather, they are accountable to their bosses. And the are fine as long as they are sycophantic bootlickers.
- heresie-dabord 3y ago
  From TFA: "The Post Office said the honour was given for [Former Post Office boss Paula Vennells'] work on "diversity and inclusion", and her "commitment to the social purpose at the heart of the business and her dedication in putting the customer first".
3y ago

127361 3y ago

All those people that ostracized or otherwise hurled abuse at the postmasters, they can go to hell.

malka 3y ago
Good news everyone. We are hurling toward hell at an increasing pace !

sgt101 3y ago

Here is the private eye report. 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... For those who don't know, Private Eye is a UK published satirical magazine which takes it as it's mission to go after liars, fraudsters, bent politicians, and all those who are a disgrace. It plays a pivotal role in British democracy and consequentially may be closed any day soon. It has been doing this since 1961 and everyone involved is a hero.

secondcoming 3y ago
> may be closed any day soon. It has been doing this since 1961 Kind of contradictory, no? Nobody is going to shut Private Eye down any time soon.
- pjc50 3y ago
  It's pretty much a personal project of Ian Hislop these days, who is a mere mortal. And it would only take a few libel lawsuits going against them to bankrupt the business.
- sgt101 3y ago
  Ian Hislop (the editor) is apparently the most sued man in history! (I may be exagerating). Seriously though, they are roped around with super injunctions and actions of every type intended to bring them down. I agree that they seem to be in rude health now (mostly because of my subscription I am sure) but it's really possible that some bastard will get them. After all - they got Twitter...
  - alibarber 3y ago
    > (mostly because of my subscription I am sure) I enjoyed this, thank you.
  - zimpenfish 3y ago
    > Ian Hislop (the editor) is apparently the most sued man in history! (I may be exaggerating). Wikipedia says he's in the Guinness Book of Records for that but equally a whole bunch of links say it's unverified (and I believe he himself has said he isn't recently.)

fidotron 3y ago

It is curious how the BBC keep going on about it being Fujitsu and them being Japanese, yet the problematic system was developed by ICL in the UK prior to the Fujitsu acquisition. The whole episode is an utter disgrace.

alibarber 3y ago
The final page of the company returns for ICL in 1996 (thanks to Wikipedia) notes that the ultimate controller of the company was indeed Fujitsu at that time. The rebrand happened in 2002, but it is correct to say that the system was developed by a part of Fujitsu. https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/03011561/filing-history/OTM1OTYwNTZhZGlxemtjeA/document?format=pdf&download=0 https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...

game_the0ry 3y ago

American, here. I remember first hearing about this (maybe a couple of years) and just being in complete shock. And not much can shock me nowadays. And reading this article just...I dont know what to say, honestly. How could there a complete and total lack of justice? And in the modern western world - it feels like the western world is turning into one big failed state. Those that have been wronged are owed a great deal. I am not religious, but if I was, I would pray for them.

sp332 3y ago
The article says the public inquiry started in 2021 and is ongoing.
- pjc50 3y ago
  Public inquries are 100% pointless. They have no power to jail people or impose fines.
- game_the0ry 3y ago
  > The article says the public inquiry started in 2021 and is ongoing. ...? That wont assuage the 700 people who were already wronged, 4 of whom committed suicide. Damage has been done, the inquiry is too little too late, and I am confident nothing will come of it.
- madaxe_again 3y ago
  It will conclude in the 2030s, when anybody who could have been held accountable is long dead, or retired and overseas or too infirm to stand trial. This is how it goes in the U.K., far too frequently - particularly when public bodies or government connected parties are involved. They also aren’t typically about finding fault or figuring out who to blame, and don’t often result in criminal proceedings - they are about preventing reoccurrence.
ed_elliott_asc 3y ago
Part of the problem is that for historical reasons the post office can charge and prosecute people without the police needing to investigate. The post office was a part of the country /government (I’m not sure what the right term is tbh) and it was privatised but kept those powers.

OldGuyInTheClub 3y ago

Now Palantir has its hooks into their Health Service.

NikolaNovak 3y ago

A decade ago, as I was stressing out about an upcoming go-live, my boss at the time (a wonderful, caring, thoughtful person) provided well-intended advice; he said something like "My wife is a doctor; when she does her job poorly people die! Cheer up, we just move code around". It was intended to a relatively junior architect to provide some perspective; and perspective is indeed important. But I think in IT, much more often we commit the opposite error - we are too disconnected from consequences of our seemingly abstract, technical, impersonal work. I currently work on a massive Payroll ERP. In many ways a boring, uncool system. But if we don't do our job right, people don't get paid right, and while that may not have the same immediate impact as a doctor mistake, it's... very much a real human impact. And more of us could probably draw a line from IT error to human impact if we consciously actively tried to. Devastating story, every time I read about it. Should be taught in Computer Science universities alongside the Therac-25 and few other choice cases :|

jareklupinski 3y ago
> we are too disconnected from consequences of our seemingly abstract, technical, impersonal work i think it's important to be connected to your work (when it matters, like your former boss said), but I realized that we're all just human beings, and we each have a set capacity for such things a few people may be able to knock out life-saving operation after operation and just pound a stiff drink before going back to the OR the next day for years on end, but the rest of us can only do that sort of thing for a year or two tops before 'shutting off' (or burning out) going back and forth between 'boring, but dependable' and 'exciting, but mercurial' seems to keep my personal trajectory interesting at least :)
- ryandrake 3y ago
  I think there's also a lot of engineers with a, shall we say, hands off attitude about ethics and the downstream effects of the software they are writing. Like it's "Boss told me to do it" or "Boss told me not to do it" and that's the end of the ethical quandary! Software engineers need to take at least partial responsibility for the code they are physically typing in and causing to come into existence. If that software is going to fail and cause harm to people, it's literally your job and responsibility as a professional engineer to raise that concern and stop it from shipping. A lot of software teams have too much of a "JIRA ticket is closed, so my work here is done" attitude.

hermitcrab 3y ago

There is an excellent Computerphile video discussing some of the issues in the Horizons software system at the heart of this scandal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBJm9ZYqL10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBJm9ZYqL10

Devasta 3y ago

Stuff like this shows that licensing for certain software development activities is long overdue. Could you imagine if software engineering was like real engineering, with you having to sign off on work done and accepting personal liability, including fines and jail time for negligence? So much of software development as it is practiced today simply wouldn't be tolerated in such a world.

Clubber 3y ago
Perhaps a 3rd party, unaffiliated QA requirement or something would help.
donmcronald 3y ago
Yeah, the software was broken, but the real harm was caused by people much further up the chain of command when they refused to admit the software was broken, even after they were explicitly told so by a contractor they hired. > with you having to sign off on work done and accepting personal liability I think that makes it even easier for those at the top who are willing to lie and cheat because it becomes easy to use the lowly developers as scapegoats. I think the only way you stop stuff like this scandal is to prosecute every c-suite executive that knew about the problem and helped cover it up instead of blowing the whistle on it. Claw back their wealth and send them to jail.
blibble 3y ago
> Could you imagine if software engineering was like real engineering, with you having to sign off on work done and accepting personal liability, including fines and jail time for negligence? some sections of the industry have this (notably finance)
SilverBirch 3y ago
I think you've taken the complete wrong lesson from this. The problem wasn't the software - the software had bugs, all software does. The problem was that people in the Post Office and Fujitsu asserted there were no bugs, no bugs could happen and made all sorts of statements that weren't even plausible and those that went against them got prosecuted and destroyed. Not because the software didn't work but because the people in charge covered up the software not working rather than dealing with the fallout. These exact shortfall issues could've happened and with an open and honest process of investigating the problems they could have been sorted decades ago. It wasn't the software that was the problem, it was the systematic cover up that was the problem.

cf100clunk 3y ago

Canada's Phoenix pay system (IBM and PeopleSoft) was quite problematic and caused financial suffering of federal employees for years, but thankfully without the outrageous legal pain inflicted on Horizon's victims. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/families-suffer-phoenix-pay-government-minister-embarrased-1.4543130 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/families-suffer-phoeni...

Rapzid 3y ago

Reminds me of the Kern County child abuse convictions but an even larger scale. In both cases the sheer numbers make no sense, but nobody stopped to question why that was.

michael1999 3y ago

One of the worst things about dealing with SaaS is that you might have no practical way to generated your own audit records for reconciliation during a dispute. You have to ask the vendor for data to dispute the vendor! The organizational incentives are all against you. Just a cursed relationship.

ncallaway 3y ago
> You have to ask the vendor for data to dispute the vendor! Isn’t that literally the purpose of discovery in lawsuits (a practice that long predates digital records at all, much less SaaS)
- varispeed 3y ago
  If administrator can change entries and audit logs, there is no real way to prove the data has or has not been tampered with.
- donmcronald 3y ago
  There's nothing to discover if they simply don't collect information that proves your case. My favorite is "we have no evidence that XYZ was stolen" when a company gets compromised. Why would you want high quality logging at that point? Don't log access to sensitive information and then there's no evidence it was "stolen" (copied or cloned is the correct term). Retention policies are a huge issue too. There have been a lot of cover-ups discovered by people going through old boxes of papers. That's not going to happen in the future because tech companies are providing enterprise grade tooling to continually scrub history via retention policies. No one is going to find a 10 year old "smoking gun" email if you have a 7 year retention policy on all communications.
- michael1999 3y ago
  No! The problem here is the the Royal Mail had bad records. Discovery doesn't help at all! Discovery just gets you a copy of the bad data. You need good data, and nobody has it! This is why we invented double-entry bookkeeping 500 years ago. And even if, by fluke, discovery might help because there was actually a good copy somewhere, that means you've already lost by spending a fortune on lawyers in a dispute with a crown corporation! Look at these disputes - lives were ruined over $44k pounds. Suing the Post Office wouldn't be cheaper than that. In a traditional paper based flow, I have my own copies. I talk to a salesperson, get a price, and fax a PO. I keep a copy of that PO on file. The vendor delivers the order along with a waybill. My staff receive the order and count it, reconciling against my order. If the count is short, we check the waybill. Is the waybill short too? Then there was a problem in order flow. If the waybill matches my order, but the shipment is short, then the problem is in fulfillment. I call sales and hash it out. Honest errors happen, and reasonable people resolve them when given the facts. If the salesperson says their copy of the PO looks different, and calls me a liar when I send them my copy, then we have a real dispute. We might have to get a lawyer involved. But this is well beyond honest error. But in most SaaS environments (GB egress, bytes storage, etc), you are dependent on the vendor for the data. There is no practical way to disagree with AWS if they tell you your usage was 20TB and you expected 15. You are trusting the vendor not to lie (maybe reasonable), and also to never make an error (totally unreasonable!). We now have no defense against honest error. B2C is in a similar boat. In olden-times, I knew people who kept a log book and stop watch by the phone and logged all their calls. Every month, they reconciled their phone bill against their log. Just like they reconciled their bank statement against their cheque stubs and deposit slips. But who in this day keeps their own log of PayPal transactions safely outside Paypal? My main safety with PayPay is short latency - they report significant transactions right away so any errors can be corrected quickly.

hermitcrab 3y ago

Interestingly the TV drama doesn't mention Adam Crozier, who was CEO of Royal Mail 2003-10. I wonder if this is at all related the fact that Crozier was also CEO of ITV 2010-2017, the company that made the TV drama? Hmmm. https://forums.digitalspy.com/discussion/2458110/itv-boss-and-the-post-office-scandal https://forums.digitalspy.com/discussion/2458110/itv-boss-an...

pjc50 3y ago
Stupidly, "Royal Mail" and "Post Office" are separate organizations.
- hermitcrab 3y ago
  They only separated in 2012.

at_a_remove 3y ago

She should hand back the money she got for her work on "diversity and inclusion."

alibarber 3y ago
By the sounds of this article, I'd have to agree with you. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-67929650 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-67929650

datadeft 3y ago

Software is eating the world.

bufio 3y ago

Well, then. All is forgiven.

rytor718 3y ago

This is so tragic. Ive tried reading the reports in this thread that have more info about the cases, but I don't understand how there wasn't enough evidence to exonerate these people at the time of the accusations. It doesn't seem the post office had to prove their software worked as they claimed it did. I may have missed this or misunderstood something but there are access logs, receipts given to customers, the money itself vs the stock/services sold ...these are can all be counted by hand no? There should be a 1-to-1 relationship between the business that came in and the products/services that went out, physical evidence. I feel like I've missed or misunderstood something about this situation. Its horrific to imagine management would ruin lives over something like this. They really ought to be prosecuted and thrown in jail today, even if they're 90 yrs old. Anyone who took part in this cover up really shouldnt be let off the hook here.