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This Post Office scandal is currently ongoing in the UK. The Fujitsu developer in question confirmed what the Post Office was denying, that the Horizon software

This Post Office scandal is currently ongoing in the UK. The Fujitsu developer in question confirmed what the Post Office was denying, that the Horizon software at the center of the scandal, had implemented methods for secretly editing accounts. Approx 700 postmasters (self-employed managers of Post Office branches) were held responsible when large amounts of cash appeared to have vanished from tills, resulting in prosecutions for fraud and theft. I know someone who was affected by this, who managed a now-closed Post Office branch here in Wakefield, UK and it was a life ruining ordeal for her. She was accused of stealing £1,000's in cash. I'm not sure if it was a bug or someone remotely changed the account records for her branch, but the campaign the Post Office ran to smear any accusations of wrongfulness on the part of the Horizon software is shocking.

ExoticPearTree 3y ago
I loosely followed the discussion here on HN, but I don't see any mention of anyone from the Post Office being arrested/prosecuted/sentenced for this. It seems that some people there abused their power and need to cool down behind bars.
- petesergeant 3y ago
  In fact, they had recently shortlisted the lady in charge of the PO at the time to be the Bishop of London, because of course they had.
  - ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
    That's Paula Vennells and she was awarded a CBE for her role in running the Post Office. However, there's just been a petition that garnered over 1.2 million signatures for her to be stripped of her CBE and in response, she has "promised" to return it. I, for one, don't believe her.
    - nebulous1 3y ago
      Apparently she can't "return" it, it has to be annulled by the British monarch.
      - ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
        I hope Charlie does that then, but it depends on whether he cares enough about it. I think it would be fitting if a significant percentage of other people with CBEs started to return them with public statements about them not wanting to be associated with the likes of Paula Vennells.
        tialaramex 3y ago
        It's not really on Charlie, any more than he's the one making the lists. His mother wasn't like "OH, we should honor that Post Office lady, I like receiving letters and I bet she's somehow responsible for that". She just got a list with Paula's name on it, along with various crooks, financiers, consultants, political hacks and maybe the odd charity worker. Issuing Honours is something a Monarch does, but like declaring War or deciding what Laws should govern the country, they don't actually make decisions, that's a government problem. So long as the general public were barely aware of a problem, this could skate along as not important for years, but now lots of people are angry because they saw a TV show and for once when they said "Hey this is terrible!" instead of "It's just a TV show it's not real you idiots" those of us who were paying attention are like "Yes, so what are you going to do about it?" which as we've seen puts pressure on government to actually do something.
- Tyrek 3y ago
  It's insane to me that most of the heat is being directed at Fujitsu. Sure, there's definitely some culpability there, but the Post Office (especially their legal team) holds the vast majority of the responsibility. There's a lot weighing in on the multi-year investigation that (has been) ongoing, but I can't help but feel like they're waiting for the public furor to cool down before releasing anything.
  - toyg 3y ago
    > the Post Office (especially their legal team) holds the vast majority of the responsibility. It really depends on what Fujitsu told which PO manager.
    - tialaramex 3y ago
      The Post Office also paid independent people to figure out where the problem is, and the answer was "Horizon is garbage, you can't rely on it". So, they fired those people. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-67921974 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-67921974 This a pattern we've seen before 1. "We aren't wrong, you are too involved to make an impartial decision. We need somebody independent to investigate" 2. "The independent investigation has finished, but we need to properly digest their report, so we can't tell you what they said yet" 3. "We've now realised the independent investigation was inadequate, everybody who worked on it was incompetent and its findings are useless so we've destroyed the report. We declare ourselves exonerated, we were right all along". People tend to have this mistaken understanding of morality which assumes they're a good person and so therefore obviously what they did must be good (since they're a good person) and so they might need to uh, fix differences between the world as they've imagined it and the slightly less rosy reality. For example sure, you know that stabbing Sarah in the throat resulted in Sarah becoming dead, but you had to do that, because you're a good person and Sarah was going to tell the Police that you'd stolen $18.5M from the business. You didn't steal that money! Sure, yes, you took the money and maybe you technically shouldn't have done that, but you had a 100% sure strategy for playing Blackjack and recovering the $800 000 you lost last month, except that you got a bit confused and lost all of the $18.5M, but that's not theft, that's just a minor mistake you will be able to soon fix, if only Sarah doesn't tell these lies about stealing and get you arrested. So you had to, it wasn't murder, it was really self defence. You're a Good Person!
- ExoticPearTree 3y ago
  To sort of answer my own question: - https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/13/business/uk-post-office-fujitsu-horizon-scandal/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/13/business/uk-post-office-f... - https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-quash-wrongful-post-office-convictions https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-quash-wrong... From the CNN article it seems like the police is going to get involved in this, so at least some good news for the people wrongfully prosecuted by the people charge of the Post Office.
prof-dr-ir 3y ago
> currently ongoing in the UK To be precise it is finally getting some of the attention it deserves, both from the public and from the government. The miscarriages of justice date from 1999 until 2015, and the high court ruling (about the software being faulty) that finally stopped the flow of convictions dates from 2019, almost five years ago. Very little happened since then, and in particular no one has been held accountable. If that delay sounds absolutely bonkers to you then yes, that is what everyone else thinks as well.
- krisoft 3y ago
  > Very little happened since then, and in particular no one has been held accountable. Even crazier. The Post Office just recently lowered(!) the amount of money they allocated for compensations: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67784706 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67784706 They basically allocated a pot of money to pay the people they have harmed off. But these people had to actively go out and request their conviction to be overturned. Which of course many people were reluctant to do, since it means they would be upturning their life again, and going to court and finding lawyers and etc. They understandably have very little trust in the system. So Post Office just shrugged and decided they don't need to keep that much money around.
  - scott_w 3y ago
    > Even crazier. The Post Office just recently lowered(!) the amount of money It's even worse: they're still fighting hard against the appeals, heaping more misery on the people trying to turn their lives around!
    - miohtama 3y ago
      Sounds like lawyers are at the driving seat
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - 3y ago
dmix 3y ago
Was it the post office itself that was dealing out charges? Like a post office inspector or whatever it's called? Or was it a normal police referral type thing?
- benrutter 3y ago
  So apparently in UK law, the post office carry out their own investigations before taking charges to court (effectively replacing the police for internal post office charges) which sounds mental to me.
  - scott_w 3y ago
    David Davis mentioned this on News Agents. It seems like a holdover from when it was simply an arm of the state, where it made sense that it could just handle its own enforcement (since it carried the power of the Crown). It's absolutely something that needs to be stripped away in the modern day.
    - RuggedPineapple 3y ago
      It's not really a holdover because the UK allows ANYONE to bring a private prosecution. They just have the resources to do it at scale.
      - JdeBP 3y ago
        There are legal arguments recounted in modern law textbooks that the whole idea of private prosecutions in England and Wales is a hold-over nowadays. The argument goes that since CPS decisions are subject to judicial review, the raison d'être for private prosecutions, that they allow for bad exercise of public prosecutorial discretion to be corrected by private persons, no longer exists, since the bad exercise of discretion now has another remedy. There is a fair groundswell of opinion, already driven by the bad reputation that the RSPCA, another prolific private prosecutor, has garnered, against private prosecutions. The Horizon thing only serves to fuel this, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were not soon a proposal to do away with all private prosecutions on the back of these, despite the fact that Post Office Ltd and the RSPCA are institutional private prosecutors, and there's nowhere near as strong a case that personal private prosecutors are a problem.
e40 3y ago
Is there a podcast that talks about this?
- mrw34 3y ago
  https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000jf7j/episodes/downloads https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000jf7j/episodes/downloads
- supertron 3y ago
  I recommend The Guardian's podcast episodes covering this: https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2024/jan/08/revisited-the-post-office-scandal-part-1-podcast https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2024/jan/08/revisited... https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/audio/2024/jan/08/revisited-the-post-office-scandal-part-2-podcast https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/audio/2024/jan/08/revisi... Also some Private Eye podcast episodes: https://www.private-eye.co.uk/podcast/49 https://www.private-eye.co.uk/podcast/49 https://www.private-eye.co.uk/podcast/95 https://www.private-eye.co.uk/podcast/95
sonicanatidae 3y ago
Welp, it'll be a fine, paid with other people's money and that's about it. Jail. The people who knowingly lied and sent people to prison need to be jailed. Not fined, not given a handie, not allowed to simply retire. J.A.I.L. They callously wrecked people's lives, including some that committed suicide.
- maeil 3y ago
  Jail is not enough of a deterrent for the kind of enormous damage some of the involved have caused to society. For such large-scale, fully intentional, proven harm to society out of nothing but self-interest over a long period of time, stronger penalties than jail must be applied.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - pjc50 3y ago
    Such as? (Bearing in mind the ECHR)
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - sonicanatidae 3y ago
      Beating them with pool cues about the head and shoulders until their retinas detach would be a great consequence.
      - rad_gruchalski 3y ago
        Would you sign up as an executor? Or would you rather have some other sadist to do it?
        sonicanatidae 3y ago
        You have no idea how fast I would jump to be the one with the pool cue. They would have to reconsider light being the fastest thing in the universe. It's not about sadism. It's about people getting deserved consequences for actions that greatly harmed a large number of people. Me? I'm just tired of watching it all. Treat people reasonably, and not be a Snidely Whiplash level of asshat or you get the pool cue.
rlpb 3y ago
> I'm not sure if it was a bug or someone remotely changed the account records for her branch... From https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/09/how-the-post-offices-horizon-system-failed-a-technical-breakdown https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/09/how-the-post...: > One [bug]...would see the screen freeze as the user was attempting to confirm receipt of cash. Each time the user pressed “enter” on the frozen screen, it would silently update the record. In Dalmellington, that bug created a £24,000 discrepancy, which the Post Office tried to hold the post office operator responsible for. The fact that this is even possible, apart from the sheer incompetency of a software design that permits it, means that no person can reasonably be accused of stealing cash if that accusation is based on records from this system.
- Gibbon1 3y ago
  > would see the screen freeze as the user was attempting to confirm receipt of cash. Each time the user pressed “enter” on the frozen screen, it would silently update the record Consider the shittiest homegrown shopping portal probably doesn't do that and any commercial point of sale system absolutely won't do that either. The system has to be such a POS internally that no other vendor will take the liability for it. Reminds me of the Therac-25 that killed people. This thing probably killed more people than that.
  - notso411 3y ago
    This was custom software on custom hardware. Bit different from some web app with built in debounce.
    - rcxdude 3y ago
      So is basically any point of sale system. Realllllly not an excuse.
    - bloqs 3y ago
      The underlying paradigms are the same and it is inexcusable
- 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
EdwardDiego 3y ago
My wife and I watched Mr Bates vs the Post Office, recently, it was one of those watches where you spend a lot of time yelling "How the fuck?! What the fuck?!" at the screen because the malice and dishonesty was so deliberate, so persistently maintained, lest the "brand" be sullied. I've been following this story for years, I know BBC's Panorama covered it in 2015, and was really surprised there wasn't more of an outcry in the UK about such blatant unfairness, guess technical cases like this are really helped by a TV drama with quality actors making it easily accessible to the general population, as soon as ITV aired the miniseries, the petition to have Vennall's CBE stripped jumped from 7K signatures to 700K+, and she said she would return it. (not the golden handshakes and "performance" bonuses though lol) I just can't believe that no-one has been held criminally accountable (yet) for the sheer (to quote the judges in the civil case) affront to justice that this represented - whether it was Post Office Limited (POL) misleading (well, lying to) the courts, or Fujitsu employees lying in prosecutions, or POL deliberately withholding evidence in their role as a prosecutor (wild that this power to prosecute as transferred from Royal Mail to the spun off entity), and some of the cynically legalistic games they played (like asking the judge to recuse himself for being biased against them, to further delay the outcome of the civil suit). And the crap they pulled with the Second Sight independent analysis that they commissioned themselves... I was just reading the Clarke Advice(s), and god-damn, I can't see how any former POL executives can claim "we honestly believed all that stuff we said in court, honest", after their own goddamn independent legal advice told them "stop these prosecutions, like now, your expert witness is full of shit" The 2nd Clarke Advice is a great read too, basically "STOP TRYING TO HIDE EVIDENCE, JESUS CHRIST". Oh, and some of the code that turned up from Horizon in an internal Fujitsus report is egregiously bad (how do I turn x into -x or -x into x? What's -(-x)? nevermind, I got this), from what I've read, the team that wrote Fujitsus was considered low skilled and mocked by other groups within Fujitsu as basically a group of clowns merely lacking a circus. Clarke Advice 1: https://www.postofficescandal.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Clarke-advice-re-Jenkins.pdf https://www.postofficescandal.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/... Clarke Advice 2: https://www.postofficescandal.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/20130802-Clarke-advice-re-shredding-1.pdf https://www.postofficescandal.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/... Fujitsu report: https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/sites/default/files/2022-11/FUJ00080690%20Report%20on%20the%20EPOSS%20PinICL%20Task%20Force%2014052001.pdf https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/sites/default/fi... Discussion of recusal application by Court of Appeal: https://taxpolicy.org.uk/assets/recusal_judgment.pdf https://taxpolicy.org.uk/assets/recusal_judgment.pdf
DebtDeflation 3y ago
>implemented methods for secretly editing accounts. >not sure if it was a bug or someone remotely changed the account records It seems to me that determining whether this was a bug or a deliberate backdoor that allowed someone connected to Fujitsu to change account values should have been one of the first priorities of the investigation. The CNN article I read before the BBC article didn't even mention this, it seemed to just imply that this was all a mistake or at worst the government/Fujitsu trying to coverup the fact that the software was shoddy.
hmottestad 3y ago
I wonder if anyone thought that it seemed a bit far fetched for 100 postmasters to all steal money. Then when it was 200, it must seem doubly far fetched. Once 500 postmasters were caught "stealing" money, wouldn't someone wonder how they managed to hire 500 dishonest people. Typically when you catch one person you always wonder how many got away with it, so they catch 500 then there must be 5000 or 50 000 postmasters that were stealing without getting caught. How many post offices are there really in the UK?
ddmf 3y ago
It's absolutely disgusting, and it may also allow a murder to go free (or someone incorrectly jailed for murder if you believe them). Also, strange seeing my hometown mentioned on here!

ExoticPearTree 3y ago

I loosely followed the discussion here on HN, but I don't see any mention of anyone from the Post Office being arrested/prosecuted/sentenced for this. It seems that some people there abused their power and need to cool down behind bars.

petesergeant 3y ago
In fact, they had recently shortlisted the lady in charge of the PO at the time to be the Bishop of London, because of course they had.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
  That's Paula Vennells and she was awarded a CBE for her role in running the Post Office. However, there's just been a petition that garnered over 1.2 million signatures for her to be stripped of her CBE and in response, she has "promised" to return it. I, for one, don't believe her.
  - nebulous1 3y ago
    Apparently she can't "return" it, it has to be annulled by the British monarch.
    - ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
      I hope Charlie does that then, but it depends on whether he cares enough about it. I think it would be fitting if a significant percentage of other people with CBEs started to return them with public statements about them not wanting to be associated with the likes of Paula Vennells.
      - tialaramex 3y ago
        It's not really on Charlie, any more than he's the one making the lists. His mother wasn't like "OH, we should honor that Post Office lady, I like receiving letters and I bet she's somehow responsible for that". She just got a list with Paula's name on it, along with various crooks, financiers, consultants, political hacks and maybe the odd charity worker. Issuing Honours is something a Monarch does, but like declaring War or deciding what Laws should govern the country, they don't actually make decisions, that's a government problem. So long as the general public were barely aware of a problem, this could skate along as not important for years, but now lots of people are angry because they saw a TV show and for once when they said "Hey this is terrible!" instead of "It's just a TV show it's not real you idiots" those of us who were paying attention are like "Yes, so what are you going to do about it?" which as we've seen puts pressure on government to actually do something.
Tyrek 3y ago
It's insane to me that most of the heat is being directed at Fujitsu. Sure, there's definitely some culpability there, but the Post Office (especially their legal team) holds the vast majority of the responsibility. There's a lot weighing in on the multi-year investigation that (has been) ongoing, but I can't help but feel like they're waiting for the public furor to cool down before releasing anything.
- toyg 3y ago
  > the Post Office (especially their legal team) holds the vast majority of the responsibility. It really depends on what Fujitsu told which PO manager.
  - tialaramex 3y ago
    The Post Office also paid independent people to figure out where the problem is, and the answer was "Horizon is garbage, you can't rely on it". So, they fired those people. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-67921974 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-67921974 This a pattern we've seen before 1. "We aren't wrong, you are too involved to make an impartial decision. We need somebody independent to investigate" 2. "The independent investigation has finished, but we need to properly digest their report, so we can't tell you what they said yet" 3. "We've now realised the independent investigation was inadequate, everybody who worked on it was incompetent and its findings are useless so we've destroyed the report. We declare ourselves exonerated, we were right all along". People tend to have this mistaken understanding of morality which assumes they're a good person and so therefore obviously what they did must be good (since they're a good person) and so they might need to uh, fix differences between the world as they've imagined it and the slightly less rosy reality. For example sure, you know that stabbing Sarah in the throat resulted in Sarah becoming dead, but you had to do that, because you're a good person and Sarah was going to tell the Police that you'd stolen $18.5M from the business. You didn't steal that money! Sure, yes, you took the money and maybe you technically shouldn't have done that, but you had a 100% sure strategy for playing Blackjack and recovering the $800 000 you lost last month, except that you got a bit confused and lost all of the $18.5M, but that's not theft, that's just a minor mistake you will be able to soon fix, if only Sarah doesn't tell these lies about stealing and get you arrested. So you had to, it wasn't murder, it was really self defence. You're a Good Person!
ExoticPearTree 3y ago
To sort of answer my own question: - https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/13/business/uk-post-office-fujitsu-horizon-scandal/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/13/business/uk-post-office-f... - https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-quash-wrongful-post-office-convictions https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-quash-wrong... From the CNN article it seems like the police is going to get involved in this, so at least some good news for the people wrongfully prosecuted by the people charge of the Post Office.

prof-dr-ir 3y ago

> currently ongoing in the UK To be precise it is finally getting some of the attention it deserves, both from the public and from the government. The miscarriages of justice date from 1999 until 2015, and the high court ruling (about the software being faulty) that finally stopped the flow of convictions dates from 2019, almost five years ago. Very little happened since then, and in particular no one has been held accountable. If that delay sounds absolutely bonkers to you then yes, that is what everyone else thinks as well.

krisoft 3y ago
> Very little happened since then, and in particular no one has been held accountable. Even crazier. The Post Office just recently lowered(!) the amount of money they allocated for compensations: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67784706 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67784706 They basically allocated a pot of money to pay the people they have harmed off. But these people had to actively go out and request their conviction to be overturned. Which of course many people were reluctant to do, since it means they would be upturning their life again, and going to court and finding lawyers and etc. They understandably have very little trust in the system. So Post Office just shrugged and decided they don't need to keep that much money around.
- scott_w 3y ago
  > Even crazier. The Post Office just recently lowered(!) the amount of money It's even worse: they're still fighting hard against the appeals, heaping more misery on the people trying to turn their lives around!
  - miohtama 3y ago
    Sounds like lawyers are at the driving seat
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - 3y ago

dmix 3y ago

Was it the post office itself that was dealing out charges? Like a post office inspector or whatever it's called? Or was it a normal police referral type thing?

benrutter 3y ago
So apparently in UK law, the post office carry out their own investigations before taking charges to court (effectively replacing the police for internal post office charges) which sounds mental to me.
- scott_w 3y ago
  David Davis mentioned this on News Agents. It seems like a holdover from when it was simply an arm of the state, where it made sense that it could just handle its own enforcement (since it carried the power of the Crown). It's absolutely something that needs to be stripped away in the modern day.
  - RuggedPineapple 3y ago
    It's not really a holdover because the UK allows ANYONE to bring a private prosecution. They just have the resources to do it at scale.
    - JdeBP 3y ago
      There are legal arguments recounted in modern law textbooks that the whole idea of private prosecutions in England and Wales is a hold-over nowadays. The argument goes that since CPS decisions are subject to judicial review, the raison d'être for private prosecutions, that they allow for bad exercise of public prosecutorial discretion to be corrected by private persons, no longer exists, since the bad exercise of discretion now has another remedy. There is a fair groundswell of opinion, already driven by the bad reputation that the RSPCA, another prolific private prosecutor, has garnered, against private prosecutions. The Horizon thing only serves to fuel this, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were not soon a proposal to do away with all private prosecutions on the back of these, despite the fact that Post Office Ltd and the RSPCA are institutional private prosecutors, and there's nowhere near as strong a case that personal private prosecutors are a problem.

e40 3y ago

Is there a podcast that talks about this?

mrw34 3y ago
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000jf7j/episodes/downloads https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000jf7j/episodes/downloads
supertron 3y ago
I recommend The Guardian's podcast episodes covering this: https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2024/jan/08/revisited-the-post-office-scandal-part-1-podcast https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2024/jan/08/revisited... https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/audio/2024/jan/08/revisited-the-post-office-scandal-part-2-podcast https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/audio/2024/jan/08/revisi... Also some Private Eye podcast episodes: https://www.private-eye.co.uk/podcast/49 https://www.private-eye.co.uk/podcast/49 https://www.private-eye.co.uk/podcast/95 https://www.private-eye.co.uk/podcast/95

sonicanatidae 3y ago

Welp, it'll be a fine, paid with other people's money and that's about it. Jail. The people who knowingly lied and sent people to prison need to be jailed. Not fined, not given a handie, not allowed to simply retire. J.A.I.L. They callously wrecked people's lives, including some that committed suicide.

maeil 3y ago
Jail is not enough of a deterrent for the kind of enormous damage some of the involved have caused to society. For such large-scale, fully intentional, proven harm to society out of nothing but self-interest over a long period of time, stronger penalties than jail must be applied.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- pjc50 3y ago
  Such as? (Bearing in mind the ECHR)
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - sonicanatidae 3y ago
    Beating them with pool cues about the head and shoulders until their retinas detach would be a great consequence.
    - rad_gruchalski 3y ago
      Would you sign up as an executor? Or would you rather have some other sadist to do it?
      - sonicanatidae 3y ago
        You have no idea how fast I would jump to be the one with the pool cue. They would have to reconsider light being the fastest thing in the universe. It's not about sadism. It's about people getting deserved consequences for actions that greatly harmed a large number of people. Me? I'm just tired of watching it all. Treat people reasonably, and not be a Snidely Whiplash level of asshat or you get the pool cue.

rlpb 3y ago

> I'm not sure if it was a bug or someone remotely changed the account records for her branch... From https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/09/how-the-post-offices-horizon-system-failed-a-technical-breakdown https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/09/how-the-post...: > One [bug]...would see the screen freeze as the user was attempting to confirm receipt of cash. Each time the user pressed “enter” on the frozen screen, it would silently update the record. In Dalmellington, that bug created a £24,000 discrepancy, which the Post Office tried to hold the post office operator responsible for. The fact that this is even possible, apart from the sheer incompetency of a software design that permits it, means that no person can reasonably be accused of stealing cash if that accusation is based on records from this system.

Gibbon1 3y ago
> would see the screen freeze as the user was attempting to confirm receipt of cash. Each time the user pressed “enter” on the frozen screen, it would silently update the record Consider the shittiest homegrown shopping portal probably doesn't do that and any commercial point of sale system absolutely won't do that either. The system has to be such a POS internally that no other vendor will take the liability for it. Reminds me of the Therac-25 that killed people. This thing probably killed more people than that.
- notso411 3y ago
  This was custom software on custom hardware. Bit different from some web app with built in debounce.
  - rcxdude 3y ago
    So is basically any point of sale system. Realllllly not an excuse.
  - bloqs 3y ago
    The underlying paradigms are the same and it is inexcusable
3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

EdwardDiego 3y ago

My wife and I watched Mr Bates vs the Post Office, recently, it was one of those watches where you spend a lot of time yelling "How the fuck?! What the fuck?!" at the screen because the malice and dishonesty was so deliberate, so persistently maintained, lest the "brand" be sullied. I've been following this story for years, I know BBC's Panorama covered it in 2015, and was really surprised there wasn't more of an outcry in the UK about such blatant unfairness, guess technical cases like this are really helped by a TV drama with quality actors making it easily accessible to the general population, as soon as ITV aired the miniseries, the petition to have Vennall's CBE stripped jumped from 7K signatures to 700K+, and she said she would return it. (not the golden handshakes and "performance" bonuses though lol) I just can't believe that no-one has been held criminally accountable (yet) for the sheer (to quote the judges in the civil case) affront to justice that this represented - whether it was Post Office Limited (POL) misleading (well, lying to) the courts, or Fujitsu employees lying in prosecutions, or POL deliberately withholding evidence in their role as a prosecutor (wild that this power to prosecute as transferred from Royal Mail to the spun off entity), and some of the cynically legalistic games they played (like asking the judge to recuse himself for being biased against them, to further delay the outcome of the civil suit). And the crap they pulled with the Second Sight independent analysis that they commissioned themselves... I was just reading the Clarke Advice(s), and god-damn, I can't see how any former POL executives can claim "we honestly believed all that stuff we said in court, honest", after their own goddamn independent legal advice told them "stop these prosecutions, like now, your expert witness is full of shit" The 2nd Clarke Advice is a great read too, basically "STOP TRYING TO HIDE EVIDENCE, JESUS CHRIST". Oh, and some of the code that turned up from Horizon in an internal Fujitsus report is egregiously bad (how do I turn x into -x or -x into x? What's -(-x)? nevermind, I got this), from what I've read, the team that wrote Fujitsus was considered low skilled and mocked by other groups within Fujitsu as basically a group of clowns merely lacking a circus. Clarke Advice 1: https://www.postofficescandal.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Clarke-advice-re-Jenkins.pdf https://www.postofficescandal.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/... Clarke Advice 2: https://www.postofficescandal.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/20130802-Clarke-advice-re-shredding-1.pdf https://www.postofficescandal.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/... Fujitsu report: https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/sites/default/files/2022-11/FUJ00080690%20Report%20on%20the%20EPOSS%20PinICL%20Task%20Force%2014052001.pdf https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/sites/default/fi... Discussion of recusal application by Court of Appeal: https://taxpolicy.org.uk/assets/recusal_judgment.pdf https://taxpolicy.org.uk/assets/recusal_judgment.pdf

DebtDeflation 3y ago

>implemented methods for secretly editing accounts. >not sure if it was a bug or someone remotely changed the account records It seems to me that determining whether this was a bug or a deliberate backdoor that allowed someone connected to Fujitsu to change account values should have been one of the first priorities of the investigation. The CNN article I read before the BBC article didn't even mention this, it seemed to just imply that this was all a mistake or at worst the government/Fujitsu trying to coverup the fact that the software was shoddy.

hmottestad 3y ago

I wonder if anyone thought that it seemed a bit far fetched for 100 postmasters to all steal money. Then when it was 200, it must seem doubly far fetched. Once 500 postmasters were caught "stealing" money, wouldn't someone wonder how they managed to hire 500 dishonest people. Typically when you catch one person you always wonder how many got away with it, so they catch 500 then there must be 5000 or 50 000 postmasters that were stealing without getting caught. How many post offices are there really in the UK?

ddmf 3y ago

It's absolutely disgusting, and it may also allow a murder to go free (or someone incorrectly jailed for murder if you believe them). Also, strange seeing my hometown mentioned on here!