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Engineer insists Post Office software did a 'good job'
- gnfargbl 2y agohttps://archive.is/Wa8Rx https://archive.is/Wa8Rx
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoI can’t read the article due to the paywall but is this the incident where software written by some firm accused postal workers of theft and got them fired? Hard to see how the final outcome can be characterized as a good job, unless they’re claiming they implemented the specifications they were given.
- Jtsummers 2y agoNot just fired, convicted of crimes they didn't commit. He's defending himself as much as the software. He personally gave testimony against some of the convicted postmasters. He's in denial because otherwise he'd have to admit that he was not just wrong, but personally helped send innocent people to prison.
- crooked-v 2y agoAlso, many of the 900-plus people affected were made to "pay back" "embezzled" money that was never missing in the first place, and more than a few went bankrupt in the process.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- aurizon 2y agoIt was a national shame of the type that undermined and destroyed the USSR, and Putin and his ilk have robbed Russia and covered up a deep social culture of theft and corruption. You know, of course, that the invasion column sent to occupy Kiev stalled because tanker drivers sold the fuel and the army stalled. There are many other things we see on youtube/Telegram daily
- KittenInABox 2y agoIf I wrote such software that drove otherwise healthy people to kill themselves I would consider myself responsible for their deaths. The motivation to deny this would be immense. I still have no sympathy for him; in my mind, I think he killed people.
- datavirtue 2y agoDude, it's just software. The responsibility lies with management 100%.
- lowbloodsugar 2y agoRight up to the point where (FTA) he provided expert testimony.
- Devasta 2y ago"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they go down? That's not my department." says Werner Von Braun...
- Jtsummers 2y ago> Dude, it's just software. The responsibility lies with management 100%. If you're an engineer, that's not true. The responsibility largely (though not entirely) lies with you. You're the one informing management on whether the system is sound, safe, and fit for purpose. If you don't want that kind of responsibility, don't call yourself an engineer. And definitely don't give expert testimony that your system couldn't possibly be at fault.
- datavirtue 2y agoThey had a responsibility to establish actual standing for accusing and prosecuting someone. Software is irrelevant at that point. If the software tells me to kill someone I'm going to hopefully step back and think shit over.
- kergonath 2y agoHe testified against them. At this point he is complicit.
- janice1999 2y agoIt's this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal Over 900 subpostmasters were prosecuted and 236 went to prison, including a pregnant woman whose baby was taken from her, despite no evidence the money she was accused of stealing ever existed in the first place. People lost their businesses and homes, were shunned by their communities and some committed suicide. And the Post Office knew from at least 2003 the software was broken.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- IshKebab 2y agoPure hubris. He worked on the system, people are saying that it is fatally flawed and he's just not accepting that possibility because it feels like a criticism of him. He can't imagine the bug so the most likely explanation is theft. We see this attitude here all the time, e.g. the people that think they never write bugs, and tools to avoid them like static typing, Rust, tests, etc. are just for lesser mortals.
- 349j3ojwejr 2y ago[flagged]
- hobs 2y agoIts amazing that someone could find errors they made in their code, "finish" fixing them, and then surmise there could be no further possibility of errors. If anything this mental state is a sign of an infinitesimal amount of software experience, or maybe a well spring of infinite naivete we could mine to power space faring civilizations.
- JohnMakin 2y agoI find it most often in leads that get promoted a little too quickly and are still in the dangerous “advanced beginner” stage where they know enough to be dangerous but still lack expertise to know they have no expertise.
- 12_throw_away 2y agoMore than one of my bosses: "I don't understand why this is taking so long ... look I implemented it in 10 minutes, here: [link to commit that failed CI with syntax errors]"
- acchow 2y agoThere are people who think they never write bugs?
- 2y ago
- crooked-v 2y agoFor anyone wondering at the context here, more than 900 subpostmasters in the UK (that is, contracted franchisees running small branch post offices) were accused and convicted of supposedly embezzling money, based entirely on faulty software. See the Wikipedia post for more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
- basisword 2y agoImportantly, not just accused but convicted and imprisoned based on faulty software.
- complaintdept 2y agoSeveral also comitted suicide, and quite a few were divorced. Also, British law apparently has no mechanism for holding anyone responsible. I'm not even sure how you'd begin to make restitutions for this tbh.
- janice1999 2y agoThe people responsible are the kind of people who end up running a large broadcaster (ITV) or being appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). The law does not apply to that class.
- pxeger1 2y agoI haven’t seen any coverage of technical details of how the buggy software might have made fraud look possible. Does anyone have a link about that? A priori it seems a little implausible to me that any software could make such a mistake in a way that didn’t make it obvious it was a bug, but I don’t know the extent to which the Post Office might have mishandled the evidence.
- janice1999 2y agoThere were 2 aspects: 1. Fujitsu employees could remotely log in to accounts and alter them without subpostmasters knowing. The Post Office knew this could cause shortfalls but lied about it in court. [1] 2. Money/transactions frequently went 'missing' according to subpostmasters when actions, such as customers lodging or withdrawing money or buying stamps, were not properly replicated to the central database. This was caused by things as trivial as 2 customers using 2 machines at the same time. These complaints started as soon as the system was deployed but was ignored for nearly 2 decades. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-68663750 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-68663750
- pxeger1 2y agoAh, 2 seems like a sensible explanation. I’ve seen 1 mentioned in the press but never seen any details on whether Fujitsu employees ever did this, and why they might have.
- janice1999 2y ago> why they might have. They had untracked access to what are essentially bank accounts. No one has said it out loud but the implication is theft. The other possibility is that they were desperately trying to cover up faults - when subpostmasters reported bugged transactions sometimes it would get silently 'fixed' remotely.
- gnfargbl 2y agoThere's a very long technical expert report describing Horizon on the Inquiry website: https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/evidence/expg0000001-expert-report-charles-cipione https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/evidence/expg000... I have to confess to not having read it, but it's the closest thing I've seen to having the detail we'd all like to understand.
- aurizon 2y agoEngineer! What Railroad??
- creaturemachine 2y agoThis one perhaps? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Post_Office_Railway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Post_Office_Railway
- aurizon 2y agolol
- sicgods 2y agoThe software vendor and this engineer looks like it should have done more to speak out on the problems, but the real villain here was the Post Office who actually pursued the prosecutions despite knowing from basically the beginning about significant problems. The vendor can't bring a prosecution, so this looks like an attempt to obscure the real villain to some degree.
- PreInternet01 2y agoSnort. Yeah, so, back in the late 90s, I met the CTO for ICL (later acquired by Fujitsu, but it was basically what was then left of the 'British IBM'), after evaluating their Visual Basic 5-based front-end software for a day or two, at the instigation of Microsoft UK. VB5 was not an entirely horrific choice for an UI running on Windows touchscreen hardware at the time, but the project was riddled with basic mistakes, like blocking foreground threads with long-running background operations, and, mostly, threading model mismatches between UI and back-end code (which was all C++, but not the good kind -- and oh, it implemented some weird distributed messaging bus, where you could do just about anything, but nothing really worked, especially not if the ISDN-based network was acting up...). My recommendation was to upgrade to VB6, which made multi-threaded foreign function calls at least reliable-ish, to re-do the entire calling surface of the C++ libraries accordingly, plus to significantly improve documentation, since literally nobody seemed to know which calls did exactly what (as in: which parameters they required and what they returned) and how to handle retries. The guy literally listened to me for 30 seconds (possibly less!), then turned around, and told his minions to escort me out and "get someone who understands what we're doing here". Well...
- conductr 2y agoThe more I read of this the more I think it’s the legal system that’s really at fault here. Any developer that says “trust me, the software works” can’t be trusted. I feel like every user of software has experienced this fact. I feel like they should need third party code audits, field testing and generally a much higher burden of proof such to actually rule out software bugs sufficiently to jail someone.
- datavirtue 2y agoInstead, they got caught up in the post office judicial system, eliminating many basic rights and protections.
- chrisjj 2y agoThey went through the regular judicial system. But there they apparently lost one major right. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40808808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40808808
- IshKebab 2y agoEven worse, "trust me, the software I wrote works". I guess the problem is the defence didn't have an expert witness who had access to the source code and bug database (if they even had one) etc. to even counter that. Feels a lot like the nonsense forensics that has been in the news fairly recently.
- tialaramex 2y agoHistorically the assumption was that a machine under question probably doesn't work, so the prosecution must show to a jury that it works or else they haven't met the burden, you're innocent because the machine doesn't work. This probably feels fine for a while, and then you discover you're repeatedly releasing people who are very obviously crooks who did exactly what they were accused of, but you couldn't prove to the satisfaction of a jury that the machine everybody knows works does in fact work. They need offer no evidence that it doesn't work, that's your problem, they walk free. So this assumption was reversed. But then you get Horizon. Did you steal £18,284.27 from the Post Office? Don't say "No" because the computer says you did, and unless you can prove why it's faulty, the Post Office can rely on that £18,284.27 because a computer said so and under law the assumption is that it's correct. Clearly neither of these simple assumptions is adequate. That's a problem. None of which justifies what was done to these people, that's over and above the technical legal problem of how to deliver a just outcome - nobody at POL or ICL/Fujitsu seems to have cared about a just outcome anyway.
- datavirtue 2y agoAt what point do you take a pause in the midst of accusing 900 of your most trusted people of high crimes? Is everything on fucking auto-pilot? I have been prosecuted by an automated system before. The State actually owed me and still owes me restitution.
- siva7 2y agoHopefully that "engineer" gets exposed so we all know who to never work with. There aren't many devs in the world partly responsible for the death or wrongful prosecution of over 900 people and still denying any responsibility but spitting in the face of the victims by claiming they did a good job.
- Jtsummers 2y ago> Hopefully that "engineer" gets exposed so we all know who to never work with. He is named in the article, even if you're caught behind the paywall: Gareth Jenkins.
- JohnMakin 2y agohttps://archive.ph/c85Fo https://archive.ph/c85Fo This guy’s a real piece of work. Not only did he architect this software, he was a key witness in several postmaster prosecutions. Deserves every ounce of jail time the state can throw at him, which appears to be approximately zero. There is a special place in hell for this kind of extreme arrogance.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
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- Devasta 2y agoStuff like this is why some software engineers should have the same legal requirements that real engineers do, with personal liability for negligence and the risk of fines or jail.
- tivert 2y ago> Stuff like this is why some software engineers should have the same legal requirements that real engineers do, with personal liability for negligence and the risk of fines or jail. That would pretty much immediately put a stop to "move fast an break things," which would be a good thing. Software engineer culture is pretty terrible because quality is optional and a matter of personal preference.
- Gys 2y agoWij van wc-eend… https://untranslatable.co/p/amarens/wij-van-wc-eend https://untranslatable.co/p/amarens/wij-van-wc-eend