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> They are assumed correct in UK courts. IT systems were legally considered infallible This will change when elected officials start getting hoisted by their o
by jen20 1y ago
> They are assumed correct in UK courts. IT systems were legally considered infallible
This will change when elected officials start getting hoisted by their own electronic petards.
The Venn diagram of midwit enterprise developers who build systems with audit trails yet could not swear under penalty of perjury that the audit trail is absolutely correct in every case is almost a circle.
- Jooror 1y agoShow me a system for which you believe the audit trail is absolutely correct in every case and I’ll show you a midwit…
- liveoneggs 1y agoI may be dumb but isn't this what a merkle tree does? Or the blockchain sort of does (with 51% confidence?)
- jen20 1y agoIt is straightfoward to build systems which derive their state from the audit trail instead of building the audit trail in parallel. That is what event sourcing is.
- Jooror 1y agoTIL, thanks! I was attempting to emphasize the absurdity of any software system being “absolutely correct at all times”. I don’t believe such a system can exist, at least not in such strong terms.
- jen20 1y agoWhat's important is that the audit trail can be replayed to derive the state of the system - and preferably in such a way that investigators can determine what _would_ have been seen by someone using it on a specific day at a specific time. Whether the system is free from bugs is a different matter - no system is, which is why deriving state from the audit trail instead of a parallel process which is guaranteed to diverge is so important!