41–50 of 291 posts
A lesson to test your code and take action based on costumer feedback. I’m curious to learn what was Fujitsu’s position during those investigations.
Not sure I'd take action based on what someone who makes fancy dress/theatrical clothes suggests tbh.
Edit: I get it.
When: I use this software
Then: I should not be falsely imprisoned for 3 years.
>For the first 10 years of Horizon’s existence, transaction and account data was stored on terminals in each branch before being uploaded to a central database via ISDN. Our source says this part of the system simply did not work.
>“The cash account was a piece of software that sat on the counter NT box, asleep all day,” he said. “At the end of the day, or a particular point in the day, it came to life, and it ran through the message store from the point it last finished. It started at a watermark from yesterday and combed through every transaction in the message store, up until the next watermark.
>“A lot of the messages in there were nonsense, because there was no data dictionary, there was no API that enforced message integrity. The contents of the message were freehand, you could write whatever you wanted in the code, and everybody did it differently. And then, when you came back three weeks later, you could write it differently again.”
And down further
>Speaking to Computer Weekly in 2015, the anonymous source told us: “The asynchronous system did not communicate in real time, but does so using a series of messages that are stored and forwarded, when the network connection is available. This means that messages to and from the centre may trip over each other. It is perfectly possible that, if not treated properly, messages from the centre may overwrite data held locally.”
>Four years later, former Fujitsu engineer Richard Roll wrote in a witness statement to the High Court: “The issues with coding in the Horizon system were extensive. Furthermore, the coding issues impacted on transaction data and caused financial discrepancies on the Horizon system at branch level.”
BUT the most important part
>So far, nobody at the Post Office or Fujitsu has been held accountable
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure I'd take action based on what someone who makes fancy dress/theatrical clothes suggests tbh.
What is this in reference to? Edit: I get it.
I think he/she meant customer, I found the idea of someone who makes fancy dress giving technical feedback amusing.
>For the first 10 years of Horizon’s existence, transaction and account data was stored on terminals in each branch before being uploaded to a central database via ISDN. Our source says this part of the system simply did not work.
>“The cash account was a piece of software that sat on the counter NT box, asleep all day,” he said. “At the end of the day, or a particular point in the day, it came to life, and it ran through the message store from the point it last finished. It started at a watermark from yesterday and combed through every transaction in the message store, up until the next watermark.
>“A lot of the messages in there were nonsense, because there was no data dictionary, there was no API that enforced message integrity. The contents of the message were freehand, you could write whatever you wanted in the code, and everybody did it differently. And then, when you came back three weeks later, you could write it differently again.”
And down further
>Speaking to Computer Weekly in 2015, the anonymous source told us: “The asynchronous system did not communicate in real time, but does so using a series of messages that are stored and forwarded, when the network connection is available. This means that messages to and from the centre may trip over each other. It is perfectly possible that, if not treated properly, messages from the centre may overwrite data held locally.”
>Four years later, former Fujitsu engineer Richard Roll wrote in a witness statement to the High Court: “The issues with coding in the Horizon system were extensive. Furthermore, the coding issues impacted on transaction data and caused financial discrepancies on the Horizon system at branch level.”
BUT the most important part
>So far, nobody at the Post Office or Fujitsu has been held accountable
Software is in the walls. At some point legislators are going to come and ask the question how we stop things like this happening and if the Fujitsu's of the world don't have an answer then we can expect regulation that will likely embed practices that don't help. I don't think we take software reliability seriously enough, most of our focus is on speed of release, ever quicker cycles and it being OK to break things.…
Software doesn't exist in a vacuum and software will never be perfect. Trying to solve systematic problems by holding one part to impossible standards will just make things worse rather than better.
"In December 2019, at the end of a long-running series of civil cases, the Post Office agreed to settle with 555 claimants."
So settlements in 555 of the original 700+ prosecutions.
"It accepted it had previously "got things wrong in [its] dealings with a number of postmasters", and agreed to pay £58m in damages. The claimants received a share of £12m, after legal fees were paid."
But 80% of the settlement money went to lawyers. Ugh.
There's no way this is true.
> There were more than 700 prosecutions based on Horizon evidence. The commission and the Post Office are asking anyone else who believes their conviction to be unsafe to come forward.
On second thought, I guess it may be, since even after the abuse was proven they are still holding innocent people on false charges.