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UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’

theguardian.com

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Re: UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’

#81

Post by viraptor »

cabernal wrote: post #64

This and the John Deere bug posted earlier make me a bit concerned over the accumulating evidence of unreliable software ruining people's lives... What can be done? Mandatory audits, pen testing? If this is an organizational problem, more vacation? limiting overtime? rethinking employee incentives?

> What can be done?

Not taking software results as a fact. Software report stating X in court should be equivalent to "the person who wrote this in a hurry would say X, but it's not a sworn testimony".

We should have the person presenting any report like that be personally responsible for the contents. If they aren't willing, it shouldn't be presented.

Re: UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’

#82

Post by ccsnags »

lupire wrote: post #60
PaulKeeble wrote: post #35

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.…

Throwing innocent people on jail based on lies (with bonus, corrupt government officials colluding with foreign entities) is the problem here, not software bugs.

Software bugs happen. The trick is to have proper management of the release that takes into account the inevitability of bugs while incentivizing bugs to be identified and fixed without the stakeholders of the project being in a position to have to defend a project as if it is perfect.

I cannot imagine how it must have felt being under the boot of an entire government and it’s corporate partners due to a bug. This is why we are important. A poorly managed IT system with bad incentives puts lives in danger. It is a literal threat to the safety of society. This cannot be stressed enough.

Re: UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’

#84

Post by simonh »

lupire wrote: post #56

The idea that 700 people in the same job were all committing the same crime and constantly getting caught is insane. This is a perfect example of Orwell's description of fascist Britain, where the people are made slaves of the state.

Over several years and 20,000 post office branches it's not a huge percentage. I suppose they assumed the new system was revealing corruption that had gone unnoticed under the previous system. That's in no way an excuse or justification for the knowing, deliberate suppression of evidence that went on here.

Re: UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’

#85

Post by vanilla-almond »

Repeating this comment that I posted yesterday...it is unfair?

Will any developers involved in this horrible scandal ever will be held accountable for their work?

I wonder if the developers who were responsible for such a bug-infested piece of software realise their work has destroyed people's lives? (They presumably never met the users of their software or were so distant from end-users that they never considered the consequences of their actions.)

Do those developers even realise it was their incompetence that caused untold misery? Or are they completely detached from the events in this scandal and see themselves as simply cogs in the 'system' and thus blameless?

Blame must be apportioned to management. But also I feel it's too easy as a developer to see yourself as part of a team and thus absolved of any individual blame. You're subsumed in the "team" - and ultimately no-one takes responsibly.

Even with management at fault, one cannot deny that it was the developers who produced absolute garbage.

I hope the developers who worked on this system, no matter how much they feel they are not responsible for the failure of this project, will reflect on how the impact of software they built had devastating consequences on people's lives.

Re: UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’

#86

Post by Mauricebranagh »

haunter wrote: post #43

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252496560/Fujitsu-bosses... >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,…

Written from the POV of a former BT billing systems developer - The system was designed (fucking badly) before the widespread existence of ADSL.

This is what happens when you outsource core financial systems to low cost bidders with dubious tech chops building a message queue system is not fraking rocket science at this point.

Back when I worked on the ground up billing system for Telecom Gold (aka Dialcom) we did this as the existing mish mash of dodgy code that Dialcom offered (Sorry Eric) was not up to standard.

We had large amounts of internal auditing built in and we tracked discrepancies to the Penny.

Re: UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’

#87

Post by quercusa »

Uberphallus wrote: post #78
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This culture ruined these peoples lives. Things must change. This isn't a unique issue to Fujitsu it is something most of the software industry is doing, this story could be about just about any piece of software. Damn straight. I'm really big on software Qualit…

It's been 15 years since I've seen CMMI mentioned, and I was glad I hadn't.

Do you object to CMM as a model or just the CMMI/9001 industry?

Re: UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’

#88

Post by Mauricebranagh »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #74
haunter wrote: post #43

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252496560/Fujitsu-bosses... >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,…

The crappy state of rural UK broadband (circa 2010) is proudly on display here. ref: https://www.ingenia.org.uk/Ingenia/Articles/c05470e5-337f-4b... Maybe the FCC went all NYPD-World-Police on the UK - popped over there to run things for a while.

Didn't have BB back then - this is the sort of application D Chanel was designed for.

Re: UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’

#90

Post by Silhouette »

mnw21cam wrote: post #40
PaulKeeble wrote: post #35

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.…

I still think https://xkcd.com/2030/ has to be taken seriously. You can put a whole load of verification effort into your software, which will undoubtedly make it more reliable. But you are still likely to have some kind of corner case where it breaks down. Software is complex enough for this to be universally true. The key is how we respond when the software fails. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 case sh…

The key is how we respond when the software fails.

I agree, but if the first step to solving a problem is understanding that it exists then the first principle here must be to acknowledge that software systems are fallible and therefore any surprising or reasonably contested result they produce should be treated with proper caution until further information can be gathered.

So many of the problems we see when modern technology goes wrong start with assuming it didn't. At that point, it's not even about how you respond to the failure, because you're denying that the failure ever happened. Big software companies with considerable lobbying power seem to be particularly good at convincing people who aren't technical experts, including most politicians, judges, juries and reporters, that this is the case.

A corollary to this is that we desperately need more technological awareness among our politicians, lawyers, journalists and other relevant professions. Tech has become too big to be a minor issue you delegate to some random advisor in a basement office. It affects almost everything we do today, sometimes profoundly, and failing to understand that will inevitably lead to some horrible outcomes as we've seen all too vividly today.

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