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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’

#91

Post by vlovich123 »

serial_dev wrote: post #68
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.…

> At some point legislators are going to come and ask the question how we stop things like this happening Bob Martin talks about it a lot, how the software developers of the world need to have an "oath", like the hippocratic oath. Two posts that summarize things well (but there might be more where he talks about these things) https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2011/01/17/software-cr... https://blog.cleancoder.com/…

An oath isn’t going to do anything without any way to enforce it legally. The Hippocratic oath is neat but the real teeth are in enforcement against malpractice like civil and criminal lawsuits and a licensing body. You see similar things for lawyers and certain engineers (in commonwealth countries “professional engineer” is a restricted title like Lawyer or MD). Note that just doing that won’t solve all problems either. These licensing bodies regularly publish enforcement actions, so malfeasance continues. Nominally they can help whistleblowers but, as with all regulatory bodies, there’s always a risk of regulatory capture making such actions still peril-filled.

Moreover it’s not even clear this particular work even fall under traditional definitions that would required a licensed engineer as those deal with public safety (bridge construction, buildings, etc) and something like this doesn’t really. We’d need an updated definition that takes into account the software needs of the world (privacy and security, etc).

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

#93

Post by robertlagrant »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #66
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 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…

Actually there's a huge amount of self policing. Engineers are the ones at the forefront of inventing and tooling more ways to test.

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

#94

Post by PaulKeeble »

serial_dev wrote: post #68
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.…

> At some point legislators are going to come and ask the question how we stop things like this happening Bob Martin talks about it a lot, how the software developers of the world need to have an "oath", like the hippocratic oath. Two posts that summarize things well (but there might be more where he talks about these things) https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2011/01/17/software-cr... https://blog.cleancoder.com/…

Doctors don't follow the hippocratic oath in practice, it just isn't a real consideration. If they did none of these covid long haulers or ME patients would have been tortured into worse conditions, nor would all those mentally ill patients have been locked up. Medicine treats the oath like software developers treat most best practices that reduce bug counts, as a nice to have but no one has time for.

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

#95

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

_0o6v wrote: post #70

A shocking injustice. Innocent people went to prison for years. There was clearly a cover up at Fujitsu and the Post Office, and those accountable should now be prosecuted.

I'd wager a stuck pig that Fujitsu was a major campaign contributor. If they still are, convictions are a lot less likely.

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

#96

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

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,…

That's not (even) the most important part.

The most important part is that the PO used these actions to claw back "stolen" money from its postmasters. This money appears to have ended up in its profit and loss account.

If true this means that instead of the postmasters stealing from the PO, the PO was stealing from its postmasters.

There's been at least one claim - in the Daily Telegraph, so questionably credible, but never mind - that a document exists proving that senior management were aware that the accusations against postmasters were untrue, but carried on regardless.

If that document exists it changes the narrative from accidental tech failure and management incomprehension to something less wholesome.

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

#98

Post by davidhyde »

Those postmasters defending charges of theft against them in the 2000s should not have had to prove that the computer system they were forced to use had bugs. In order to prosecute them in the first place, the Post Office should have had to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt and without risk of bias, that the computer system was correct. So, independent review at the very least, not testimony from parties with a vested interest in the outcome. This mess was as much a failure of the UK legal system as it was of the active efforts of the Post Office and Fujitsu to deceitfully protect their own interests above the postmasters affected.

It's like a murderer giving evidence against a random stranger and being believed at face value because they provided all the evidence first hand.

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

#99

Post by danpalmer »

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?

Pentesting and auditing aren't great solutions here. They can be useful on small scopes but a big system like this, it's unlikely to be hugely impactful – it will find things, but who knows if it finds enough.

In the UK in the wake of the 2008 banking crisis, a number of positions in banks became criminally liable for issues under them. If you're director-level or above (I think?) then you may be ultimately put in prison for negligence or issues like that which occur in your department. This is rare, not sure if it's been used yet, but it effected a cultural change in consumer banking as a bunch of execs suddenly had their necks on the line if someone under them did something wrong. I don't believe this is too hard-line in practice, I think a defence is "look at all these reasonable steps we take, we couldn't have foreseen this", but it had the impact (source, a good friend of mine is bordering on this level in a UK bank).

I wonder if a similar thing could work in a wider way across more industries - not with the intention of criminally punishing lots of people, but with the aim to change the culture around responsibility to the public and other stakeholders in the work that we do.

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

#100

Post by robk »

davidhyde wrote: post #98

Those postmasters defending charges of theft against them in the 2000s should not have had to prove that the computer system they were forced to use had bugs. In order to prosecute them in the first place, the Post Office should have had to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt and without risk of bias, that the computer system was correct. So, independent review at the very least, not testimony from parties with a veste…

Computer said so and they blindly followed. Offshoring victims :(
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