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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’

#101

Post by Chris2048 »

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?

Standards. Just say certain things, payment systems, need to meet certain levels of auditability (does it record all relevant data, and can I see them after the fact), verification (is the data correct and can I prove that) and privacy.

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

#102

Post by robertlagrant »

lupire wrote: post #61
tyingq wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The percentage isn't the problem" I disagree. Even the ambulance chasers here in the U.S. take around 40% as their contingency fee. 80% is just...wow. Edit: "ambulance chasers" in this context means very opportunistic lawyers that are primarily motivated by money, and not helping their clients. I don't see how that term is disparaging any victims/clients. The comparison is that even outright greedy lawyers aren't ta…

You're comparing apples to oranges. "Ambulance chasers" (a terrible slur that looks down on weak victims pursuing justice), offer their services in a competitive market. If they charge too much, again, that should be determined by having a separate pool for fees separate from damages, and be a dispute between the perpetrator and the lawyer, not the victim and the lawyer. The cost of the legal work is uncorrelated to…

> a terrible slur that looks down on weak victims pursuing justice

No, you've misunderstood entirely.

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

#104

Post by robertlagrant »

DanBC wrote: post #55

https://www.judiciary.uk/judgments/hamilton-others-v-post-of... The judgment is blistering.

The previous judgements sent lots of people to jail, so let's not congratulate the criminal justice system very much.

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

#105

Post by himinlomax »

kristjankalm wrote: post #16

This is unreal. Shitty software sending people to prison without anyone in the process considering what exactly is the likelihood of hundreds of postmasters simultaneously becoming thieves overnight.

This reminds me of what happened after 9/11, the fear of dirty bomb was all the rage so the US government deployed a network of Geiger counters. They arrested a number of dangerous dirty bombers, all of whom were cancer patients spotted by the detector at the subway station nearest Johns Hopkins radiation treatment facility.

It took weeks to fix the problem.

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

#107

Post by Silhouette »

viraptor wrote: post #81
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.

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.

I don't think making it personal works at scale. You can't reasonably expect everyone giving evidence in court, say every individual police officer who is a witness to a speeding offence, to be a technical expert on the technological tools they are given to do their job.

Instead, as you implied in the previous paragraph, the weight given to any evidence derived from technology should be proportionate to the credibility of that technology. If it's a device that has to be vetted and approved according to strict regulatory standards and in court there are two other concurring sources of evidence, that's clearly a much stronger case than a single reading from a single device whose calibration has reasonably been called into question at trial that is being presented as the only evidence in that trial.

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

#108

Post by dd82 »

robk wrote: post #100
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 :(

same with facial recognition.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/technology/facial-recogni...

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

#110

Post by vageli »

throwaway210222 wrote: post #79
serial_dev wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/…

"software developers… need to have an "oath", like the hippocratic oath." More importantly, the employers of software engineers must have ZERO option to emply a software engineer (anywhere on earth) that doesn't have the same oath. Doctors have a monospony on their services that makes their oath work: the hospital manager cannot just go hire un-oathed doctors. Never going to happen in software. Ever.

The practice of medicine was not a licensed endeavor at its inception, and that changed over time. With that in mind, what makes you say "Never going to happen in software. Ever."?
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