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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’

#161

Post by cletus »

throwaway823882 wrote: post #151
cletus wrote: post #136

The first bizarre part to me about this fiasco is that accounting, as a discipline, is one that is designed to catch errors. Put it another way: it assumes errors will occur. This is why in shops, for example, you'll have manual stocktaking (ie let's verify what's in the store is what the computer thinks is in the store) and in any business you'll have reconciliation processes to find and remedy errors. This highligh…

> electronic voting should be outlawed Nationally regulated, sure. Verified with a physical copy (or a different system), sure. But banned altogether? You might as well ban everything in the world that is digital , as none of them are fool-proof. Voting isn't even that important. The wrong guy gets picked, what happens? Same bullshit as if the right guy got picked. If your choices are "Hitler" or "Jesus", then your s…

If you vote on a touch screen and it prints out a paper ballot, that's fine as long as that's a legible ballot, like not just a QR code or something. The voter should have confidence in the output.

Likewise, if you use a pen or pencil to fill out a ballot that then is counted electronically, that too is fine.

In both cases there's a paper ballot as a source of truth and that's what's key.

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

#162

Post by michaelt »

Rexxar wrote: post #126
mnw21cam wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree with the sentiment but the example taken for software in this xkcd is wrong. There is a fundamental problem of trust when using software for voting systems that is not linked to the reliability of software but to the nature of voting systems and the properties we want.

Well, there are two problems and which is the fundamental one depends on your prior assumptions.

Some would say it's impossible to build a secure electronic voting system, even if your supplier and their employees were completely trustworthy because between physical tampering, state-level adversaries, the state of the art in software development and the impossibility of proving a negative, such security has never been seen before.

In other words, that it's an unsolvable technical problem.

Others would say it's impossible to build a secure electronic voting system even if we were capable of creating flawless bug-free and tamper-proof software and hardware because the supplier will always be able to introduce undetectable bugs if they want to, and no supplier can ever be perfectly trustworthy.

In other words, that it's an unsolvable social problem.

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

#163

Post by srswtf123 »

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

If the problem is the software, then use less software. Perhaps we shouldn't simply take it as a given that moving processes into software isn't always the right move?

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

#164

Post by handelaar »

Of course it's Fujitsu, purveyor of nearly every nonfunctional hit-and-run government IT contract in the UK and Ireland.

As far as I can gather this malignancy escapes permanent legal destruction primarily by shedding all of its staff every 20 minutes

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

#166

Post by pmichaud »

LatteLazy wrote: post #144
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…

While I agree more broadly, you cannot expect the Post Office to prove a negative. How would they prove conclusively that the software had no bugs at all under any circumstances? That's a pretty steep QA bill imho.

Sure, I can agree with that — it’s way too hard to prove a big system isn’t buggy. So then you also can’t use its output as evidence in court, right? You have to have other evidence that you can prove isn’t faulty. Can’t have it both ways.

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

#167

Post by quacked »

avs733 wrote: post #159
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…

Or breathalyzer convictions in the us...where charges are often dismissed if a subpoena for the code is granted

Do you have a source for that? I'd believe it immediately, but I'd like to be able to spread it around.

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

#168

Post by rectang »

rlpb wrote: post #130
lbriner wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of "normal" people like the idea of holding corporates accountable but how would that actually work? The CEO blames one of their directors; the Director blames the supplier; the supplier blames the requirements documentation; the Business Analysts blame the culture for creating confusing and conflicting requirements. Yes, you can hold the organisation accountable but then the people who worked there bac…

> I think a lot of "normal" people like the idea of holding corporates accountable but how would that actually work? Exactly which specific problem is "holding corporates accountable" trying to fix? If it's that postmasters were being falsely convicted, then the way to fix that is to raise the burden of proof significantly. I hope this case has done that, and next time a court will not accept "computer says so". With…

No, it is not sufficient.

The problem is that it is possible to design malicious systems which through incentives, ensure that illegal acts will take place, yet only low-level actors are ever punished. The people who architected the systems and made the decisions statistically guaranteeing illegal activity escape punishment through plausible deniability and abscond with their ill-gotten gains.

Besides this scandal, see the failure to punish any executives after the 2007 crash, or Carrie Tolstedt and John Stumpf of Wells Fargo who even after clawbacks retired tens of millions of dollars ahead, etc.

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

#169

Post by davidhyde »

LatteLazy wrote: post #144
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…

While I agree more broadly, you cannot expect the Post Office to prove a negative. How would they prove conclusively that the software had no bugs at all under any circumstances? That's a pretty steep QA bill imho.

Agreed that you cannot expect the Post Office to prove a negative but, if they cannot prove a negative, they should not be able to use their computer system as evidence of theft and fraud. Especially if this is the only evidence they have.

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

#170

Post by fitblipper »

quacked wrote: post #167
avs733 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or breathalyzer convictions in the us...where charges are often dismissed if a subpoena for the code is granted

Do you have a source for that? I'd believe it immediately, but I'd like to be able to spread it around.

Me to! Please share. :)
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