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Computer said so and they blindly followed. Offshoring victims :(
same with facial recognition. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/technology/facial-recogni...
The security photo is directly viewable by the police and the accused.
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These people need to be paid massive compensation for having their lives ruined, paid for by whoever did such a bad job on this system.
It's far worse than just having bugs - they knew there were bugs and covered it up even when they knew what impact it was having. That's the bit I find genuinely shocking.
Part of which was caused the very "antagonistic" IB or SD like the US postal Inspectors.
There was a bit guilty by suspicion tendency that went on and I suspect some of this culture was embedded in the organisation.
Certainly having yourself or your staff investigated by SD was considered very stressful even after the "bad old days"
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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.
This is the proof that how we write software is inherently wrong, if we allow innocent lives to be destroyed because we don't want to write it differently. Imagine not doing inspections of new building construction because it would be costly.
No, the problem is greater than that. Decisions that affect people should not be made solely by computers or algorithms, and those decisions should be made transparent and auditable. If that leads to different/better ways of writing software, good. It's a larger societal issue though.
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.
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These people need to be paid massive compensation for having their lives ruined, paid for by whoever did such a bad job on this system.
It's far worse than just having bugs - they knew there were bugs and covered it up even when they knew what impact it was having. That's the bit I find genuinely shocking.
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…
As the post office is such an old organisation (350 years), it used to have its own armed guard, has its own investigations branch and conducts its own prosecutions. The police wouldn't get involved because the post office was considered to have jurisdiction. Taken from this, which is a great listen: https://soundcloud.com/privateeyenews/page-94-the-private-ey...
I said this is just like if the police where investigating your for murder and I was told ah well in the bad old days people used to fall down stairs on occasion
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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.
They can actually use formal methods to prove that their software is bug free. This technique is often used in safety-critical systems to ensure that they function as-specified. As long as the specification is correct, the software system should perform to specification under all input conditions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_methods We should consider the cost of QA and of engineering process against the cos…
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Both. It's very well geared towards maintaining a certain standard of quality and predictable project throughput in rather well defined projects, and it certainly makes the job easier in procurement, but it's totally detached from what the SWE world is outside of that. I can see the point of such models in certain areas, like military, aerospace, naval, or, to stay on topic, Horizon, where dev is outsourced, somewhat…
They had a good idea, but they applied "old world" thinking to it. The single biggest issue with software development, is that it is incredibly dynamic. Static solutions don't work, and CMMI is a very static solution. Sadly, a lot of quality practices are static. Dynamic solutions are really difficult to get right, and tend to depend on a lot of hard-to-quantify variables, like the experience and talents of individua…