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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’

#211

Post by wizzard »

lbriner wrote: post #160
arethuza wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that £59,000 was actually stolen but that the accused received the money. There was no evidence that the post masters charged ever had the money in their possession!

What you are both arguing doesn't match up with the facts. It was proved beyond reasonable doubt multiple times. The "proof", (which we now know was flawed) was that the system had shown that what they had sold didn't tally with what was sent to the Post Office, to refute that proof, the defence have to show another plausible explanation. Yes, if they could have proved they also received what was stolen, that would h…

> Yes, if they could have proved they also received what was stolen, that would have been a slam dunk but there are enough plausible reasons why they can't find the money. Maybe it was given to friends and family as cash, maybe it was used to gamble or to pay off some criminal.

If this was one or two cases, then sure, maybe they were really smart about hiding the money. However, there were hundreds of convictions. What is the more likely explanation?

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

#212

Post by moomin »

coldcode wrote: post #146
haunter wrote: post #46

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,…

Is there no legal support for challenging the source code of the product in the UK?

There’s barely any legal support at all these days. That’s what all that “tough on crime” and “stop waste” nonsense in newspapers gets you: large chunks of the criminal justice system barely work anymore.

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

#213

Post by ClumsyPilot »

himinlomax wrote: post #175
jschwartzi wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Formal methods require a comprehensive specification. Usually, if you have a specification comprehensive enough for formal verification, you already have 90% of the benefits, which is why it's (so far) only really useful in safety critical applications with a very small scope. I'm not going to take a huge risk in betting that the postal service didn't have anything resembling a serious spec in this case.

Thats fine, but if they choose to handle money with a joke app, they should eat the losses

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

#214

Post by rgblambda »

jonplackett wrote: post #172
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…

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.

>>paid for by whoever did such a bad job on this system.

Blame whoever signed off on the system. Can't fix bugs that aren't reported.

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

#215

Post by 8note »

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…

I think the bugs left in by the SV culture are less important than the one they do fix.

The most important bug is that the software doesn't solve the problem that you have. It doesn't matter how reliably it doesn't solve your problem

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

#216

Post by ClumsyPilot »

lbriner wrote: post #160
arethuza wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that £59,000 was actually stolen but that the accused received the money. There was no evidence that the post masters charged ever had the money in their possession!

What you are both arguing doesn't match up with the facts. It was proved beyond reasonable doubt multiple times. The "proof", (which we now know was flawed) was that the system had shown that what they had sold didn't tally with what was sent to the Post Office, to refute that proof, the defence have to show another plausible explanation. Yes, if they could have proved they also received what was stolen, that would h…

"The "proof", ..what they had sold didn't tally with what was sent to the Post Office"

Post office looses packages all the time, should someone go to jail for that too?

If their stuff doesn't tally, they are disorganised, they loose stuff or have idiots. Thats their problem. Maybe it's post office employees stealing shit.

Why do we immediately assume postmasters have abything to do with it without a shred of evidence?

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

#217

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

lupire wrote: post #200
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe don't use an "incredibly dynamic system" as evidence in criminal cases, then.

Yup.

AI is gonna pour rocket fuel on this stuff. There's already a great deal of talk about replacing lawyers with AI.

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

#218

Post by lupire »

simonh wrote: post #84
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.

What job has 3.5% rate of criminal prosecutions, with 0 eyewitness evidence?

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

#219

Post by DaedPsyker »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #96
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, bu…

BBC (broadcast so don't have link) said that under the previous CEO that an investigation was shelved into the accusations. Given the number of accusations I have to wonder if there was a cover-up.

Jail sentences, bankruptcy and suicide has been caused, management that oversaw this need to face prosecution.

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

#220

Post by throwaway823882 »

heraclius wrote: post #208
throwaway823882 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Voting isn't even that important. The wrong guy gets picked, what happens? Same bullshit as if the right guy got picked. If voting is unimportant, why do you care about racist requirements for physical ID cards? Perhaps there might be some sort of connexion between the two!

It's more important that you are able to participate than what the result is. Better to have an insecure system where 10 million people get to vote, than a secure system where only 10 people get to vote.
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