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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’

#231

Post by anonymousDan »

dignick wrote: post #138
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…

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...

They should be stripped of those powers immediately in my opinion. It's an anachronism and as been shown by this incident they are not fit for purpose.

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

#232

Post by spideymans »

raesene9 wrote: post #4

An (IMO) Interesting question is how to reduce the risks of things like this happening. Where evidence from IT systems is being used as a large part of a prosecution, it seems that it should have some kind of scrutiny as to how those systems operate. One option would be allowing the defence to see details of how the system works, testing that was done and known bugs, but that would require a lot of expensive work by…

>An (IMO) Interesting question is how to reduce the risks of things like this happening.

Corroborating evidence. In this case, where was the evidence that this money was ever in their possession? Was it ever sitting in their bank account? Was it buried in the back yard? Did they buy fancy sports cars or houses? The prospect of thousands of people stealing money without a trace of the cash is fantastical.

In general, I'd say electronic evidence should need to be corroborated with physical or other types of evidence to achieve a conviction. It's too easy for electronic records to be falsified, either through software bugs or outright malicious intent.

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

#233

Post by toyg »

Roonerelli wrote: post #177
dignick wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Really great work by Private Eye. They did all the investigation and broke the story. None of the big news outlets were on it at all

On internal UK news, there is nothing as good as Private Eye. Every two weeks they publish more “hard” material than newspapers do in a month. I’m a subscriber, the value for money is simply ridiculously good.

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

#234

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

Mauricebranagh wrote: post #192
arethuza wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unfortunately (As a sort of insider X BT ) the Postal side always had much worse employee relations. 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…

no idea what those acronyms mean. X BT? IB? SD? WTF?

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

#235

Post by da_chicken »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #224
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 proof of program correctness tends to require that the software's purpose lies in a very narrow, and extremely well-defined problem space. The _Horizon_ software in-question is a general-purpose line-of-business system, which presumably has to react to ever-changing business requirements - that's probably the hardest space to implement formal-methods in - with little benefit for doing-so precisely because requ…

You don't need a formal proof for the entire system as a whole. You could simply have a formal proof of specific functions of the software. Those functions which will have their data audited, for example.

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

#236

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

8note wrote: post #215
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

> The most important bug is that the software doesn't solve the problem that you have.

And we should add:

Unless we can't do so without introducing any additional problems, while solving that problem in a manner that truly solves it; as opposed to making it appear solved.

We really are often best off, with the problem, if the cure is worse than the disease.

When I was younger, we had a saying:

To err is human, but it takes a computer to really fuck things up.

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

#237

Post by dignick »

toyg wrote: post #233
Roonerelli wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really great work by Private Eye. They did all the investigation and broke the story. None of the big news outlets were on it at all

On internal UK news, there is nothing as good as Private Eye. Every two weeks they publish more “hard” material than newspapers do in a month. I’m a subscriber, the value for money is simply ridiculously good.

Same. I struggle to find time to get through each edition, but I don't mind paying the subscription to support quality journalism.

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

#238

Post by temporama1 »

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…

Any independent review would inevitably be done by the same type of "expert" that wrote the software in the first place.

No doubt it's some sprawling, insane Java monstrosity Manhattan project or suchlike.

"Yeah - 10,000 classes - completely fine and not crazy at all."

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

#239

Post by jjk166 »

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", (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

No, it claimed that what they had sold didn't tally, a claim they never proved. The defense put forward another plausible explanation - that the software was incorrect, and the prosecution obviously didn't prove the software was accurate.

Even if the computer was right and there was a genuine discrepancy in the tally, you then need to prove that this person was the one responsible for it. Certainly in this case, there couldn't possibly have been sufficient evidence to prove they were the ones that did it if it was never done to begin with. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, but it sure as hell isn't proof of presence.

In the "we found your DNA" analogy, you're finding my DNA in my workplace where nothing has actually gone missing - how does that prove I am guilty of theft?

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

#240

Post by skissane »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #234
Mauricebranagh wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately (As a sort of insider X BT ) the Postal side always had much worse employee relations. 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…

no idea what those acronyms mean. X BT? IB? SD? WTF?

X = ex-, as in formerly

BT = British Telecom. British telco, which used to be part of the government-owned Post Office, but was separated from it in 1981 and then privatised in 1984. The delivery services part of the Post Office (Royal Mail) was separately privatised in 2013; but the retail post office business (Post Office Ltd) remains under full government ownership, albeit most of the individual post offices are privately run by franchisees – and it was these franchisees who were being prosecuted

IB = Investigation Branch – https://www.postalmuseum.org/blog/the-post-office-investigat...

SD = Security Division

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