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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’

#251

Post by simplerman »

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.

This won't change until executives go to jail.

A few years ago, we were fighting against tight deadline and skipping unit tests, QA, processes, etc. Someone brought up one of the recent major breach (Equifax?). Developers started to say that people will go to jail. Basically, devs were using this breach to imply that they will personal responsibility for releasing a product that might have security flaws. Our director laughed and said no one will go to jail and if our product ever got in trouble, they will personally take responsibility.

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

#253

Post by justincormack »

jschwartzi wrote: post #153
LatteLazy wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That wasn't the issue. Fujitsu, who operated the system, had access to post office branch systems with full access, but this was denied. The postmasters were prosecuted individually without good enough representation. The 2019 judgement is a good read about how the prosecutions happened and how the evidence was presented [1]. Really, formal methods and bugs were not issues, this was a system with humans in and someone decided that some of the humans should be blamed for issues, because the balance of power let them.

[1] https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/bates-v-...

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

#254

Post by justincormack »

cmsefton wrote: post #39

Private Eye magazine (a satirical investigative news magazine) has covered this for many years, and have an excellent report for anyone interested: https://www.private-eye.co.uk/pictures/special_reports/justi... [PDF] Glad to see them finally have their names cleared, and can only hope prosecutions will follow as a result, utterly shameful how the Post Office, Fujitsu and others behaved. For example: > A Fujitsu prog…

The judgement is a good (long) read https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/bates-v-...

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

#255

Post by mcguire »

_vertigo wrote: post #203
jonplackett wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 really not about the bugs. The bugs were unfortunate, but bugs happen. The problem is taking the word of the system at face value and not investigating further even when dozens of people's livelihood and freedom are hanging in the balance. Oh, and also the bit about spending 2 decades covering everything up and trying to clamp down on the investigation rather than admitting you got it wrong, once again at the ex…

"It's really not about the bugs. The bugs were unfortunate, but bugs happen."

Once upon a time, computer programming attempted to be a profession. Fortunately for all of us who write code for a living, we no longer have to live under the threat of that responsibility.

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

#256

Post by mcguire »

wutbrodo wrote: post #187
throwaway823882 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. I think there's a lot of room for writing software better, including expanded source access for public systems and formal verification when critical. But the failure in this case isn't technical, it's legal. It's rational to decide that occasional bugs in a mail…

As long as none of the blame goes to the programmers, we're all good.

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

#257

Post by hermitcrab »

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.

I have also recently subscribed to Private Eye - mostly because there is now so little other investigative journalism going on in the UK that I think they deserve some support (the main papers are nearly all owned by billionaire mates of the Conservative Party). It is also quite funny.

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

#258

Post by hermitcrab »

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…

Some of these postmasters died before being able to clear their names. It is a huge miscarriage of justice and a national disgrace. I don't suppose any of the guilty parties will be punished though.

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

#259

Post by giantg2 »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #247
deepspace wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The breathalyser issue is immensely frustrating. In the few cases where the software has been allowed to be examined, they found egregious bugs. Not to mention that the one-size-fits-all measurement model is inaccurate for people outside a very narrow metabolic range. The trouble is that if you speak up about it, people ask: "why are you defending drunk drivers?" It's like innocent until proven guilty flies out the w…

All sorts of police field tests have significant rates of false positives. People actually get arrested on the basis of such "evidence" all the time. The justice and law enforcement systems essentially operate on the notion that these things are "good enough".

I've just recently had a trooper make 4 "mistakes" in court and in official reports. One of which I believe was an outright lie. The system doesn't care. If this were any other witness they would be discredited, but because they are law enforcement, they get a free pass. The agencies won't even handle the complaints correctly or file this information as Guglio data for when future cases request it (if found to be unreliable they can lose thier job). The system actors (law enforcement and judicial) in most states have special privileges in keeping information private - so special in many cases that if a complaint against a judge turns up exculpatory evidence that you have no right to it. The reason they state is to uphold the integrity of, and the public trust in, the system. I would think transparency would do that better. The only way that transparency would hurt those objectives is when wrongdoing is ignored or the punishments are so lenient to offend the public sense of justice.

But hey, I'm just a stupid peon, so what do I know.

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

#260

Post by citrin_ru »

BillinghamJ wrote: post #9
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…

I'm very sure this system was certified in a multitude of ways. No certification process would prevent this. The real issue here was that Post Office refused to recognise that, although computers themselves are mostly infallible, computer programs are never infallible. They conducted their activities and took actions based on assuming the reporting was flawless. Then the really serious problem is that in cases where…

> although computers themselves are mostly infallible

What do you mean? Hardware is fallible too, just less often than software. This may cause problem on its own e. g. bit flips in non-ECC memory, HDD which lie (reply to flush cache before data is actually written) or HW can trigger software errors, e. g. HW can crash at random moment and SW can be not designed to handle this properly.

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