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The presumption that computers are working correctly

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Re: The presumption that computers are working correctly

#11

Post by tivert »

phire wrote: post #7

As a programmer, it's my experience that the computer itself usually works correctly. It's almost never a hardware bug. But software.... software gets things wrong all the time and the computer hardware just blindly does what the software told it to.

> As a programmer, it's my experience that the computer itself usually works correctly. It's almost never a hardware bug.

> But software.... software gets things wrong all the time and the computer hardware just blindly does what the software told it to.

That's not a distinction that's relevant to this article. By "computer" it means a system composed of hardware and software (and which is almost always what "computer" is used to mean):

> The presumption that computers are presumed to be operating correctly, unless there is evidence to the contrary is what lawyers call “a presumption of evidence”.

> This means that a court can be satisfied that a relevant fact can be established just by computer records, unless there is evidence that the computer is not working properly.

> And so when the computer record shows, for instance, a financial shortfall by postmaster or postmistress, the court will accept that as evidence of an actual shortfall - unless the defendant can show that the computer was not operating correctly.

> In short, when the computer record is the essence of a prosecution case: computer says guilty.

Re: The presumption that computers are working correctly

#12

Post by suzzer99 »

This is the first I've heard of this scandal. I'm curious what the major problems were with the software that caused the discrepancies. Dropped connections? Wikipedia didn't go into much detail with that.

Ok I found this: https://www.benthamsgaze.org/2021/07/15/what-went-wrong-with...

Re: The presumption that computers are working correctly

#13

Post by qingcharles »

jfoutz wrote: post #8

How does that work? I'm not a lawyer. I'm a lazy programmer. So, does the defense get to subpoena the logs, and depose a programmer to explain why some random request returned a 502? Does the defense get, like, red team access? Although I'm a lazy programmer, I do think a lot about failure modes. If my freedom is on the line, I can probably think up a few (orders of magnitude) test cases. Happy to provide a shell scr…

In the US at least it is hard to bring source code into the trial, even though you technically have a right.

I remember one case where the FBI installed malware via a browser exploit on thousands of computers to get their IPs and one defendant tried to get the source code but the government managed to keep it secret.

Re: The presumption that computers are working correctly

#14

Post by User23 »

phire wrote: post #7

As a programmer, it's my experience that the computer itself usually works correctly. It's almost never a hardware bug. But software.... software gets things wrong all the time and the computer hardware just blindly does what the software told it to.

What do you mean by works correctly? By what standard do you say the software gets things wrong? After all it's an indisputable fact that computers only ever do exactly what you tell them to.

Re: The presumption that computers are working correctly

#15

Post by thaumasiotes »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #9
phire wrote: post #7

As a programmer, it's my experience that the computer itself usually works correctly. It's almost never a hardware bug. But software.... software gets things wrong all the time and the computer hardware just blindly does what the software told it to.

It does happen to Hardware. Here are two older examples: “The Intel Pentium series of CPUs had two well-known bugs discovered after it was brought to market, the FDIV bug affecting floating point division which resulted in a recall in 1994, and the F00F bug discovered in 1997 which causes the processor to stop operating until rebooted.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_bug

> and the F00F bug discovered in 1997 which causes the processor to stop operating until rebooted

You reminded me of the Things I Won't Work With piece that observed in passing that the behavior of dioxygen difluoride was surprisingly well described by its chemical formula. ( https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-wor... )

Re: The presumption that computers are working correctly

#16

Post by User23 »

topspin wrote: post #6

"Code is law." -Lawrence Lessig The UK apparently made that explicit. Doubtless others have as well: if we could forego the flag waving and whataboutery, That Would Be Great (tm).

Lawrence Lessig's greatest claim to fame is handing Disney and friends unlimited copyright before the Supreme Court.

I'd hold up Judge Alsup if I wanted to give an example of a tech saavy legal practitioner.

Re: The presumption that computers are working correctly

#17

Post by albert_e »

User23 wrote: post #14
phire wrote: post #7

As a programmer, it's my experience that the computer itself usually works correctly. It's almost never a hardware bug. But software.... software gets things wrong all the time and the computer hardware just blindly does what the software told it to.

What do you mean by works correctly? By what standard do you say the software gets things wrong? After all it's an indisputable fact that computers only ever do exactly what you tell them to.

> After all it's an indisputable fact that computers only ever do exactly what you tell them to.

too broad a generalization i think.

who told these computers to do what they did?

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20221011-how-space-weathe....

Re: The presumption that computers are working correctly

#18

Post by di4na »

suzzer99 wrote: post #12

This is the first I've heard of this scandal. I'm curious what the major problems were with the software that caused the discrepancies. Dropped connections? Wikipedia didn't go into much detail with that. Ok I found this: https://www.benthamsgaze.org/2021/07/15/what-went-wrong-with...

It is one of the biggest scandal of our time related to software. I ... want to recommend learning more about it but only do so with a strong stomach.

Numerous people that rabbithole into this case end up running to a nearby bucket. It is... not pretty.

Re: The presumption that computers are working correctly

#20

Post by murderfs »

phire wrote: post #7

As a programmer, it's my experience that the computer itself usually works correctly. It's almost never a hardware bug. But software.... software gets things wrong all the time and the computer hardware just blindly does what the software told it to.

As a programmer that works on drivers, it's my experience that hardware almost never works correctly. "We'll fix it in software" might as well be the official motto of the hardware industry.
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