If you're in the UK, the Panorama documentary on this from 2022 is really worth watching - https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0016t20/panorama-the-...
British Post Office Scandal
11–20 of 153 posts
Re: British Post Office Scandal
#12It’s another example of the British establishment and media blaming “computer glitches” and “the system”. A buggy accounting system on its own cannot cause such a disaster, unlike a buggy avionics system or a Therac-25.
This scandal would not have happened if the people in power had rightly been skeptical of the output of an accounting system that had been called into disrepute by several employees.
People did this. People chose to prosecute. People lied. The courts accepted dodgy evidence. The scandal is the post office employees, the solicitors, the courts, and the Fujitsu employees, not the buggy accounting system. People took the output of an accounting system as though it had come down from a mountain on a stone tablet.
Re: British Post Office Scandal
#13My wife was watching the ITV drama on this last night and I had to leave the room. It was making me so incredibly angry that such huge injustices can be allowed to take place. I recommend the show to anyone with better control of their emotions that me!
I was just reading the other day that some MP was calling for those who were affected to have their names cleared. It's fucking astounding that this hasn't been a priority until the recent TV series on it has come out.
I understand this might look like complete b*llocks, but it seems they are not doing that because, despite the good aim in this specific case, would create a bad precedent.
The whole case, after so many years, is as ridiculous as it gets for a government scandal - I agree. At the same time, I kind of understand why this needs to be carefully thought as a legal manoeuvre.
Re: British Post Office Scandal
#14My wife was watching the ITV drama on this last night and I had to leave the room. It was making me so incredibly angry that such huge injustices can be allowed to take place. I recommend the show to anyone with better control of their emotions that me!
I was just reading the other day that some MP was calling for those who were affected to have their names cleared. It's fucking astounding that this hasn't been a priority until the recent TV series on it has come out.
This skandal is 6 years old. I find it hugely concerning that someone has to make a TV play that resonates with the public for politicians or anyone responsible really to show any interest in resolving this.
The current activities and proposals probably have to be seen as crowd management and might not be an honest attempt for a solution, again.
Re: British Post Office Scandal
#15Is there any actual technical report of what's wrong with the Horizon system? This feels like a weirdly long Wikipedia article that only touches on legal points and that somewhat lacks in real substance.
I don't know of any actual technical reports but this is interesting, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/09/how-the-post....
"One, named the “Dalmellington Bug”, after the village in Scotland where a post office operator first fell prey to it, would see the screen freeze as the user was attempting to confirm receipt of cash. Each time the user pressed “enter” on the frozen screen, it would silently update the record. In Dalmellington, that bug created a £24,000 discrepancy, which the Post Office tried to hold the post office operator responsible for."
https://clarotesting.wordpress.com/tag/dalmellingto-bug/
"The Dalmellington Bug entailed a user repeatedly hitting a key when the system froze as she was trying to acknowledge receipt of a consignment of £8,000 in cash. Unknown to her each time she struck the key she accepted responsibility for a further £8,000. The bug created a discrepancy of £24,000 for which she was held responsible."
Re: British Post Office Scandal
#16Is there any actual technical report of what's wrong with the Horizon system? This feels like a weirdly long Wikipedia article that only touches on legal points and that somewhat lacks in real substance.
There's some more detail here: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/09/how-the-post...
It only mentions a few bugs out of the hundreds that were discovered (a full list hasn't been published), but it appears that the bugs weren't the only issue:
> In 2015, for instance, the Post Office told the House of Commons inquiry: “There is no functionality in Horizon for either a branch, Post Office or Fujitsu to edit, manipulate or remove transaction data once it has been recorded in a branch’s accounts.” This was untrue, and the Post Office admitted as such four years later during a high court case.
> In fact, staff at Fujitsu, which made and operated the Horizon system, were capable of remotely accessing branch accounts, and had “unrestricted and unaudited” access to those systems, the inquiry heard.
It's truly a scandal that no-one in charge at the Post Office or Fujitsu has been prosecuted for providing false testimony that led to so much misery and death for the sub postmasters. The MET has finally started to investigate fraud and perjury charges which seems like they only bother investigating crimes that have been made into a popular four-part series.
Re: British Post Office Scandal
#17Is there any actual technical report of what's wrong with the Horizon system? This feels like a weirdly long Wikipedia article that only touches on legal points and that somewhat lacks in real substance.
I was curious for the same, and ended up reading this - https://em360tech.com/tech-article/post-office-scandal It seems like the classical mega-corp system issues: "These flaws included rounding errors, data corruption, and issues with synchronization between local and central databases."
I was listening to a programme about this on Radio 4 last night
it seems like, on top of the buggy software, Fujitsu had contractors logging in to Post Office systems to manually 'fix' accounting errors the buggy software had produced
one of them described how while they were logged in to the POS system it would appear to be working to the real user but would actually be doing nothing because it was in some kind of remote admin mode, seems like the sort of remediation that's likely to make things worse
sounded like a total shit show
Re: British Post Office Scandal
#18Is there any actual technical report of what's wrong with the Horizon system? This feels like a weirdly long Wikipedia article that only touches on legal points and that somewhat lacks in real substance.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/09/how-the-post... states "a full list [of bugs] has never been produced".
The article gives one example of a bug where the UI would freeze/get stuck, but still respond to key presses, so a user might think the system had crashed but press 'enter' repeatedly, which would silently create several records.
Re: British Post Office Scandal
#19In middle of this it's obscene how the media neglects to mention who did most of the actual investigative journalism: https://www.private-eye.co.uk/ -- for years on end, whilst the issue was ignored by the rest of the press.
They all now jump in on it and elide the years of work put in by the PE. This is a common tactic in media outlets, esp. here, for the major sources to try to "own" issues with nearly zero work put in on them.
Re: British Post Office Scandal
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly curious: can you expand a bit on why subscribe? I live in the UK, but never heard about Private Eye before?
Private Eye is a publication that Ian Hislop from Have I Got News For You edits. It's often quite funny, it tends to hold government, corporations and public figures to account much better than most newspapers. It's generally pretty good, but it's tarnished a bit by backing Andrew Wakefield when he made up the MMR/autism connection
Hislop quietly rolled back his Wakefield support, sadly not in a front page apology as he should have:
https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2010/feb/05/pri...
He may have been smitten by Heather Mills who was the journalistic driving force behind that crusade.
FWiW when I see Private Eye I still think Peter Cook.