At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says
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Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says
#2Some context:
"How a software glitch at the UK Post Office ruined lives" - 2024 | 331 comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39010070
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says
#3Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says
#4[deleted]
Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says
#5 Another post office operator, Seema Misra, was pregnant when she was sent to prison. She said in testimony that the local newspaper had published a photo of her and labeled her the "pregnant thief." While she was in prison, her husband was beaten up and subjected to racist insults, she testified.
Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says
#6[flagged]
Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says
#7I have followed this scandal quite closely over the years, and these two quotations sum it up. Pretty sad:
"The report alleges that even before the program was rolled out in 1999, some Fujitsu employees knew that Horizon could produce false data."
"As the years went by the complaints grew louder and more persistent [...] Still the Post Office trenchantly resisted the contention that on occasions Horizon produced false data."
Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says
#8To the NY Times: please don't say they died by suicide. The passive voice makes it sound like some act of God, something regrettable but unavoidable that just somehow happened. It's important not to sugarcoat what happened: the postmasters killed themselves because the British state was imprisoning them for crimes they didn't commit, based on evidence from a buggy financial accounting system. Don't blur the details of what happened by making it sound like a natural disaster.
Horizon is the case that should replace Therac-25 as a study in what can go wrong if software developers screw up. Therac-25 injured/killed six people, Horizon has ruined hundreds of lives and ended dozens. And the horrifying thing is, Horizon wasn't something anyone would have previously identified as safety-critical software. It was just an ordinary point-of-sale and accounting system. The suicides weren't directly caused by the software, but from an out of control justice and social system in which people blindly believed in public institutions that were actually engaged in a massive deep state cover-up.
It is reasonable to blame the suicides on the legal and political system that allowed the Post Office to act in that way, and which put such low quality people in charge. Perhaps also on the software engineer who testified repeatedly under oath that the system worked fine, even as the bug tracker filled up with cases where it didn't. But this is HN, so from a software engineering perspective what can be learned?
Some glitches were of their time and wouldn't occur these days, e.g. malfunctions in resistive touch screens that caused random clicks on POS screens to occur overnight. But most were bugs due to loss of transactionality or lack of proper auditing controls. Think message replays lacking proper idempotency, things like that. Transactions were logged that never really occurred, and when the cash was counted some appeared to be missing, so the Post Office accused the postmasters of stealing from the business. They hadn't done so, but this took place over decades, and decades ago people had more faith in institutions than they do now. And these post offices were often in small villages where the post office was the center of the community, so the false allegations against postmasters were devastating to their social and business lives.
Put simply - check your transactions! And make sure developers can't rewrite databases in prod.
Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says
#9Suicide is a verb and result by itself. Would the author also say “he died by murder”?
Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says
#10What a horrible story.
What can you do when you know you are innocent but the court trusts the software more than it trusts people? And you are asked to repay something you never stole which off course leads to your financial ruin/divorce/... your kids bullied because you as a parent were deemed a thief... Imagine your spouse leaving you because of something you didn't even do...
Someone absolutely needs to go to jail over this. This kind of software is supposed to go through a lengthy compliance and certification process, so clearly whatever person put their signature on that "certified" document is responsible for these death.