I was curious so I looked into it: It looks like about 10x the average UK suicide rate (assuming "the worst case": all male, 40+ over about a decade. In reality some percentage of the about 1000 wrongfully accused will be female, of course).
At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says
301–310 of 585 posts
Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
The United States (famously) has stronger free speech protections and weaker libel/slander laws, yet seems to have less of an issue with tabloids. Is there maybe more of a divide between what's alloweable for "public figures" versus private citizens? Or maybe even our right-wing rags are more skeptical of the government? I don't know what the difference is, but you seem to see less of this sort of thing, gross as our…
The US tabloids are awful. Any checkout isle at a Walmart, Dollar General, etc is just littered with them, right next to the disposable lighter packs and chewing gum.
But nobody reads them in the US[1], and many are about celebrities or cryptids or what-have-you rather than current events or private citizens. There's definitely a cultural difference here.
[1] UK has 1/4th of the population of the US but The Sun has 4x the circulation of The New York Post. The Daily Mirror every day puts out 4x the number of papers that The National Enquirer puts out in a week.
Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says
#303Effectively tortured to death. One of the things that frustrates me with how ethics is taught in computer science is that we use examples like Therac 25, and people listen in horror, then their takeaway is frequently "well thank god I don't work on medical equipment". The fact that it's medical equipment is a distraction. All software can cause harm to others. All of it. You need to care about all of it.
Therac 25 is exactly what I thought of when reading this story. The software didn't have direct hardware control to kill patients with radiation, but it still resulted in thousands of victims.
Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why does it not make sense? If I was involved in a robbery at age 18, as a dumb kid, should I still be called "robber xyz" for the rest of my life? Especially if I turned my life around?
I agree that we should be forgiving, give people second chances etc, but that doesn't change the meaning of words. "Defamation" is when you damage someone's reputation by saying things about them that aren't true. If you were convicted of a crime long ago and someone draws attention to that fact, they're not defaming you. The truth isn't defamation, by definition.
> The truth isn't defamation, by definition.
This is a famously American position.
Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why does it not make sense? If I was involved in a robbery at age 18, as a dumb kid, should I still be called "robber xyz" for the rest of my life? Especially if I turned my life around?
I agree that we should be forgiving, give people second chances etc, but that doesn't change the meaning of words. "Defamation" is when you damage someone's reputation by saying things about them that aren't true. If you were convicted of a crime long ago and someone draws attention to that fact, they're not defaming you. The truth isn't defamation, by definition.
> but that doesn't change the meaning of words.
Words can have multiple similar definitions with small variations. If I look up "defamation" I get:
> Defamation is a legal term that refers to any statement made by a person, whether verbal or printed, that causes harm to another person’s reputation or character. --- https://legaldictionary.net/defamation/
> Defamation is a communication that injures a third party's reputation and causes a legally redressable injury. The precise legal definition of defamation varies from country to country. It is not necessarily restricted to making assertions that are falsifiable, and can extend to concepts that are more abstract than reputation – like dignity and honour. --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation
Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says
#306The bug is hardly the problem here, it is necessary but far from sufficient for something like this to happen. The UK legal system's ability to prosecute and penalize people without anything more than circumstantial evidence makes it unfit for purpose. It should be an embarrassment to a country that considers itself a member of the developed Western world.
>The UK legal system's ability to prosecute and penalize people without anything more than circumstantial evidence makes it unfit for purpose.
This defect is present in all justice systems to some degree or another. For that matter, most crimes (serious or otherwise) rarely have the sort of smoking gun evidence that would satisfy us all that it wasn't circumstantial. Worse still, when the evidence isn't circumstantial, it's still usually testimonial in nature... some witness is on the stand at trial, describing what they saw. Or, perhaps more accurately, misinterpreting what they saw/remember.
The only difference this time around is that they were misinterpreting what their software logic meant.
Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that we should be forgiving, give people second chances etc, but that doesn't change the meaning of words. "Defamation" is when you damage someone's reputation by saying things about them that aren't true. If you were convicted of a crime long ago and someone draws attention to that fact, they're not defaming you. The truth isn't defamation, by definition.
> The truth isn't defamation, by definition. This is a famously American position.
I'm not American, and we're discussing a UK news story.
But I genuinely didn't know that other countries do things differently. What does defamation even mean if it doesn't include the concept of untruth?
Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
I say this as someone whose father killed himself when I was in 5th grade: The "victims" who suffer after a suicide are the living, not the dead. These kinds of "modernizations" are transparent PC nonsense made up by well-intentioned do-gooders who have no idea how to represent the interests of other people who have a lived experience that they don't understand. The person is dead either way. There's literally no way…
What makes “committed suicide” any more plain or honest than “died by suicide”?
The latter implies that suicide just happened to the person, like they got hit by a bus.
The former correctly attributes the action to the person who killed themselves. Certainly the motivations and causes that drive people to suicide are complex, but ultimately it is a choice the person makes.
"Committed" is perhaps not the best word, since it's associated with crimes (and suicide is not a crime in many places anymore), but it's at least more active.
Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suggest you keep an eye on what's being published in Private Eye and Computer Weekly if you have access to those where you are. They're holding feet to the fire on all these points. One thing I would say is that if somebody is convicted in the UK, it's acceptable legally and culturally to call them by the crime they committed. The problem is that in this case the Post Office had unique legal powers, and was being r…
Lets ignore everything else for a second. Isn't it common sense, common decency to ask how can thousands of postal workers become thieves overnight? We're talking about postal workers for fuck's sake, not a bunch of mafia dudes. Is there some kind of perverse incentive for the prosecutors to send as many people to jail as possible, guilty or not? run by people who did not want to "harm the brand" Oh well, now their p…
Related case in the Netherlands: if you just think all dual citizens are up for no good as the pretext a lot of law abiding people's lifes will just get upended.
If legislation, jurisdiction and law enforcement forget about basic principles and human rights in favour of looking productive, collateral damage is pretty much more or less expected.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_scand...
Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
The actual answer to this is terrible. Courts had to trust the computer was correct. There was a common law presumption that a computer was operating correctly unless there is evidence to the contrary (and getting that evidence is basically impossible for the individuals being charged who were post office workers, not computer experts, and the source code was a trade secret). This might change, partly in response to…
Governments should have access to all the source of code they buy licenses to (and provided at sale), as a precondition of selling to a government. When these sorts of things happen, the source can be subpoena'd with the relevant legal tool, and reviewed appropriately. Why governments don't do this is beyond me. It greatly limits liability of gov procurement, and puts the liability on the companies selling such goods…
Governments (certainly in the UK) aren't willing to pay enough to make this work for vendors.
An escrow approach is quite common to protect the government in the event of a vendor going bankrupt or similar.