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British Post Office Scandal

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Re: British Post Office Scandal

#2
My 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!

Re: British Post Office Scandal

#3
Is 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.

Re: British Post Office Scandal

#4

Is 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."

Re: British Post Office Scandal

#5

Is 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 felt exactly the same. I read some of the original Second Sight reports and I very much got the impression that the issues were quite broad and related to inadequate training, poor/confusing UI etc.

There isn't, as far as I can tell, a single interesting "bug" that was causing incorrect figures to be saved in a database, which is the impression you get from skimming the coverage.

Re: British Post Office Scandal

#7

Britons - this is your reminder that Private Eye is available for subscription at the very low price of £45 for an issue in your letterbox fortnightly.

Honestly curious: can you expand a bit on why subscribe? I live in the UK, but never heard about Private Eye before?

Re: British Post Office Scandal

#8
post #2

My 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.

Re: British Post Office Scandal

#9

Britons - this is your reminder that Private Eye is available for subscription at the very low price of £45 for an issue in your letterbox fortnightly.

Honestly curious: can you expand a bit on why subscribe? I live in the UK, but never heard about Private Eye before?

The most obvious and current reason is their tireless work on the Post Office scandal, but in general they print news that newspapers won't for fear of losing their relationships with politicians and other powerful figures.

A recent example is the story that an MP walked in on Carrie blowing Boris in his office as Foreign Secretary while he was still married to another woman, and that at the time he was also trying to get her a paid job in his office.

The Times had that story and printed most of it (though referred only to a 'comprimising situation') in their early edition of the paper the next day but it vanished from the later prints which end up in newsagents. The Mail also had the story online for a couple of hours before deleting it.

Private Eye printed the whole saga including the gory detail and the article getting spiked.

You might say this is just lurid gossip but as a taxpayer I would like to know if our leaders are giving paid jobs in government to women who blow them on the side, and I won't find out about it from any newspapers.

(The cartoons are pretty funny too!)

Re: British Post Office Scandal

#10

Britons - this is your reminder that Private Eye is available for subscription at the very low price of £45 for an issue in your letterbox fortnightly.

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
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