51–60 of 153 posts
Software bugs ruin lives, but corruption allows it to happen.
People, normal people, small postmasters, killed themselves after being wrongly disgraced for financial fraud while the C-suite of the Post Office falsified their accounting to award themselves bonuses.
In 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 pu…
The thing that is so upsetting about all of this is that it's been pretty much ignored by government since 2009, the post office systematically lied and covered this up while knowing it was destroying innocent people. And the only reason they got traction was due to a docu drama last week. I don't normally feel like this, but I really hope people from the post office go to prison and lose their pensions over this. They deserve worse.
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.
BBC explains why it’s hard to overturn the convictions: The scale of the Post Office scandal means that there are no easy and quick solutions for the government. Ministers could advise the King to grant Royal Pardons, once reserved for the condemned as they faced the gallows. But these would be largely symbolic acts because the government can't, at the stroke of a pen, quash a conviction. That’s because the courts ar…
If the government could find a way to make it work for the homosexual activity convictions, I'm sure they can find a way for this miscarriage of justice as well. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/04/past-convictio...
To clarify how this happened: in the UK anyone can bring a private prosecution where they effectively act as the prosecutor . This is usually used by charities who take on laws to prosecute (eg., crimes against animals). Here the post office used the law to prosecute its own staff in alleged crimes against the post office . So they were both the prosecutor and the victim. This gave them overwhelming incentives not to…
While the incentives are not to reveal evidence the law is absolutely clear that all evidence identified must be revealed. The difficulty is that forcing and unlimited discovery to identify the evidence would break the whole legal system, and this is what parties can hide behind (for a while at least). We'll have to see when and how anybody will face the consequences of any failures to reveal the evidence.
I very much recommend reading the Judgements in Bates vs Post Office. As litigation progressed you can notice how it becomes apparent to the judge how Post Office legal tactics and behaviour undermined the prosecutions.
In 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 pu…
Private Eye definitely did a lot of work, but they were not the only ones, and multiple freelancers and journalists worked on it "in the shadows" for years.
The Post Office tactics of calling editors to make threats and play down the stories were also quite influential.
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?
Its a great souce for stories of wrong doing in national and local government, business, schools, the NHS, transport, farming and the Media. They regularly report on miscarriages of justice which you'll never usually hear about and get to the root of certain stories that are only very superficially reported on nationally.
Its also a fantastic source of scurrilous gossip and rumour about politics and media which is usually accurate. They've been doing it for years now, since the early 1960's.
In 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 pu…
https://www.postofficescandal.uk/
The scandal has hit the headlines many, many times across all the outlets, particularly in 2019-21 with the litigation and appeal cases. It was the subject of an episode of BBC Panorama in 2015 (fronted by Nick Wallis).
But it all comes to nought. The victims are still out of pocket and still have criminal prosecutions. If the media are to blame, then so is the judiciary, and so is the government, who have had it in their power to provide financial redress. And of course the Post Office and Fujitsu are the culprits.
BBC explains why it’s hard to overturn the convictions: The scale of the Post Office scandal means that there are no easy and quick solutions for the government. Ministers could advise the King to grant Royal Pardons, once reserved for the condemned as they faced the gallows. But these would be largely symbolic acts because the government can't, at the stroke of a pen, quash a conviction. That’s because the courts ar…
Because we have no way to detect all the cases.
A lot of the cases were handled in the "Post Office courts" (I don't remember the correct name, not a British), and there are more or less no records of them. So you need to ask people affected to come up and find ways to validate them, then create a case for quashing it. It is a total FUBAR mess.
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.
Sounds like a rather complex distributed system which no one fully understood combined with the failure of the database to meet ACID requirements.