[HN Gopher] Ex Post Office CEO hands back award after IT failure...
___________________________________________________________________
Ex Post Office CEO hands back award after IT failures lead to false
convictions
Author : alibarber
Score : 128 points
Date : 2024-01-09 18:36 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| The Post Office were told about the problems in 2003 but decided
| to sack the contractor they had hired to check their software
| rather than deal with the problems.
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-67921974
|
| Why aren't management in the dock over this.
| ericfrazier wrote:
| Gross negligence. Claw back their wages to compensate the
| postmasters.
| donmcronald wrote:
| Not even close. They conspired to cover up deficiencies while
| people were being criminally prosecuted for the discrepancies
| caused by those deficiencies. The knew about it and they
| belong in jail. Nothing less.
| Clubber wrote:
| Yes, they deserve the jail time they so effortlessly dolled
| out to the innocent people.
| game_the0ry wrote:
| The problem with modern management is that they are rarely
| accountable to those that have been wronged. Rather, they are
| accountable to their bosses. And the are fine as long as they
| are sycophantic bootlickers.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| From TFA:
|
| "The Post Office said the honour was given for [Former Post
| Office boss Paula Vennells'] work on "diversity and
| inclusion", and her "commitment to the social purpose at the
| heart of the business and her dedication in putting the
| customer first".
| 1123581321 wrote:
| They are paying out roughly 150k per prosecution. That seems
| low if most of those resulted in fines and jail time. Does
| anyone have a source for data on the outcomes of these cases?
|
| (If pressed on "seems low" I couldn't exactly say, but if ten
| million is the actuarial value of life then every year of adult
| life in prison should be worth at least 175k, on top of the
| difficulties of enduring prosecution and career and reputation
| being harmed.)
| gpderetta wrote:
| Andrew Malkinson was wrongly convicted and spent 17 years in
| a UK jail. He is likely to eventually get less than PS1M
| compensation and that's after the government scraped the rule
| that "board and lodge" would be subtracted from the
| compensation.
|
| edit: accidentally a word.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| 17 years (missing a word.) Link for those unfamiliar like
| me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongful_conviction_of_An
| drew_...
|
| That seems grossly unfair. Based on what I'm musing, at
| bare minimum, 3 million would be appropriate.
| concordDance wrote:
| What's a good rationale for any particular sum?
|
| I mean, for starters you can just calculate average
| lifetime earnings and subtract expected earnings of the
| person over the remainder of their lifespan, then add an
| amount per year in prison roughly corresponding to the
| QALY value of prison vs normal life...
|
| But is there anything else you might add on? I expect the
| above calculation to only arrive at about a million for a
| country like the UK (which is less rich than the US and
| has less bad prisons).
| lamontcg wrote:
| Needs a compound annual growth rate, plus there's lost
| opportunity costs.
| timthorn wrote:
| It's an immediate 150k payment, followed by a further
| settlement figure. I think that's a choice between either
| 600k without question, or an investigation to assess actual
| loss.
| varispeed wrote:
| > or an investigation to assess actual loss.
|
| Which sounds like a poor taste joke given what led to this
| (poor investigation or lack thereof)
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| It is often trying to find any ways to pinch pennies,
| indeed.
|
| A recent case made the news and prompted a change of the
| rules [1]. Until last year they deducted "living costs"
| from compensation for wrongful imprisonment because while
| a person is in jail they don't have to pay for food and
| housing, thereby saving money...
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66417103
| timthorn wrote:
| That's why there is an option of a no investigation
| settlement. But if that were the only option, postmasters
| who felt that it didn't compensate them adequately would
| have reason to complain.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Fujitsu provided shoddy software that was inadequate for the
| job, then lied about it. The Post Office threw hundreds of
| subpostmasters under the bus, rather than admit the issues in
| the system. Senior management at both the Post Office and
| Fujitsu should be in the dock.
|
| There has only been 1 Fujitsu whistleblower (as far I am
| aware). Surely hundreds of IT people must have known?
|
| The mainstream print media mostly seem to have ignored this
| scandal, perferring instead to write about celebrity tittle
| tattle (with a few honourable exceptions, such as Computer
| Weekly and Private Eye).
|
| This scandal has been known for years. But only the recent TV
| drama seems to have forced most politicians to care about it
| (with a few honourable exceptions, such as Lord Arbuthnot).
| anigbrowl wrote:
| The function of the mainstream media (particularly in the UK)
| is not to inform the public but to keep them in line. It's
| worth remembering that Rupert Murdoch owns 4 newspapers and a
| TV channel.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Murdoch has possibly done more damage to the UK than any
| other human being alive.
| ascorbic wrote:
| There have been literally hundreds of articles about this in
| the mainstream media for well over a decade. Yes, Computer
| Weekly and Private Eye deserve the biggest share of credit
| for persuing it, but it's simply not true to sat that the
| rest of media has ignored it. The real scandal is that even
| though it was widely reported, so little was done about it
| for years.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| I would be interested to know the number of articles
| published on the scandal by mainstream papers, such as the
| independent, Guardian, Times and Telegraph.
| alibarber wrote:
| One upshot of the current UK government being in such dire
| straits in terms of their popularity, and this scandal
| causing such a universal uproar in public opinion, is that
| they do seem to be bending to it and actually doing
| something. Enough? Probably not.
| adolph wrote:
| While it is fair to say "Fujitsu," a more complete picture is
| a British company called International Computers Limited
| (ICL) acquired by Fujitsu after the Post Office job started.
| ICL seems like a British variant of IBM.
|
| _The Horizon accounting system was developed by ICL Pathway,
| owned by the Japanese company Fujitsu._ [0]
|
| _International Computers Limited (ICL) was a British
| computer hardware, computer software and computer services
| company that operated from 1968 until 2002._ [1]
|
| _In May 1996, ICL Pathway Limited (later Fujitsu Services
| (Pathway) Limited) was awarded the private finance initiative
| contract to develop the Horizon IT system to modernize Post
| Office and Benefits Agency operations._ [1]
|
| 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Computers_Limi
| te...
| alibarber wrote:
| The reference from that first wikipedia article, here:
| https://find-and-update.company-
| information.service.gov.uk/c..., dated 1996, states on the
| final page that the ultimate controller of ICL Pathway (who
| developed Horizon) was, at this time (1996), indeed
| Fujitsu.
|
| It wasn't like Fujitsu had bought the company and inherited
| the liability - they had in fact themselves bid for and won
| the project - via these intermediaries.
| 127361 wrote:
| All those people that ostracized or otherwise hurled abuse at the
| postmasters, they can go to hell.
| malka wrote:
| Good news everyone. We are hurling toward hell at an increasing
| pace !
| sgt101 wrote:
| Here is the private eye report.
|
| https://www.private-eye.co.uk/pictures/special_reports/justi...
|
| For those who don't know, Private Eye is a UK published satirical
| magazine which takes it as it's mission to go after liars,
| fraudsters, bent politicians, and all those who are a disgrace.
| It plays a pivotal role in British democracy and consequentially
| may be closed any day soon. It has been doing this since 1961 and
| everyone involved is a hero.
| secondcoming wrote:
| > may be closed any day soon. It has been doing this since 1961
|
| Kind of contradictory, no? Nobody is going to shut Private Eye
| down any time soon.
| sgt101 wrote:
| Ian Hislop (the editor) is apparently the most sued man in
| history! (I may be exagerating).
|
| Seriously though, they are roped around with super
| injunctions and actions of every type intended to bring them
| down. I agree that they seem to be in rude health now (mostly
| because of my subscription I am sure) but it's really
| possible that some bastard will get them.
|
| After all - they got Twitter...
| alibarber wrote:
| > (mostly because of my subscription I am sure)
|
| I enjoyed this, thank you.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > Ian Hislop (the editor) is apparently the most sued man
| in history! (I may be exaggerating).
|
| Wikipedia says he's in the Guinness Book of Records for
| that but equally a whole bunch of links say it's unverified
| (and I believe he himself has said he isn't recently.)
| tialaramex wrote:
| Indeed. British politicians have not infrequently been crooks
| or shaggers (or like Boris, both), but we don't see the
| authoritarian tendencies that have seized the Right across
| much of the world in recent years.
|
| Private Eye's biggest threat is likely the death of print,
| apparently the reason you _can 't_ get it at all except on
| paper is cited by the editor (Ian Hislop) as a success
| factor. I admit if I could pay the _same_ and get it online
| (instead of a package through the door every couple of weeks)
| I 'd do that, but it would significantly reduce their
| visibility.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > Nobody is going to shut Private Eye down any time soon.
|
| I believe, based on my admittedly shaky memory of the PE
| podcast, that they said it did come close at least once due
| to court costs and judgements.
|
| (I'll have to go through the episodes and see if I've gone
| mad.)
| hermitcrab wrote:
| They have come close to being sued out of business on
| several occasions. Most notably by thief, bully and liar
| Robert Maxwell. Private Eye was one of the very few
| institutions to stand up to him during his (sadly much too
| long) lifetime.
| gpderetta wrote:
| One of their legal battles[1], Harkell vs Pressdram[2],
| has become legendary and the precendent apparently
| referenced often in the UK legal system and beyond.
|
| [1] for very small values of "battle"
|
| [2] https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/arkell-v-pressdram
| hermitcrab wrote:
| I hadn't seen that. Worth a look. ;0)
| hermitcrab wrote:
| BTW I subscribe to Private Eye partly because it is
| interesting and funny, but mainly because they are one
| the few institutions in the UK that still seem to be
| doing proper investigative journalism and holding power
| to account. The rest have been hamstrung by Google et al
| taking all their advertising revenue or being owned by
| plutocrats (or both).
| fidotron wrote:
| It is curious how the BBC keep going on about it being Fujitsu
| and them being Japanese, yet the problematic system was developed
| by ICL in the UK prior to the Fujitsu acquisition.
|
| The whole episode is an utter disgrace.
| alibarber wrote:
| The final page of the company returns for ICL in 1996 (thanks
| to Wikipedia) notes that the ultimate controller of the company
| was indeed Fujitsu at that time. The rebrand happened in 2002,
| but it is correct to say that the system was developed by a
| part of Fujitsu.
|
| https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...
| mike_hearn wrote:
| I feel like we in the software industry should do more reflection
| on what happened here. Yes, many of the most evil acts were the
| result of social non-technical problems like terrible management,
| stupid legacy UK laws allowing PO prosecutions, and so on.
|
| But the root cause was bugs. So many bugs.
|
| There isn't much the average HN poster can do about the political
| and justice problems, which are firmly in the realm of the
| British government. But there are people here who work on
| databases and app frameworks. What can be learned from the
| Horizon scandal? Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be much
| discussion of this. Compare vs the airline industry where
| failures are aggressively root caused.
|
| I'll start:
|
| 1. Transaction anomalies can end lives. Should popular RDBMS
| engines really default to non-serializability by default (non
| repeatable reads, for example).
|
| 2. Offline is very hard. A lot of bugs happened due to trying to
| make Horizon v1 work with flaky or very slow connections, and
| losing transactional consistency as a result. The SOTA here has
| barely advanced since the 90s, instead the industry has just
| given up on this and now accepts that every so often there'll be
| massive outages that cause parts of the economy to just shut down
| for a few hours when the SPOF fails. Should there be more focus
| on how to handle flaky connectivity in mission-critical apps
| safely?
|
| 3. What's the right way to ensure rock-solid accountability
| around critical databases, given that bugs are inevitable and
| data corruption must sometimes be manually fixed? A lot of the
| Horizon problems seemed to involve Fujitsu manually logging in to
| post offices and "fixing" the results of bugs, in such a way that
| they didn't realize their fix created ledger imbalances that the
| SPMs would be blamed for. A part of why big enterprises got so
| excited about blockchains was this notion of an _immutable_
| ledger in which business records can 't go magically changing
| around you without anyone knowing how. There are clearly ways to
| do this, but they're not the default.
|
| 4. IIRC at least some failures were traced back to broken touch
| screens generating false random touches, which could lead at
| night to random transactions being entered and confirmed when
| nobody was around. Are modern capacitative touch screens immune
| to this failure mode? If not, are consoles in embedded
| applications always reliably engaging screen locks?
|
| I guess there are bazillions more you could come up with.
| sgt101 wrote:
| There is an organizational axis too. The technical capabilities
| of the GPO went off with BT in 1984. The remaining organisation
| was anything but a competent customer for IT implementations.
| Outsourcing has definite limits and potentially catastrophic
| results - as does the demolition of corporate technical
| capability.
|
| An empowered technical architecture function could have vetted
| this system and prevented this all. But gut it and stamp it
| under the heal of the CFO and you may as well not bother.
| g_p wrote:
| > Outsourcing has definite limits and potentially
| catastrophic results - as does the demolition of corporate
| technical capability.
|
| A lot of what seems apparent in this case is that contractual
| and commercial factors weren't set up correctly - they were
| set up to deliver predictable prices (loved by public sector
| clients), but not necessarily to deliver good outcomes.
|
| An example - it appeared much of the rush to ship the point
| of sale terminals was to get through customer acceptance (and
| presumably the payment milestone), despite scope creep and
| quality issues. And there was a cost for PO to access audit
| logs, and limits on capacity of these logs which could be
| handled. Presumably this delivered a lower headline price for
| an accountant negotiating the price down, but it ultimately
| made a poorer solution that wasn't for for purpose.
|
| It seems like (from what I've seen of the evidence) nobody
| internally in PO really had full understanding and ownership
| of the project and they'd outsourced that (but kept the
| suppliers tightly commercially managed, creating the
| incentives for shipping poor quality code, rather than
| spending the time to polish it, as some had tried to do in
| the development team).
|
| Some interesting evidence here in the inquiry on software
| development practices and low competency and quality of code
| - https://postofficeinquiry.dracos.co.uk/phase-2/2022-11-16/#
| d...
| paxiongmap wrote:
| > The remaining organisation was anything but a competent
| customer for IT implementations.
|
| This is very much the standard in UK public procurement and
| has been for a large number of years. It's got a lot worse
| since Brexit when most civil servants with any skills or
| capability to deliver have moved on because they didn't want
| to deliver the 'will of the people' to have their cake and
| eat it.
| surfer7837 wrote:
| > Offline is very hard. A lot of bugs happened due to trying to
| make Horizon v1 work with flaky or very slow connections, and
| losing transactional consistency as a result. The SOTA here has
| barely advanced since the 90s, instead the industry has just
| given up on this and now accepts that every so often there'll
| be massive outages that cause parts of the economy to just shut
| down for a few hours when the SPOF fails. Should there be more
| focus on how to handle flaky connectivity in mission-critical
| apps safely?
|
| If there's a network partition you have two options: accept
| reduced availability and keep your consistency, or have better
| availability and have reduce node consistency. Not much else
| you can do, that's just life.
|
| Obviously, ways to increase consistency with consensus
| algorithms etc with 2 phase commits, and you reduce consistency
| with consensus algorithms. Depends on your requirements.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| According to the TV drama, the Fujitsu staff could go in and
| change data in the live data, while the log said it was the
| subpostmaster making the change. If so, that seems like
| negligently bad design.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| It was an IT project for a government department designed and
| delivered in the 90s, negligently bad design is pretty much
| what I think we would've expected.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| The history of UK government IT contracts is indeed a very
| sad one.
|
| From memory:
|
| UK Covid test and trace system: PS37 billion pretty much
| wasted
|
| UK NHS IT system: PS12 billion pretty much wasted
|
| And I'm sure there are lots of others.
|
| And yet we are still giving huge projects to the same
| companies. Amazingly, Fujitsu's contract for the Horizons
| system has recently been renewed.
| _Wintermute wrote:
| Only a small fraction of the covid test and trace costs
| were on software, the overwhelming majority was on lab
| tests and PCR kits.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| > _But the root cause was bugs. So many bugs._
|
| I disagree, these were not the root cause of this scandal. Bugs
| happen and even if those ones might fall below expected
| standards, trying to pin the 'blame' on them might be perceived
| as deflecting from the real culprits. The scandal here is how
| the technical issues were handled.
| michael1999 wrote:
| Don't worry about dbms transaction management. This is the
| wrong level. No bank uses database-level transactions to make
| sure a balance transfer doesn't erase or double money. They
| post a durable entry in the transaction log, and then compute
| balances as roll-ups of the transactions. If some weird data
| glitch or cosmic ray produces the wrong balances, just re-run
| the tx rollup!
| michael1999 wrote:
| This approach still leaks, but the breakage will be things
| like overdraft limits, and those can be handled as business
| exceptions. And that's why we have transaction size limits.
| Risk-management, all the way down.
| game_the0ry wrote:
| American, here. I remember first hearing about this (maybe a
| couple of years) and just being in complete shock. And not much
| can shock me nowadays.
|
| And reading this article just...I dont know what to say,
| honestly.
|
| How could there a complete and total lack of justice? And in the
| modern western world - it feels like the western world is turning
| into one big failed state.
|
| Those that have been wronged are owed a great deal. I am not
| religious, but if I was, I would pray for them.
| sp332 wrote:
| The article says the public inquiry started in 2021 and is
| ongoing.
| game_the0ry wrote:
| > The article says the public inquiry started in 2021 and is
| ongoing.
|
| ...?
|
| That wont assuage the 700 people who were already wronged, 4
| of whom committed suicide.
|
| Damage has been done, the inquiry is too little too late, and
| I am confident nothing will come of it.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| It will conclude in the 2030s, when anybody who could have
| been held accountable is long dead, or retired and overseas
| or too infirm to stand trial. This is how it goes in the
| U.K., far too frequently - particularly when public bodies or
| government connected parties are involved.
|
| They also aren't typically about finding fault or figuring
| out who to blame, and don't often result in criminal
| proceedings - they are about preventing reoccurrence.
| ed_elliott_asc wrote:
| Part of the problem is that for historical reasons the post
| office can charge and prosecute people without the police
| needing to investigate.
|
| The post office was a part of the country /government (I'm not
| sure what the right term is tbh) and it was privatised but kept
| those powers.
| gpderetta wrote:
| As far as I know, technically anybody [with deep enough
| pockets] can initiate private prosecution in the UK.
| gnfargbl wrote:
| They can, but the CPS can always choose to take over the
| case -- and they are allowed to take over with the express
| intent of dropping the prosecution.
|
| https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/private-prosecutions
| zarzavat wrote:
| Hopefully this case will be the final nail in the coffin
| of private prosecutions. We don't need such things in the
| modern world.
| neilwilson wrote:
| The Post Office remains part of the government.
|
| It was Royal Mail that was privatised.
|
| That a public corporation has persecuted these individuals
| makes it doubly worse. At any point the government minister
| in charge of the Post Office could have yanked chains and
| stopped it.
| donmcronald wrote:
| I can barely comprehend it. They conspired to maliciously
| prosecute hundreds of people to cover up their own incompetence
| and the consequences of that are "give that trophy back to the
| king". The rich and powerful truly live in a different world
| than the rest of us.
| stevesimmons wrote:
| > I am not religious, but if I was, I would pray for them.
|
| Ironically, Paula Vennells, Post Office CEO at the time, is
| deeply and publicly religious. She's an ordained Anglican
| priest.
| adolph wrote:
| Anglican is the state religion in England, so that makes
| sense.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Thanks capitalism. Sorry to be snarky, but I really do feel
| that he advent of Thatcherism/Reaganism led to massive erosion
| of moral values in favor of raw economic leverage.
| bufio wrote:
| The UK is pretty much a failed state.
| OldGuyInTheClub wrote:
| Now Palantir has its hooks into their Health Service.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| A decade ago, as I was stressing out about an upcoming go-live,
| my boss at the time (a wonderful, caring, thoughtful person)
| provided well-intended advice; he said something like "My wife is
| a doctor; when she does her job poorly people die! Cheer up, we
| just move code around".
|
| It was intended to a relatively junior architect to provide some
| perspective; and perspective is indeed important.
|
| But I think in IT, much more often we commit the opposite error -
| we are too disconnected from consequences of our seemingly
| abstract, technical, impersonal work.
|
| I currently work on a massive Payroll ERP. In many ways a boring,
| uncool system. But if we don't do our job right, people don't get
| paid right, and while that may not have the same immediate impact
| as a doctor mistake, it's... very much a real human impact. And
| more of us could probably draw a line from IT error to human
| impact if we consciously actively tried to.
|
| Devastating story, every time I read about it. Should be taught
| in Computer Science universities alongside the Therac-25 and few
| other choice cases :|
| jareklupinski wrote:
| > we are too disconnected from consequences of our seemingly
| abstract, technical, impersonal work
|
| i think it's important to be connected to your work (when it
| matters, like your former boss said), but I realized that we're
| all just human beings, and we each have a set capacity for such
| things
|
| a few people may be able to knock out life-saving operation
| after operation and just pound a stiff drink before going back
| to the OR the next day for years on end, but the rest of us can
| only do that sort of thing for a year or two tops before
| 'shutting off' (or burning out)
|
| going back and forth between 'boring, but dependable' and
| 'exciting, but mercurial' seems to keep my personal trajectory
| interesting at least :)
| ryandrake wrote:
| I think there's also a lot of engineers with a, shall we say,
| hands off attitude about ethics and the downstream effects of
| the software they are writing. Like it's "Boss told me to do
| it" or "Boss told me not to do it" and that's the end of the
| ethical quandary! Software engineers need to take at least
| _partial_ responsibility for the code they are physically
| typing in and causing to come into existence. If that
| software is going to fail and cause harm to people, it 's
| literally your job and responsibility as a professional
| engineer to raise that concern and stop it from shipping.
|
| A lot of software teams have too much of a "JIRA ticket is
| closed, so my work here is done" attitude.
| jareklupinski wrote:
| totally agree, i think the problem is deeper than an
| engineering problem; every industry can find a group of
| people "just doing their jobs"
|
| thinking about it, the excuse is often "i gotta pay my
| mortgage / bills / child's college" , but I have a hard
| time pointing to self-inflicted debt as the root cause of
| human suffering
|
| unless we just want to sweep it all under sin: "greed"
| justinclift wrote:
| > there's also a lot of engineers with a, shall we say,
| hands off attitude about ethics and the downstream effects
|
| Yeah. I know one (not involved in my projects thankfully)
| whose response to pointing out likely downstream problems
| is generally "that sounds like a 'their' problem rather
| than a 'me' problem".
|
| And I'm quoting, as I've heard it from them often. :(
| suchire wrote:
| My expectations for people to take ethical responsibility
| generally scales with rank/level. It's hard to fault a
| junior engineer for doing what they're told; they might not
| even know about any harms they are doing, or maybe they're
| economically vulnerable and can't speak up for fear of
| losing their job.
|
| On the other hand, a Director or Staff Engineer has my full
| blame for anything unethical that happens under their
| purview.
| wayne-li2 wrote:
| I don't really think this is true anymore.
|
| When a doctor messes up, their patient gets hurt. When we mess
| up, millions get inconvenienced. You can't really say one is
| worse than the other. Take Twitter for example. You could say
| "so what, people can't tweet for a while" but among those
| millions of users are a couple (like the Japanese tsunami
| twitter account) where lives can be lost if your service
| doesn't perform adequately.
|
| I work in financial services -- if my bug causes a million
| people to lose money, what percentage of that million were on
| the border of suicide and my bug tipped them over the edge?
| Even if that number is 0.1 person / 1 million that means I can
| commit 10 such bugs in my lifetime before I've statistically
| taken a life.
|
| Not saying this line of thinking is right or healthy, but it's
| just not as black and white as "doctor can kill people, we
| can't".
| varispeed wrote:
| Not many corporations do user research. Architects and
| developers should be attending these sessions.
|
| Seeing with your own eyes, how average user of the system
| interacts with it is sobering for many. Sometimes it leads to
| fundamental changes in thinking and has overall positive effect
| on the product.
| iwontberude wrote:
| If it could save a person's life, could you find a way to save
| ten seconds off the boot time? If there were five million
| people using the Mac, and it took ten seconds extra to turn it
| on every day, that added up to three hundred million or so
| hours per year people would save, which was the equivalent of
| at least one hundred lifetimes saved per year.
|
| https://libquotes.com/steve-jobs/quote/lbl2z6p
| cafard wrote:
| During boot time, one can sip one's coffee, glance at the
| newspaper, maybe tidy the desktop a little.
| zilti wrote:
| Who boots every day?
| suchire wrote:
| > But if we don't do our job right, people don't get paid
| right, and while that may not have the same immediate impact as
| a doctor mistake, it's... very much a real human impact.
|
| As someone whose spouse is a teacher in the San Francisco
| Unified School District (where they had a disastrous rollout of
| new payroll and HR software), the effects are very, very real
| and concrete to me. Luckily, I work in tech and our could
| handle the problems, but many teachers live paycheck-to-
| paycheck. We know of teachers who have donated blood to get
| rent money because they weren't paid, and one teacher died from
| cancer while being denied healthcare as a result of the HR
| software being borked. Total disaster with real, negative human
| consequences, unfortunately.
| avg_dev wrote:
| I wish more people thought like you. To be particularly
| relevant to your industry:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system?wprov=sfti1...
| hermitcrab wrote:
| There is an excellent Computerphile video discussing some of the
| issues in the Horizons software system at the heart of this
| scandal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBJm9ZYqL10
| Devasta wrote:
| Stuff like this shows that licensing for certain software
| development activities is long overdue.
|
| Could you imagine if software engineering was like real
| engineering, with you having to sign off on work done and
| accepting personal liability, including fines and jail time for
| negligence? So much of software development as it is practiced
| today simply wouldn't be tolerated in such a world.
| Clubber wrote:
| Perhaps a 3rd party, unaffiliated QA requirement or something
| would help.
| donmcronald wrote:
| Yeah, the software was broken, but the _real_ harm was caused
| by people much further up the chain of command when they
| refused to admit the software was broken, even after they were
| explicitly told so by a contractor _they hired_.
|
| > with you having to sign off on work done and accepting
| personal liability
|
| I think that makes it even easier for those at the top who are
| willing to lie and cheat because it becomes easy to use the
| lowly developers as scapegoats.
|
| I think the only way you stop stuff like this scandal is to
| prosecute every c-suite executive that knew about the problem
| and helped cover it up instead of blowing the whistle on it.
| Claw back their wealth and send them to jail.
| blibble wrote:
| > Could you imagine if software engineering was like real
| engineering, with you having to sign off on work done and
| accepting personal liability, including fines and jail time for
| negligence?
|
| some sections of the industry have this (notably finance)
| SilverBirch wrote:
| I think you've taken the complete wrong lesson from this. The
| problem wasn't the software - the software had bugs, all
| software does. The problem was that people in the Post Office
| and Fujitsu asserted there were no bugs, no bugs could happen
| and made all sorts of statements that weren't even plausible
| and those that went against them got prosecuted and destroyed.
| Not because the software didn't work but because the people in
| charge covered up the software not working rather than dealing
| with the fallout.
|
| These exact shortfall issues could've happened and with an open
| and honest process of investigating the problems they could
| have been sorted decades ago. It wasn't the software that was
| the problem, it was the systematic cover up that was the
| problem.
| cf100clunk wrote:
| Canada's Phoenix pay system (IBM and PeopleSoft) was quite
| problematic and caused financial suffering of federal employees
| for years, but thankfully without the outrageous legal pain
| inflicted on Horizon's victims.
|
| https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/families-suffer-phoeni...
| Rapzid wrote:
| Reminds me of the Kern County child abuse convictions but an even
| larger scale.
|
| In both cases the sheer numbers make no sense, but nobody stopped
| to question why that was.
| michael1999 wrote:
| One of the worst things about dealing with SaaS is that you might
| have no practical way to generated your own audit records for
| reconciliation during a dispute. You have to ask the vendor for
| data to dispute the vendor! The organizational incentives are all
| against you. Just a cursed relationship.
| ncallaway wrote:
| > You have to ask the vendor for data to dispute the vendor!
|
| Isn't that literally the purpose of discovery in lawsuits (a
| practice that long predates digital records at all, much less
| SaaS)
| varispeed wrote:
| If administrator can change entries and audit logs, there is
| no real way to prove the data has or has not been tampered
| with.
| donmcronald wrote:
| There's nothing to discover if they simply don't collect
| information that proves your case.
|
| My favorite is "we have no evidence that XYZ was stolen" when
| a company gets compromised. Why would you _want_ high quality
| logging at that point? Don 't log access to sensitive
| information and then there's no evidence it was "stolen"
| (copied or cloned is the correct term).
|
| Retention policies are a huge issue too. There have been a
| lot of cover-ups discovered by people going through old boxes
| of papers. That's not going to happen in the future because
| tech companies are providing enterprise grade tooling to
| continually scrub history via retention policies. No one is
| going to find a 10 year old "smoking gun" email if you have a
| 7 year retention policy on all communications.
| michael1999 wrote:
| No! The problem here is the the Royal Mail had bad records.
| Discovery doesn't help at all! Discovery just gets you a copy
| of the bad data. You need good data, and nobody has it! This
| is why we invented double-entry bookkeeping 500 years ago.
|
| And even if, by fluke, discovery might help because there was
| actually a good copy somewhere, that means you've already
| lost by spending a fortune on lawyers in a dispute with a
| crown corporation! Look at these disputes - lives were ruined
| over $44k pounds. Suing the Post Office wouldn't be cheaper
| than that.
|
| In a traditional paper based flow, I have my own copies. I
| talk to a salesperson, get a price, and fax a PO. I keep a
| copy of that PO on file. The vendor delivers the order along
| with a waybill. My staff receive the order and count it,
| reconciling against my order. If the count is short, we check
| the waybill. Is the waybill short too? Then there was a
| problem in order flow. If the waybill matches my order, but
| the shipment is short, then the problem is in fulfillment. I
| call sales and hash it out. Honest errors happen, and
| reasonable people resolve them when given the facts.
|
| If the salesperson says their copy of the PO looks different,
| and calls me a liar when I send them my copy, then we have a
| real dispute. We might have to get a lawyer involved. But
| this is well beyond honest error.
|
| But in most SaaS environments (GB egress, bytes storage,
| etc), you are dependent on the vendor for the data. There is
| no practical way to disagree with AWS if they tell you your
| usage was 20TB and you expected 15. You are trusting the
| vendor not to lie (maybe reasonable), and also to never make
| an error (totally unreasonable!). We now have no defense
| against honest error.
|
| B2C is in a similar boat. In olden-times, I knew people who
| kept a log book and stop watch by the phone and logged all
| their calls. Every month, they reconciled their phone bill
| against their log. Just like they reconciled their bank
| statement against their cheque stubs and deposit slips. But
| who in this day keeps their own log of PayPal transactions
| safely outside Paypal? My main safety with PayPay is short
| latency - they report significant transactions right away so
| any errors can be corrected quickly.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Interestingly the TV drama doesn't mention Adam Crozier, who was
| CEO of Royal Mail 2003-10. I wonder if this is at all related the
| fact that Crozier was also CEO of ITV 2010-2017, the company that
| made the TV drama? Hmmm.
|
| https://forums.digitalspy.com/discussion/2458110/itv-boss-an...
| at_a_remove wrote:
| She should hand back the money she got for her work on "diversity
| and inclusion."
| datadeft wrote:
| Software is eating the world.
| bufio wrote:
| Well, then. All is forgiven.
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