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Do you think the post office read the EULA from Fujitsu and thought “yeah, that’s ok”? You know, the bit in the EULA that all software has: no warranties are expressed or implied…
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The fact that's always amazed me is that the Post Office management worked on the assumption that the computer system (Horizon) was always correct.
I've worked in IT for about 40 years and currently support a legacy system which is slowly being replaced (and which I've written large parts of in the past). At the last estimate, it has a few million lines of code (C#, SQL, Javascript, etc), which some may not consider that large, but is large enough that few people could understand everything it does. It handles several tens of thousands of stock movements and financial transactions every day with the value running into billions annually; there are quite a few single transactions which are worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.
If I get a report that there's an imbalance, my first thought is to check the transaction logs, code etc, and try to determine if there's a bug or a data error which might cause the issue. I do NOT assume the user is at fault except as a last resort.
I find it hard to believe that the Horizon system was taken to be infallible and that people were convicted almost entirely on the basis that it had to be correct, while there was apparently little or no attempt to trace the 'supposed' stolen funds. If they'd taken the money, surely there'd be evidence of where it had gone?
And the fact there there were hundreds of such cases, but no-one thought it odd that so many people who'd been loyal postmasters for decades suddenly had imbalances in their accounts after a new computer system was introduced, and no-one publicly considered that the system might be wrong beggars belief!
Perhaps it's because I have worked in IT so long that I am always suspicious of the computer system first and the user second. Maybe the common man (or senior post office manager?) thinks "it's a machine exactly following its instructions so it must be right" while, as an IT person, I think "what instruction has someone given the machine now which makes it report the wrong information?".
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It's only when you have seen a problem and had to workout what went wrong do you understand how a computer can be wrong. Computers are always right (sort of), As you say between a 'new' wizzy system and Employee of 30 years, I think all CP and any others who have worked on IT for an ammount of time would look first at the system and then at the employee (does there house have a swimming pool are they driving a Tesla?) and look at the system again.
I can't understand why there was no one with that mind set involved... 
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Exactly this. What I also find surprising is that out of the hundreds of accused, some of which were very small post offices, not one sub-postmaster had kept a separate record of transactions for manual reconciliation - even right after the introduction of Horizon. Given that sub-postmasters are indeed responsible for their accounts, I'm amazed that no-one had kept such an audit (effectively carrying on the previous manual record keeping that Horizon replaced) - which, whilst not proof that fraud was not involved, would have at least provided evidence to any investigation.
This issue has been rumbling on for so many years; I think I recall reading about the root cause quite some years ago, and periodically individual cases have been reported in the press - even national television - for ages. It's telling, and very sad, that it takes a "drama" on TV to finally get it into the general consciousness and give it the attention it's always deserved. Even then the issue has focussed on "remote access" and manual adjustments, rather than the actual bugs that caused the need for adjustments anyway.
The last major system I built from scratch, the VERY FIRST thing I did was build a logging system so that everything could be tracked and debugged. On the database, for every table, before writing insert/load/update stored procedures, I wrote a couple of triggers per table that logged each and every data change (whether made by the application or by any other means). If these steps had been taken at Fujitsu, it might not have made detecting bugs easier, but would have provided evidence to assist in debugging and in identifying the source of changes to data. But as the Guardian reported last week: One member of the development team, David McDonnell, who had worked on the Epos system side of the project, told the inquiry that “of eight [people] in the development team, two were very good, another two were mediocre but we could work with them, and then there were probably three or four who just weren’t up to it and weren’t capable of producing professional code”.
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Humans are imperfect and messy.
Software fails.
But so do bridges and buildings. Even waste dumps.
So do big and small businesses.
So do government officials, armies, police forces, intelligent agencies, etc. Even entire countries.
The reasons are very seldom simple. Corruption, ignorance, mismanagement, sickness and others play a role.
Hindsight is great but it doesn't translate into foresight.
It isn't a matter of having no failures. Best one can hope for is that at least they will try to do better at least for a short time.
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Exactly. That's why we as developers need to instrument our systems so that they are traceable and debuggable, track changes and so on.
The issue with the Post Office was that their management, (and / or Fujitsu's) refused to acknowledge that their software was fallible, and therefore - even if it existed - failed to use the diagnostics to find out what had gone wrong. The only "culprit" left, therefore, were the users - the sub-postmasters. To what extent that refusal to accept that Horizon might have bugs was down to naivety, ignorance or stupidity, and to what extent it was deliberate, will hopefully come to light in the not-too-distant future.
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DerekT-P wrote: refused to acknowledge that their software was fallible,
Very, very rare in my experience that organizations admit to failure.
Individual humans are more likely to admit to failure but are very resistant to it even so.
The likelihood of either goes down as complexity goes up.
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Thankfully, yes very rare. That's part of what makes this scandal so shocking.
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Even if they had kept manual records, I suspect the Post Office staff sent round to interview them would have ignored any evidence, or used it to imply the manual records were to cover up the fraud.
These interviewers were bullies, using scare tactics beyond anything our esteemed police forces would use.
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Perhaps I have viewed too many movies and TV series legal dramas but it seems to me the defense attorneys should have investigated the Horizon code.
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Solicitors and barristers (== the UK types of lawyers) know no more about computers than software people know about the practice of law. Also, if the postmasters were honest, they certainly didn't have the kind of money required to hire top tier legal defence, including investigators, computer experts, etc.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Greetings and Kind Regards
I looked up "solicitor" and "barrister" on WikiPedia. I never understood the difference between the two. I still do not. A near as I can discern from the article one needs a solicitor a barrister a chartered legal executive perhaps even a solicitor advocate and finally an actual lawyer in order to beat a parking ticket in Jolly Ol' England. The place of my birth. I still recall as a young child seeing my twin brother feed the pigeons in what I presume was Trafalgar Square. I have even an earlier memory than this but if I were to disclose it I would be pilloried as hallucinating as it can not be any earlier while in this world.
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It wouldn't have helped. The evidence is that the Post Office ad possibly Fujitsu lied to cover themselves. They also prevented an IT company from carrying out forensic work on behalf of the victims.
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Wow - and "only" £3820! 
Think I'll stick with the free Merlin Bird ID app and a cheap (or should that be "cheep"?) telephoto phone lens for now.
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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They should invent some kind of AI-spectacles which can directly pinpoint/highlight the buggy piece of code, while debugging. Should have the ability to read the coder's mind, to understand expected behaviour.
Or, does this already exist?
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Amarnath S wrote: Or, does this already exist?
@OriginalGriff has a cat that's quite adept on the keyboard.
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Amarnath S wrote: Should have the ability to read the coder's mind, to understand expected behaviour.
To read shouldn't be that difficult. To understand it... that's another thing  
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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On second thoughts, such a device would be harmful to coder's careers. A single coder wearing this AI-spectacles could potentially displace many coding jobs.
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I'd love to have a pair of these, but not at $4,800 US.
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Geez, ok, that's cool but it seems like it takes the fun out of doing the identification oneself. In 5-10 years, nobody will be able to do anything without AI. And yeah, I mean anything. 
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Actually that was my thought also. Not my thing but from what I have seen identification is only a small part of what people enjoy about it.
Not to mention that at least some people already have expensive equipment used just to see the birds from a distance, so how do these match that quality?
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jschell wrote: identification is only a small part of what people enjoy about it.
The identification can be a big part of it if the birder has a list of species he wants to see in his lifetime. But that's only when spotting birds that you don't usually see everyday.
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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Wordle 937 2/6*
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