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Comment by mellosouls | Hacker News Reader

This has been an ongoing story in Private Eye (UK investigative/satirical mag) for years.

It's shocking that there has been nothing done about it, they can hardly claim they didn't know.

The scary thing is that the Post Office kept denying there was a problem and stating words the effect of "it is impossible for the system to be broken" and the courts took this as gospel.

Amy developer knows that any piece software can and does have bugs that only cause problems in rare and unusual circumstances. This is something that the Post Office and the courts should have understood and considered, rather than just assume the system was infallible.

Its concerning for the future as we rely more and more on computers. If the courts, police etc just assume the computer is correct then we have a problem. If the computer says something is amiss, how to do prove or disprove it? Especially when AI is thrown in to the mix and the decision process isn't totally clear.

The journalistic criterion here isn't the breaking of the news, but the disposition of an ongoing court case.

I find stories dating to:

2013: Daily News (apologies): https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2395964/Exposed-The...

2018: Daily Telegraph: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2018/11/07/post-offic...

2017: Financial Times (archive): http://archive.is/8RzKm

It's only the last which provides any relevant information on the name of the system or the vendor(s) involved: "Horizon", and Fujitsu, respectively.

Whether or not there will be a culpability from Fujitsu, and why or why not, would be of interest to me.

See my recent comment on organisations (and not merely corporations) as risk-externalising systems:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21769923

Came here to post this. It's been known about for years, and just allowed to bubble and simmer, while Fujitsu et al continue to profit

Isn’t this more the fault of the justice system than Fujitsu?

I'd say it's more about regulatory capture, going with the lowest bidder in tenders and non-experts making decisions

Non-experts and bad people to boot. Where are the ethics?

It depends. Not exactly sure what the situation is here but a lot of those outsourcing "transformations" look really strange. A lot of the times it's hard to prove that cost has gone down and for sure quality did. One wonders if these outsourcing companies are not somewhat unethically hiding information.

As much as anything the big outsourcing transformation projects are about "reducing or offloading risk".

What that actually means is the senior managers who commission them want somebody else to point the finger at if anything goes wrong. "Nobody ever got sacked for buying IBM."

Plus they have a nice big transformation project on their CV.

Hopefully this will change to "If you ever bought Horizon, you are going to jail."... but I guess that I am too much of an optimist here?

Yeah in the UK there seems to be absolutely no accountability for the repeated and disastrous outsourcing from public to private sector in particular.

By the time the problems come to light the decision makers are long gone on to their next brilliant transformation gig at another gullible organisation.

While working in a large private sector ERP project that was going off the rails a wise colleague commented that "Companies get the suppliers they deserve"....

This is not surprising of course. But regardless of the degree of incompetence at the company and its suppliers, isn’t this a failing of the courts for putting someone in prison wrongly?

Of course. There is more than one villain here.

What makes you think there's litigation?

We read an interesting article about it: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-50747143 It was posted to HN recently.

And made worse by the historical treatment of GPO employees accused of theft - the internal security division (with legal powers) was feared.

The phone side wasn't as bad but I only found out about it when I read the internal policies on investigations and commented on how strict they where.

Some one older than me explained that in the bad old days people used to fall down stairs occasionally to expedite confessions - helps explain the bad industrial relations at RMG to this day

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