What went wrong with Horizon: learning from the Post Office Trial | Hacker News Reader

What went wrong with Horizon: learning from the Post Office Trial

benthamsgaze.org

The fact that this got proven to be unfair at all and convictions overturned etc. is because it could ultimately be pointed out that these specific software bugs existed in an intentionally designed piece of software. But it still took years to get past the "computer says no" attitude to being told they were wrong. I worry as increased use of AI and profiling becomes normal, that there will be no avenue for people when e.g. the background check company's ML system says they're a high risk candidate.

What is the avenue for people when the bank's owner says they're a high-risk candidate?

GDPR article 22 provides basic safeguards against automated decision making, thankfully. Imperfect perhaps, dofficult to enforce - but at least it is addressed.

UK is no longer part of the EU and is looking to neuter GDPR: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...

One of the bizarre anachronisms I learned about from the coverage of this is that the Post Office was able to perform "private prosecutions" [1] bringing criminal proceedings without involving a public prosecutor.

The Post Office was even offering plea deals, telling sub-postmasters that if they plead guilty to false accounting they'd drop charges of theft.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prosecution

The RSPCA and TV Licensing bring the majority of private prosecutions.

Until fairly recently, all prosecutions were private prosecutions; the state didn't think that prosecuting crimes was any of its business.

I once did work for the Post Office Investigations Division. I was "hired help" - I was employed by a hardware vendor. The people I was working with were pleasant, decent and clever people; but they explained to me that the organization was secretive, and operated rather like a cross between MI5 and Special Branch. That's not similar to a normal private prosecution. The UK now has a Crown Prosecution Service; the police pass a completed investigation to the CPS, and the CPS decides whether charges are justified. There are laws restricting what police investigators are allowed to do and say. None of that applies to the Post Office Investigations Division (who apparently employ their own prosecuting counsel).

I think the Wikipedia article you linked explains that the Post Office's power to investigate, charge and prosecute dates back to the 17thC. So yes, "anachronism" is right.

Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20240104150909/https://www.benth...

Some people like to say that there's no real world application for blockchain. It seems like this might be a good example of one. If they can't do atomicity right, force them to use the blockchain-level encoding of the transactions.

Blockchain doesn't solve this problem, it moves it to a different environment. Instead of paying your son to mow the lawn you've invented an army of tiny robots who trundle out and clip one individual blade of grass before reporting back home.

What if the ingest system wrongly feeds your blockchain with faulty records? They are saved permanently, sure, but are they correct ?

It s like saying that because you kidnapped a bitcoin millionaire and took his key, the blockchain allowing you to claim his balance means that you are indeed the rightful owner of the funds. No, you're not.

The root cause of this and many problems is people not auditing computers by hand.

How many Fortune 100 companies do absurdly stupid things because nobody audited a spreadsheet that had errors in it?

You can use computers for day-to-day operations, but you must periodically audit every thing they do (for one day, for example) by hand.

As a teacher I double-check Canvas' grade book in Excel.

Not auditing computers eventually leads to disaster.

The Horizon system was well known to be extremely buggy though.

The developer, who has not previously talked publicly about his experiences on the project, told Computer Weekly that in the months leading up to its launch, Horizon’s problems were well known inside Fujitsu.

“Everybody in the building by the time I got there knew it was a bag of s*t”, he said. “It had gone through the test labs God knows how many times, and the testers were raising bugs by the thousand.”

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252496560/Fujitsu-bosses...

...the High Court judge said he would refer Fujitsu to the Director of Public Prosecutions for possible further action because he had "grave concerns" about the evidence of the company's employees.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56718036

Is it possible that all of the post office franchisees were freemasons that were skimming off cash from the books and actually were stealing cash from the post office and the horizon software gave them the ability to input their loses and gains manually into the horizon software and the horizon software used merkle hashes and the merkle hashes weren't matching up if they actually were taking cash out of their businesses without declaring it but because they were all freemasons the uk court system took the side of the franchisees and said it was due to a software bug but that evidence was never made public so the royal mail never had to pay compensation?

Make all the merkle hashes public using eliptic curve cryptography to hide everyone's addresses and then get investigators to keep investigating who paid what to have what post sent to where and then check if they under or over paid for each parcel they sent

It's not clear to me what "Credence" is; TFA doesn't say, and I haven't heard it mentioned in the press or the recent TV coverage. It seems to be a backend system that is supposed to mirror the state of Horizon branch systems, but is (sometimes?) an hour out of date.

Any info about Credence?

Credence "logs every keystroke on Horizon". [0]

[0] - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/miscarriages-justice-nick-wal...

Mirror?

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