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> But that it took 20 fucking years to correct while the broken software continued to be used is just indescribable, and absolutely not the fault of any software but the result of human choices

100% agree. Managers who were in charge of these choices should be convicted.

If the ITV show is factually accurate, looks like the managers knowingly tried to send innocent people to prison to cover their own careers and reputation.

They should have the book thrown at them.

That’s the crux of the scandal. The Post Office had experts claim under oath that ‘horizon is faultless and fit for purpose’. Mounting evidence shows that these experts were evidently aware that they were lying and so the scandal is taking on a new turn. Police are investigating the perjury that might have contributed to the prosecution’s by the PO. I want to see key people at the PO sent the jail in the same manner any one else who perjured themselves would be. It appears that some power politics went on in the background that either covered up the scandal, or could have ended it early, but turned a blind eye.

> If the ITV show is factually accurate, looks like the managers knowingly tried to send innocent people to prison to cover their own careers and reputation.

There is plenty of strong evidence that this is the case. Stronger than the evidence used against the post workers accused. Take note that no one is threatening the show runners with libel actions & such…

> They should have the book thrown at them.

And thrown hard. This is not a set of honest mistakes, but a protracted campaign to pervert the course of justice.

> But that it took 20 fucking years

20 years and a high-profile TV serialisation heightening public perception of the problem a little too close to an election for comfort. The government is running around saying they care and how much of a tragedy they think it is not because they genuinely care but because the voting public currently care and there is a general election within the next 12 months.

One of the massively empathy lacking comments from a couple of weeks ago (prior to the proposed law change specifically to speed up exonerations for this scandal, announced last week) was that they couldn't just quash all the convictions without retrial because that might let some genuine cases of fraud through – as if letting one or two criminals off more lightly (they have had 20 year of whatever punishment was originally handed down and its side effects) is such a problem compared to continuing to punish hundreds of innocents. Let them all off, then retry those few if you find new compelling evidence. But before doing that: get the people who tried to cover it all up, who bullied many into silence despite knowing (at least some of) the truth, and those who just stood by and let it all keep happening, etc., both in the post office and the government, into court first – what they have done is far more reprehensible than what those post workers were (wrongly) accused of. Handing back one CBE just doesn't cut it.

With nearly everything in the world run by software these days, it's an easy scapegoat, and an even easier clickbait title. Engineers should be furious about this framing. Even most legit software issues can be trace to poor management, poor processes, rushed deliveries, and inadequate funding. But you would never know that from reading mainstream media. To them we are all bumbling overpaid idiots.

glad to see this as the top comment, this is basically what I stepped into the thread to point out.

describing this as a software glitch is kind of heinous in its own right.

Your game crashing is a software glitch, what happened in the UK is far beyond that. It'd be like describing the issues Boeing is experiencing as a "hardware glitch". Decisions were made that should not have been made, full-stop.

Can we really say it wasn't the software that ultimately caused this when the software absolutely had bugs?

If nothing else this puts into focus plenty of bureaucratic problems, but we wouldn't be here without the underlying buggy software that opened the door for bureaucracy to fail so badly.

> Can we really say it wasn't the software that ultimately caused this when the software absolutely had bugs?

Yes, because as the OP clearly stated, the problem wasn't the bugs.

The problem was the bugs were noticed, flagged, discussed, _and systemically ignored_.

Substitute software for standard accountancy practices or a filing system that led to lost files, giving the incorrect impression that postmasters were stealing, and the result would have been the same. The core issue is an organisiation that values avoiding blame at all costs over transparency and accountability.

Yes we can. The levels of corrupt behaviour involved in this story, going right to the very top of Government, literally, absolutely transcend any "bugs happen" narrative.

Not to mention the possibility that the Post Office could remotely change the accounts without postmaster's knowledge, that is worse than ignored bugs

In any organisation things will go wrong at times, for all sort of reasons: software bugs, human error, organisational dysfunction, malicious actors, whatever.

Mistakes get made. And even if the original mistake was hugely egregious, it's usually not a huge problem if you actually deal with it well (barring things like medical errors, but even there, trying to cover up a mistake can cause more harm than the initial mistake, at least in some cases).

For these kind of institutional problems most of the time it's really the response to the mistake that turns a mistake in to a huge catastrofuck.

Definitely true. But the software does also seem to have sucked extremely and surprisingly hard for something that was mission-critical and handling millions of pounds of transactions a day. From what I've read (which is admittedly so far less than I'd like), the whole architecture was deeply inappropriate: it wasn't just subject to a 'bug' or 'glitch'.

A key detail is that the Post Office specifically had a method for secretly and remotely editing accounts of post masters and lied about its existence. Along with experts lying under oath that the software had no known issues that could result in the account errors they were seeing, when in fact the ‘expert’ was well aware at the point that horizon was rife with such bugs.

Maybe the post title is inaccurate. The article title itself continues with "and a centuries-old British company ruined lives".

It wasn't a "bridge collapse" that caused anything. Yes the bridge sucked, but lots of bridges suck. It was human decisions that caused this, by using a bridge they knew (or could and should have known) was not fit for purpose. And by ignoring people who told them it was not fit for purpose after it was deployed. And the government not stepping in. And Association of Professional Engineers. &c &c &c. All of this is well documented.

That the initial mistakes were made was kind of ridiculous for lots of reasons, but okay, mistakes happen. But that it took 20 fucking years to correct while the faulty bridge continued to be used is just indescribable, and absolutely not the fault of any bridge but the result of human choices. That's the real problem; in an alternative universe people realized the bridge was a piece of crap shortly after being deployed, the mistakes were corrected, and they fixed it or stopped using it.

Humans caused the misery. Not the bridge. The bridge bit is almost a minor detail IMO. By framing it as "a bridge collapse" people will focus on bridge design to "fix" things, but that's not where things need to be fixed.

When will the software sector be regulated like other sectors?

>When will the software sector be regulated like other sectors?

But you just said the SW sector didn't cause this, it was those who ordered it and were responsible for managing the public service using it.

It's only human to blame inanimate objects for their own failings...

Exactly, framing the software removes the accountability from where it belongs - people. Software cannot be responsible for anything, people can, and should assume it.