Fujitsu 'Horizon' software implicated in largest miscarriage of justice in UK History

LordVetinari · April 28, 2021

18 minutes ago, spartaman64 said:

and they didnt suspect anything was wrong with the software when they are having to prosecute one postmaster per week?

But they had proof! /s

This article describes in more detail the problems with the software:

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252496560/Fujitsu-bosses-knew-about-Post-Office-Horizon-IT-flaws-says-insider

I will admit I'm not hugely familiar with development on the level required to do something like this, but it sounds pretty broken from the ground up.

CarlBar · April 28, 2021

37 minutes ago, LordVetinari said:

57 minutes ago, spartaman64 said:

and they didnt suspect anything was wrong with the software when they are having to prosecute one postmaster per week?

Per the article above they installed 40,000 terminals, presumably the majority of those where intended to be used by individual postmasters and mistresses. Even the full 700 odd people caught up in this only amounts to 2-3% of all individuals, and thats spread over a long period of time and in the aftermath of a time when there wasn't really a way to detect such fraud easily.

37 minutes ago, LordVetinari said:

I will admit I'm not hugely familiar with development on the level required to do something like this, but it sounds pretty broken from the ground up.

As someone with modding experiance once i grasped what was being described it made me want to punch kittens. When your modding a game and you mess with somthing in the files, (say the rate of fire on a gun in an FPS), if you enter an invalid value, (say 4.2%A when you meant to enter 4.25A), the game when it tried to read it will do one of two things. A) scream and then perform an unexpected immediate controlled exit, (it crashes), usually with an error log telling you what you screwed up. Or B) It reverts to the core files ignoring your edit in the mod file area and prints an error about this to a log.

What this software was doing was looking at that and either ignoring it, or reading it as 4.20A, and then proceeding on without throwing the slightest sign something went wrong up.

Now imagine that value is the value in 1000's of pounds of money handed out from the till to pensioners collecting pensions. Depending on how it screws up reading that it reports the value handed out as being between £50 and £4250 less than was actually given out. Which to the post office means someone took that money out of the register and ran off with it.