Another #Horizon thought: tech teams seemingly didn't know Horizon data may be used for criminal prosecution.
If devs don't know how a system is to be used, they can't exercise good judgment in making it.
People snark about "software craftsmanship" being hipstery, but there's truth to it: good software is far more Savile Row than it is Henry Ford. Business may want interchangeable cogs but good software needs skilled people empowered to think carefully, do good work and give a shit.
Worth a read. This is the paper that broke and carried on reporting on the Post Office Scandal/Larceny well before Private Eye, Panorama or ITV got into it.
'potentially unlimited powers for new “bank scanning” algorithms, which are being proposed to tackle “fraud”… so out of control that the fraud rate for disability benefits is only 0.2%’
I've started playing #Horizon Zero Dawn in the last few days and I've gotta say, it's amazing. The incredible graphics and intriguing story that makes me wanna play more to learn about what is actually going on, but at the same time to spend my time enjoy and explore the environment as well.
The evidence of the callousness & mendacity of the various parties who persecuted & destroyed the lives of sub-postmasters gets more extensive by the week... these people should be prosecuted & locked-up for what they have done....
Its a picture of how the institutions of power in this country have a complete contempt for those who they think are obstructing them.
The #PostOfficeInquiry has just been told that internally, #Horizon was described as having "military level encryption".
Remember, yesterday, we found out they were using MD5 for hashing the audit log data despite being being built after 1996 (and apparently having fairly shaky security on the stored hashes).
Also, remember the training slide: "Link for instance is unable to decrypt the encryption we have, so we have to decrypt before sending!" (para 80 of the Technical Appendix).
One more #Horizon#PostOfficeInquiry thought for the day—the email threads that are shown in the Inquiry are a synecdoche of the hellscape of working in the big corporate world.
Pages of blathering from deeply mediocre people incapable of thinking beyond hashtags, KPIs, bullet points and mission statements. Neverending CC chains for arse covering. Constant prioritisation of comms over reality. Hideous typography.
It's both aesthetically repulsive and morally bankrupt.
Today at the #Horizon#PostOfficeInquiry emails from Post Office were shown discussing what terminology could be used in place of “bugs” which was considered both “slang” and “emotive” (despite being a completely normal term used by software developers).
They considered using “defects”, and seemed to settle on “exception” which they treated as synonymous with “anomaly”.
(Let’s ignore the fact that “exception” has a very specific technical meaning in many programming languages…)
It was under Crozier's leadership (2003 - 2010) that much of the Horizon computing systems errors and prosecution of innocent sub-postmasters occurred.
But today he said he was unaware that the Post Office even had the power to prosecute!
Post Office officials knew about the bugs in #Horizon as early as 2002, but it seem no one decided to to tell Crozier.
We're often told that the reason bosses of big companies get multimillion pound salaries and bonuses is because they have very rare and valuable talent.
I'm not convinced that not having the first clue WTF is going on in your own organisation is all that rare a talent. I have come across plenty of people who can do that.
Unless of course he's lying through his teeth. That probably can't be entirely ruled out.
The Adventures of J-Loy continue! We finally know what the game's name means! We know what Zero Dawn is... but how did they do it? We won't find answers just sitting around. Maybe it's just over the Horizon...
So, it now transpires that in the middle of the Horizon IT debacle Paula Vennells claimed that sub-post masters were likely to be tempted to steal by having large amounts of money in their tills...
when as we now know actually it was here & her associates who were tempted to steal by fraud by covering up IT problems they were aware of.
And just in case you had forgotten Vennells has served as an Anglican priest...
More evidence of the malice of the Post Office in the Horizon IT case(s) it brought.
What is interesting is how this whole situation is unravelling like an onion to reveal at its heart a vindictive & callous PO management who were prepared to collude with Fujitsu in covering up the problems with the software.
Its almost unbelievable that people could act this way... but then we only have to look to our political class to see where they got the idea from!
That's quite the smoking gun. For those who didn't follow, the UK post office used a faulty accounting software, and rather than investigating the software, even after being warned, accused people of stealing, leading to some cases of innocents thrown in jail and some suicides. I truly hope the people responsible for the coverup, starting with that Vennells character, go to jail, but alas elites are shielded from their actions... #horizon#uk