Posts by Dan 55 16873 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2009
We're the Post Office, we can't be wrong. It's a computer system, whatever it says must be right.
And that view is legally written into UK law. The presumption is that the computer is always right unless the defence can prove otherwise.
Posted this yesterday too, a bit spammy, but I'm posting it again as not even IT people know this and as we're writing the damn software we should.
The Post Office FAQ page is working overtime.
The PO can bring private prosecutions but so can anyone or any company in England and Wales. The problem it appears was there was no oversight or alarm which went off when the PO was bringing so many private prosecutions against their own employees (effectively). Scotland's justice system makes private prosecutions more difficult.
The procurement process for Horizon began in August 1994 (Wikipedia). The Tories started it, Labour ran with it, the Tories picked up the ball again. The only reason why this has blown up now is ITV were looking for dramas to make and the Tory party needs several lifebelts of which this is one. If ITV hadn't made this drama then I have no doubt that nothing would have happened politically either now or after the next election and it would have remained a series of court cases until the very end where the PM would said it's a terrible thing and have commissioned a parliamentary inquiry about it so it could fizzle out and die a natural death like Grenfell, Windrush, etc...
And now seems there's going to be a law passed which allows the executive to interfere in the judicial process, so the UK's downfall continues apace.
An accountant somewhere must have known that those sums of money were appearing out of thin air, as there would have been no balancing ledger entries to account for them
As far back as 2013 it was publicly known that their own accounts were also a mess so they could not compare entries in their own accounts with entries created by the software on Horizon PCs installed in post offices. They maintained whatever shortfall the Horizon PC software made up was the amount which had to be paid, put the money in a general account, congratulated themselves, and went on to bully the next subpostmaster.
Podcast: Where Did All The Money Go?
It is important to remember the Post Office had no real control over its internal accounting systems for the duration of its Horizon-related prosecution spree (cf the 2013 Detica report) and so it didn’t know where money was going, nor could it properly account for where it came from. Suggesting that double-entry accounting would have revealed an obvious positive entry corresponding to an obvious negative entry assumes the Post Office systems worked and the people operating them knew what they were doing. They didn’t, and even if they did, they were not going to give any visibility of them to Subpostmasters or their legal representatives.
The fact that a computer has failed may well not be obvious. Even when a failure has been identified, it may be infeasible (that is, not possible) to discover whether it was caused by a software bug or improper operation. As a result, a person challenging evidence derived from a computer is unlikely to know what documents or records might show whether a relevant error has occurred, and so cannot request they be disclosed. They will typically not have been privy to the circumstances in which the system in question is known to fail or may have failed.
ICL was bought by Fujitsu while the project was being developed so the chances of there being corrective action being taken at that early stage after a visit from Fujitsu were minimal.
I'm sure we're all pretty familiar with the idea of foreign outposts belonging to multinationals where nobody at the parent company has any clue what's going on apart from a look at the balance sheet every quarter and an office tour and slap-up meal every year or so.
Fujitsu management are probably annoyed that no UK management committed Seppuku around 2013 though, after the Post Office first admitted there had been problems for a decade.
They have delayed until it was impossible to continue to ignore it. Similar is happening with other scandals eg the Windrush people who were wrongly detained, deported
And then they delayed a bit more until it was possible to ignore it once again:
Home Office Windrush ‘transformation team’ formally disbanded
Jacqueline McKenzie, a solicitor with Leigh Day, who has handled more than 100 Windrush compensation cases, said she saw little evidence in daily casework-related calls with Home Office staff to suggest the department had introduced significant cultural change.
“In terms of its attitudes towards asylum cases, deportation and refugees the department is as hostile as ever. Things have gone backwards in terms of poor decision-making and lack of humanity,” she said.
In a further sign of a departmental desire to move on, the cross-government working group on Windrush, which was set up to monitor progress on the reform agenda, is due to hold its final meeting on Wednesday.
Establishment's gonna Establish.
Both IBM and MS spent time and money removing documentation for software from two major versions and above ago from their websites. We're in the future where documentation seems to be a crowdsourced moving target hosted on official forums but employees never actually reply to problems. Isn't it exciting?
This is not a feature which attracts, it is a feature which repels. There are only two kinds of customers, those which couldn't care less about this feature and those which will be more willing to look at other makes of car because of this feature. That's it. Just make it use Android Auto or Car Play and let the phone do the assistant part (or not, if the customer doesn't want it).
Just like TVs with nice hardware and terrible software and the customer ends up plugging something better into the HDMI port.
That might be the Bliss screensaver by Microsoft, you can still download it from archive.org.
Unlike the Windows/Menu/multimedia/internet keys of yore, the Emoji key does send not a unique scancode so it's not a real key, it just sends a bunch of left keys + Space and the OS interprets it.
change emoji key to ctrl in Microsoft designer keyboard with autohotkey
Hopefully the AI key will do something similar instead of getting its own scancode, making it easier to ignore in the future... it might even just send Left Windows + c.
If you want to see how much the space bar could shrink have a look at a Japanese 109-key layout. If MS plugs a few more apps we'll be the same way.
it would make sense to me too that the person behind the wheel would be to blame.
The person behind the wheel cannot morally be responsible if the Tesla they are in is self-driving and decides to crash or break the speed limit. If the law says the driver is responsible then it needs to be updated. Likewise if the law protects Tesla the corporation when its cars crash or break the speed limit then it also needs to be updated.
California just chose to update the law to protect car manufacturers from the consequences of their bad software which was the wrong decision.
If the reality is nobody's responsible for self-driving cars breaking the highway code or causing accidents which kill people, or the person responsible is sat behind the steering wheel but wasn't actually driving, then the law needs to be updated. Pretty obvious I would have thought.
"Which party pays the fine if a self-driving car breaks the highway code" is probably the next question everyone would think of after thinking of "Which party pays damages if a self-driving car is involved in an accident" first. Neither seem to be questions which require galaxy brains to think of and neither appear to be authoritarian or interfere with the glorious free market since we already ask these questions over the past 100-odd years of automotive history.
In this case I'm quite happy for the rest of the world to move on without asking those questions if it wants to. Their beta testing should be quite instructive for everyone else.
When the letter drops on your doormat and you as the registered owner have to identify either yourself or someone else as the driver, include the manufacturer as a third option and they get fined instead. That'll be an incentive to improve mapping data.
Just before posting I did a quick check and it seems that the registered owner is always fined no matter who the driver is in California and probably the whole of the US. Madness.
We've known for a while that there's malware which copies your entire browser profile and uses it to access accounts belonging to open sessions. Google really should be checking if a session is suddenly accessed from an IP in a different country, asking for the password before allowing certain settings to be changed, and any password change should immediately invalidate all sessions.
Who said it shipped with a "sound chip"?
You said the PC shipped with a sound chip in your original post. I'm afraid you're getting befuddled by your own anecdotes.
Also even supposing you did rig up another kind of sound output with an 8255 and strings and yoghurt pots slightly better than the standard PC speaker, it had no mainstream software support so such an expansion was pretty limited in application.
The previous poster is 100% right, you had to bit bang the PC speaker if you wanted anything other than a simple beep, something which you can't do now on a modern CPU and Windows as userland software is not allowed to do that.
Hiercoles when it first came out was hi-res two colour, fine for business software displaying something on the screen which looks similar to what it's going to print on paper but not great for a multicolour GUI or games.
Until VGA came out the de facto standard which actually gave you a decent palette comparable to Mac, ST and Amiga was Tandy and until Soundblaster came out the de facto standard was once again Tandy.
I suppose that was a strength of a PC, third parties could step in where IBM failed until IBM could pull its finger out and catch up. Sucked for you if you were a PC user and didn't choose Tandy though.
but most things have been pretty consistent over the last 40 years
They've boiled your frog:
They said Minority Report style interfaces were going to be the interface of the future until people worked out that it had a major problem in the shape of Gorilla Arm.
Then a unified phone/desktop UI was going to be the future until people worked out it was terrible at both things but especially desktop UIs.
Then Google Glass was going to be the future of interfaces until people worked out they looked like Glassholes.
Now conversational interfaces are going to be the future yet they can't even do homework properly.
I think this Supreme Court opinion from 2014 trumps that.
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