Posts by Eclectic Man 3151 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Jun 2010
The trouble with that is you get a whole load of disparate systems each doing their own thing reasonably well, but incompatible with the others when interaction is required. What you actually need is competent people who know what they are doing and are allowed to get on with it. Yes, I know, and pigs will fly...
Ooh well, time for my medication
Fairly certain the UK does not have anything at all like that - otherwise former PM David Cameron would not have been able to inherit £2million for his father 'tax free' because it was in an offshore tax haven. (Yes, that is the same David Cameron who worked for lobbying for the financial company Greensil that went bankrupt and he refuses to say how much he was paid, oh and he imposed austerity on the UK when 'in power' too.)
Umm, sorry about this, but the philosophy of taxation has been debated for thousands of years. (Julius Caesar was assassinated primarily because he wanted to tax the rich landowners more.). Whilst I have the greatest respect for the Register's commentarians, I doubt we will come to a solution on which everyone agrees. Although as the rich have increased 'their' wealth by over. trillion dollars since Covid, and the poor have seen there wealth decrease by about 1% in the same time, taxing the rich more does seem to me, personally, to be equitable. (Now I must just get on to my pension funds and make sure it is all in tax havens.)
I did some consultancy for HMRC. The officers I met were all hardworking, but complained that the outsourcing contract meant that if they wanted to move a desk in their office, the contractor would charge them over £400 for moving the IT equipment. This is a few years ago now, so I expect the cost has since risen.
An actual expert who reviewed source code for the Horizon system claimed that some of it indicated the 'programmer' had no understanding of how to write code and the code showed no understanding of even basic arithmetical operations. He was, of course, ignored by the Post Office and Fujitsu. I heard this on one of the BBC Radio 4 series on the Horizon scandal, should be somewhere in the BBC iPlayer archive, and is currently (as of 20230117) broadcast at 09:15 weekday mornings.
says it all: "Despite Davies' claims, it's important to note that the government has been here before. In 2017, The Register revealed how the plans to overhaul £6 billion ($7.58 billion) in large IT contracts expiring within the next three years have fallen by the wayside. "
I also note that while Davies was reported as having said HMG could save £20billion, he was not reported as indicating how much it could waste if things went badly. They really do need to stop using 'consultants' with a financial interest in prolonging things indefinitely to run IT procurements, and get in people who will do a proper job of telling the customer when they need a pause to work out what they actually want.
For instance, the initial idea behind the UK's Universal Credit was sensible - create a single system which could handle all of the main benefits so that a claimant only had to go through it all once, and they would get what support they deserved*. But the problem was that the Treasury decided it was a wonderful opportunity to save money on benefits (rather than on making claiming benefits more efficient). And they also decided that claimants, most of whom worked to a weekly budget had to wait 5 weeks for the first payment, when they rarely had two weeks' worth of money, so had to borrow or get an advance, which had to be repaid. Coupled with Cameron and Osborn's 'austerity' policy (based on a flawed analysis of the effects of government debt) it has been a disaster for millions of people.
I wonder if the Comptroller and Auditor General has ever himself managed a major IT procurement in person.
*For whatever definition of 'deserve' the current government decides.
Indeed. What HMG should be doing is creating a law that allows the Criminal Cases Review Commission to accept a class action where many people have been prosecuted and convicted (or agreed to plead guilty) based on the same flawed testimony or 'evidence' and quash all convictions. But, as usual, 'Operation IRMA'* will prevail and we'll get some bad cases and bad law.
*'Operation IRMA' was named after a wounded child from a war zone called Irma who was rushed to a western hospital to receive life-saving treatment, where the 'hard bitten war correspondents' called Immediate Response to Media Attention.
Early pocket calculators were a bit iffy sometimes too. An early Sinclair one calculated the square root of 36 as 5.999999999. And more recently there was the Pentium processor arithmetical error in floating point silicon. it is important to remember that computer will always get something wrong because they are designed, implemented, managed and used by fallible human beings. You can get errors from an abacus if you try hard enough.
You mean they don't give it a polish (Jay Blades* would love a go at a serious 'gong') and give it to someone who actually deserves it?**
*'The Repair Shop' BBC 1 TV programme.
**My dad's friend, Caroline Series, has been awarded a CBE for services to mathematics (non-Euclidean geometry, don't ask, I've not got a clue). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caroline_Series . Though I doubt she'd want a 'second hand' gong, now I come to think of it.
I don't understand this, Vennells could have thrown Crozier and Greene under a bus, come clean and been not only in the clear herself but lauded and praised by the very sub postmasters and sub postmistresses who have been so seriously abused and actually deserved her CBE or even a damehood. Instead she chose to 'double down' on the whole awful mess and be a villain. Now I know that honesty and integrity particularly at a senior levels in a major organisation can be severely career-limiting or ending, but did she not know right from wrong?
The mind boggles.
Telegraph article here https://uk.yahoo.com/news/horizon-tech-expert-helped-convict-215934637.html about his attempts to obtain immunity from prosecution for anything he says to the Horizon inquiry:
"The architect of the faulty Horizon IT system, who gave evidence used to convict sub-postmasters, has demanded immunity before agreeing to appear at the public inquiry.
Gareth Jenkins, who is understood to have been instrumental in developing the software as a senior computer engineer at Fujitsu, is under police investigation over his role in the Post Office scandal.
His testimony given in court cases that the Fujitsu IT system was working correctly was central to convictions and repeatedly used by Post Office lawyers.
Tracked down by The Telegraph to his home in Berkshire, Mr Jenkins, 69, said, when asked if he was sorry for what had happened: “I don’t want to talk. I don’t have anything to say to you.” "
and
"Prosecutions brought by the CPS
The Telegraph can also disclose that at least 27 prosecutions were brought by the Crown Prosecution service – as opposed to the Post Office – raising serious questions about whether Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, oversaw a number of wrongful convictions during his five-year tenure as director of public prosecutions between 2008 and 2013.
Mr Jenkins had been due to give evidence to the public inquiry twice. But in each occasion it was postponed including as recently as November 2023, when the Post Office disclosed 3,045 documents on the evening before he was due to give evidence. Sources have speculated that the release of the documents was timed to prevent Mr Jenkins giving evidence."
The phrase 'I smell a rat' springs to mind.
Roland6: there seems to be a larger number who seemingly have not fallen foul of the vagaries of the Horizon system
That we know of. The stories are that Fujitsu Admins were gaining access to Horizon systems in post offices out of hours using the relevant postmaster's credentials and 'making corrections'. If they got most of these right, and the discrepancies were only a few pounds or pence than maybe the subplots masters did not notice.
There are innumerable articles on the Register about failed government IT procurements, failures of commercial IT procurements, mismanagement, overpayment, over-promising and under-delivery. Remember the Lloyds - TSB bank 'merger' iT issues? HMG has made many competent IT procurements, but they do not make the news, but with the largest and most complicated ones they still often manage to make a complete and utter mess.
See the Crown Prosecution Service web site: https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/computer-records-evidence
"Rebuttable Presumption of Correct Functioning of a Computer
Prior to the repeal of section 69 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 by section 60 of the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999, it was necessary to prove that a computer was operating properly and was not used improperly before any statement in a document produced by the computer could be admitted in evidence.
Computer evidence must now follow the Common Law rule, that a presumption will exist that the computer producing the evidential record was working properly at the material time and that the record is therefore admissible as real evidence.
That presumption can, however, be rebutted if evidence to the contrary is adduced. In that event it will be for the party seeking to produce the computer record in evidence to satisfy the court that the computer was working properly at the material time. For detailed guidance as to the law, see <Archbold 9-11 9-15>."
I'd say that the PO stating no remote access and there being remote access was 'evidence to the contrary', but then I'm not a lawyer.
Please contact Alan Bates or the inquiry and ask them if they would like to see your notes regarding installation and remote configuration. They would prove that the PO were lying about the absence of remote access. Better still, take a photograph and send it to Private Eye or Computer Weekly.
(Condescending voice) 'But Stevie, my dear boy, you went to the wrong school. You should have gone to Eton, Winchester, Harrow, Fettes, Rugby or Marlborough if you wanted a promotion. Now, do be a good chap and get my G&T, the ice has nearly melted in this one.'
@ Doctor Syntax,
Sir / Madam, you seem to be labouring under the misapprehension that in the UK 'Justice' equates to 'fairness'*. This is not the case. Whilst the convicted post office managers have been terribly treated, they have, on the whole not been treated as unfairly as other recipients of British injustice such as Mr Andrew Malkinson**, who was sent to prison for a rape he did not commit for 17 years, because he refused to confess and maintained his innocence. He was released some months ago, but is living off benefits because he has to apply for compensation for the false conviction, the fact that the Criminal Cases Review board ignored DNA evidence that another man was present after only a few years. So if you think British Justice is about fairness, think again.
* Justice as Fairness, John Rawls, revised edition ISBN-13, 978-0-674-00078-2
** Andrew Malkinson wrongful conviction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongful_conviction_of_Andrew_Malkinson :
"Malkinson was identified by the victim in a identity parade line-up, despite several key details not matching with the description of the perpetrator. For example, she described the attacker as being 3 inches shorter than Malkinson, with a hairless chest and no tattoos. Malkinson had chest hair and prominent tattoos on his forearms. She also said the attacker would have a "deep scratch" to his face, since she'd scratched him so hard she had broken one of her fingernails. Malkinson was seen at work the next day with no scratch to his face. He also didn't have the Bolton accent the victim said the attacker had.
There was no DNA evidence linking him to the crime at the time.
At trial, he was presented as a drifter and was found guilty of two counts of rape and attempting to choke, suffocate or strangle with intent to commit rape but found not guilty of attempted murder after a jury at Manchester Crown Court (Crown Square) spent nine hours considering their verdicts.[5] He was convicted by a 10–2 majority jury verdict and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 6½ years."
AC: "some of the ones "in the clear" were keeping parallel paper records. It seems attempts to prosecute them evaporated once they made that known"
But that was surely clear evidence that there were software problems, which should have been taken as requiring technical investigation by Fujitsu, not just ignoring it and carrying on prosecuting those without parallel paper records. IF that was indeed the case, then the PO had clear and strong evidence of an IT failure, and continuing to prosecute was conspiracy to pervert the course of justice and perjury. Jonathan Aitken and (Lord) Jeffrey archer went to prison for that, and I never thought I would approve of building more prisons, but in this case ...
Well, now, we are certainly seeing the true upper class British values of hypocrisy, condescension, pomposity, self-entitlement, and sneering at the little people*.
But don't worry, these are not the ones we expect all those foreign immigrants to adopt, they will be expected to doff their caps, tug their force-locks and and bow and scrape to their rightful masters.
(You can tell I'm angry can't you?)
*That is you and me, btw, in case you were wondering, 'proper people' do not waste their time reading web sites.
Watching the four part series, and the following documentary, as a former SysAdmin I was struck by one particular thought. The Post Office insisted that there was no remote access to the horizon terminals in each post office and sub-Post Office, but no one asked how the System Administrators, located in Bracknell (I actually used to work in the building when it Was ICL) administered the system without remote access. I have used Post Offices all over Great Britain, in Scotland, Keswick in Cumbria, Penzance in Cornwall and even in Reading, Berkshire (I know, I live an exotic life). Why did no one ask how these systems as managed for updates if not remotely? Sending an engineer to each Post Office for each update every month or so would have been horrendously expensive, not to say time consuming, and clearly is nonsense. Therefore Fujitsu must have had remote access.
Another thing that worried me was the apparent complete ignorance by the judiciary and lawyers of IT Security Standards such as ISO 27001, Check and Crest technical security assessments (AKA Penetration Testing) and standards for the admissibility of computer evidence in court none of which seem to have been met by the Post Office prosecution teams. Personally had I been ware of these prosecutions when they were happening I do hope I would have had the courage to inform the relevant defendants and judges of these essential things.
Appalling ignorance by the judges, and even worse vindictiveness by the PO.
Possibly, but a tightened bolt can come loose with vibration, so it might just be that it wasn't inspected properly last time, or that it wasn't on the inspection list sufficiently frequently.
There is a problem with inspections themselves causing issues. In one case there was an inspection of some large flaps on an aircraft scheduled for a major service, but just prior to that, there was a wing inspection, so the fitters used to bring the large flap inspection forward. The result was a spike in large flap failures. So the inspection in a major service was deleted from the rota and the flap failures returned to what was expected.
It is not rocket science, but it is engineering and psychology, both can be tricky.
Could have been worse (those of a sensitive disposition look away now).
My old company had a large transformer / substation in a ground floor room, and some water (H20) got into the oil. When it was turned on the thing blew up killing the four people in there om and blowing the external wall across the adjacent street (fortunately no one else was hurt).
It seems that high voltage and current electricity, water and oil really do not mix well.
Explosion icon because that is what happened.
Alan Brown: "there wasn't much in it"
Nonsense, Peter Wright announced to the world the incredible and genius idea of having a basic current running along a circuit and using variations in that current to send messages. Which he and his colleagues thought of all by themselves. (OK so the telephone network uses exactly the same system but that had only been going since 1879*, so it was revolutionary and shows how incredibly technically brilliant the spies were at that time.)
*https://techround.co.uk/guides/history-uk-phone-numbers/#:~:text=The%20first%20telephone%20exchange%20in,essential%20to%20ensure%20efficient%20communication. Well, maybe, Not entirely sure of my telecoms history actually. But I am fairly sure that the 'idea' was very well known early in the C20, and certainly before Peter Wright and his chums 'invented' it. el Reg experts please correct / advise.
I worked in an office where the management decided to outsource the cleaning. So they did. Well, we had some plastic 'plants', sort of large shrub / bush sized things in pots, but fake. Anyway the outsourcer was only contracted to clean flat surfaces, not the 'plants'. After a year or so these seems to have achieved a sort of 'steady state' regarding the accumulation and shedding of dust. Being asthmatic when the air conditioning was running it spread the dust around and I would get rather wheezy. I managed to get the' plant' moved to place away from my desk, but they were filthy.
I also worked next to the second desk of an 'engineer' type, and it was covered with a load of old computer bits, boxes etc. and a goodly layer of topsoil (sorry, dust). Again, the air con would disturb the dues and I'd get and asthma attack. One day the engineer* was out and I brought in a hand held vacuum cleaner and cleaned the whole thing. Result - no more asthma attacks.
*(His name was Steve, he retired ages ago. If you are reading this and recognise yourself, say hello. And if you are reading this and recognise your 'spares desk' - FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE CLEAN IT!)
I can do no better than quote a recent letter in new Scientist:
"Published 27 December 2023
From Arthur Dahl, Geneva, Switzerland
The study that found there is a weekend boost to plant productivity in Europe because of reduced air pollution by aerosols, which block sunlight, should be a warning to those who seek to address global heating by injecting aerosols into the atmosphere (25 November, p 11).
This research shows how sensitive plants are to any drop in sunlight. Addressing climate change through atmospheric geoengineering will reduce plant photosynthesis on land and at sea globally, with probably catastrophic impacts on nature and agriculture."
The article referenced is at: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2403856-plants-are-more-productive-on-weekends-thanks-to-cleaner-air/
And states:
"The team analysed satellite measurements of how much light is emitted by the green pigment chlorophyll in the leaves of plants – which corresponds to how much photosynthesis is occurring – across Europe between 2018 and 2021.
By comparing this with satellite measurements of air pollution over the same period, the team found that photosynthesis rates increased when there were lower levels of aerosols, a type of pollution that includes dust as well as smoke from wildfires and human activity."
As a species we have alreadyy tampered with the atmosphere a great deal without understanding the consequences, I reckon it is time to reduce our meddling, rather than increase it.
Whilst I sympathise with women in the quest for parity with men, in more than just IT, btw, it is just not good enough. Replacing overwhelmingly white, privileged, middle and upper class men with white, privileged middle and upper class women should merely be part of the road to genuine equality of opportunity for everyone, whatever their sex, sexuality, race, colour etc. And, as has been said and upvoted many times in the above posts, 283 years is far too long to wait. Here in the UK we have seen what happens when over-privileged upper class women get 'equality' with over-privileged upper class men, and get the jobs that previously went to the 'right sort of chap' and they are just as crap and self entitled as the men were (and still are - watch the Covid inquiry if you don't believe me).
I am not entirely sure that counts as a medical essential, but I bow to your superior knowledge.
But every time I consider the 'survivorlists' attitudes and expectations I wonder what they are thinking. In the event of actually surviving a civilisation destroying event, why do their 'bug out bags' omit essential items like a compass, or an axe? If nuclear armageddon has occurred, we're basically stuffed, so maybe a geiger-counter would be useful too? And when I consider the breadth of expertise I rely on, the sheer number of different skills needed is enormous, and I mean hundreds of people. So it is far far better to try to prevent armageddon than prepare for a few months of survival afterwards, and fighting your 'guard force' and 'land slaves' in order to maintain 'control'. But then I'm not a multi-billionaire Harvard graduate/drop-out, so what do I know?
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