I really hope you are wrong, but odds are against the righteous in this case. One difference to the other cases of mass death you mention is that POL - marking their own homework - were the prosecutors, not the CPS. That is a very direct link between the actions of the PO and the subsequent deaths of so many sub-postmasters. Sadly, I fear that it will all collapse into finger pointing between POL and Fujitsu.
Posts by MrBanana
593 publicly visible posts • joined 31 May 2017
Post Office slapped down for late disclosure of documents in Horizon scandal inquiry
Probably corporate, not involuntary - "Corporate manslaughter is a crime in several jurisdictions, that enables a corporation to be punished and censured for culpable conduct that leads to a person's death." I really hope that as well as proper justice for the innocent, there will be severe retribution for the guilty.
Re: Why...
The standard "no comment/action until the enquiry is complete" is usual when the report is written without direct public scrutiny. That is not the case here. Irrefutable documentary evidence has been produced that will lead to criminal prosecutions. The actual outcome of the report is immaterial to those prosecutions being able to start right now. Dragging things out for as long as possible is just human nature. Although acting like a normal human being seems to be beyond too many of those in the PO or Fujitsu.
Lee, thank you for the enlightening information you have provided on the process of data collecting for a FoI request. But I don't think that was the original posters target. As Daniel points out below, the comment is very likely relating to the ability for low level editing of the data in the Horizon system.
In the 80s I worked on selling and customising a system used by small businesses. Simple order processing, stock control etc, based on an SQL database. We used it in-house and our chief accountant found a bug in the stock control module that would mess up the reserved stock levels. He asked me to report the problem to the system software supplier, and then cursed about all the necessary paperwork required to create an exception for resetting the stock levels. I could see he was annoyed. I opened a command shell and executed an SQL statement to fix the stock level. Now he was very annoyed. I thought I was doing him a favour, but being able to bypass the application, without any audit trail, had him reaching for the Valium. Proper accountants are conscientious like that. Anyone associated with the Horizon database, obviously was not.
Solar eclipse darkened skies, dampened internet traffic
Iowa sysadmin pleads guilty to 33-year identity theft of former coworker
Re: False Names on Official Documents
I know in the UK that the vows you make "in the eyes of God" are meaningless in law. You get married when you sign the wedding certificate, possibly only fully legally when it is lodged at the registrar's office. Using a false name on the certificate would invalidate it as a legal instrument. So the marriage would be void.
Yes, I did just crash that critical app. And you should thank me for having done so
Re: Proper testing
Part of the code I was working on had a basic keyboard interface which needed testing for bad data in the input fields. I spent some time thinking up random input to test with, and found a few validation errors that needed fixing. My colleague's approach was to dump his head on the middle of the keyboard and then roll it from side to side. He found a lot more errors.
Casino giant Caesars tells thousands: Yup, ransomware crooks stole your data
Lost your luggage? That's nothing – we just lost your whole flight!
Techies at Europe's biggest council have 8 weeks to pull finance reports from Oracle system
Re: Those close to the project are skeptical
I worked in a sales department where the figures available from the database were "inconsistent" with the numbers that were required. The data actually existed, but the "format" needed adjusting to fit the invented truth. Is it +5% this month, or more?
From vacuum tubes to qubits – is quantum computing destined to repeat history?
Data breach reveals distressing info: People who order pineapple on pizza
UK flights disrupted by 'technical issue' with air traffic computer system
Last rites for the UK's Online Safety Bill, an idea too stupid to notice it's dead
Re: Not holding my breath
The location data is definitely logged and analysed. I know a young driver who had a black box fitted, and enjoyed cheaper premiums. Then he got a girlfriend, and the insurance company noticed that he was no longer spending any time where he had declared his domicile, car registration and overnight parking. They didn't much like that and hiked the cost.
South Korea's biggest mobile telco says 5G has failed to deliver on its promise
80% of execs regret calling employees back to the office
Home office space
I sold up in the pandemic, and the house had a very large upstairs space that was previously sold to us as an opportunity to create more bedrooms. We didn't bother, and made an office space that could have easily accommodated 4 people working from home, or a small business. Took less than a week before we had a lot of interest, siting the office space as key.
Re: We have expensive real estate.
When I worked at IBM there was a recognition that the 8 layers of management between a lowly worker and a C exec was probably too much. Next up, hire a bunch of consultants to write a report on how to change this. Note, I didn't say "fix this". The result was just a bunch of reshuffling ending up with fewer layers, but the same number of managers. Genius.
Re: We have expensive real estate.
Years ago when I did go to an open plan office (fighting with a 9600 BAUD modem was the home worker alternative) I had a number of people ask me how I was able to get all my work done in the 9-5 office hours. I noticed that they would ask me this, and other questions, and then flit to another cubicle to ask another bunch of questions to someone else, and then .... Their own cubicle presence must have been about %30 of the day, and they wondered why they needed extra time to get their work done.
Internet Archive sued by record labels as battle with book publishers intensifies
Re: "artists such as Frank Sinatra .." etc
A well reasoned argument, thank you. I'm not a Taylor Swift fan, but her rerecording of her early albums to regain control is a great "stuff you" finger to the record industry. I note that the owners of the first recordings hasn't seen fit to raise any objection. I wonder how many artists who have sold off their back catalogue (Dylan, Justin Bieber’, Dr. Dre, ...) will come to regret it when they have no control over their music, and hear it being used for a haemorrhoids commercial every 15 minutes.
Re: "artists such as Frank Sinatra .." etc
You may want to check out something called Autotune. Streaming services are not always serving up original recordings. Ignoring the fidelity of the digital transfer of old, physical recordings, some streaming services have decided to "enhance" the sounds for those listeners they consider too enfeebled to appreciate an original recording. Add in a good dose of compression, and it is no wonder visitors to my vinyl listening lounge say "oh, it doesn't sound like that on Spotify".
Judge denies HP's plea to throw out all-in-one printer lockdown lawsuit
NASA mistakenly severs communication to Voyager 2
Re: Off topic
In the first term at Uni we were only allowed to use the teletype terminals. But there were two types, the one everyone wanted had a type head that dropped down after printing so you could see what was being printed. The other type required a manual press of a button to raise the carriage to see anything - very annoying. We quickly found out the magic runes required to get the CRT terminals to route through the Gandalf box to get a usable connection to the PDP-11 - perhaps that was part of the first year test.
Fed-up Torvalds suggests disabling AMD’s 'stupid' performance-killing fTPM RNG
Microsoft kicks Calibri to the curb for Aptos as default font
I'm dyslexic and cannot write anything legible in cursive script. I can only use capitals for written communication, except my signature (also illegible). Anything approaching a cursive/serif script is panful for me to read. I don't hear of anyone complaining that sans serif is unreadable to them.
Re: I like serifs
I'm dyslexic, and I find Serif fonts very hard to process. Also, a lot of my work with computer documentation means that I am continually working with fixed width Courier, which I am very happy with. Proportional spacing is for the highfalutin nobs of this world.
[ Note to El Reg editors - very disappointed that there was no effort to have every paragraph in a different font. ]
Barts NHS hack leaves folks on tenterhooks over extortion
The random demands on personal data seem to get ever more absurd and intrusive. I'm just buying a pair of lawn chairs, why on earth do you need to know my date of birth, are they rated PG13 or... what? My DoB is of course the Unix epoch 1970-01-01, telephone number is 01234 567890 - I've given this number over the phone and, if you use the right cadence, I've not been questioned. Even when I ask them to repeat it back to me.
Man who nearly killed physical media returns with $60,000 vinyl turntable
Turning a computer off, then on again, never goes wrong. Right?
Re: PC Engineers...
One coworker of mine was barely a PC user, and unfortunately got sent to a customer site that had a problem with their Univac system. This was purely for putting someone onsite to fulfil our contracted support obligations. Under no circumstances was he to do anything without explicit instructions. He managed to get logged onto the system, and diagnosed the problem as an out of space issue - this bit was actually correct. Unfortunately, as root, he took it upon himself to "tidy up" the system, and generate some free space, "/vmunix - that looks big....". After the inevitable crash, there was precious little of the system file space to enable the poor beast to boot, and we had to reinstall the OS from scratch.
Nobody does DR tests to survive lightning striking twice
Free Wednesday gift for you lucky lot: Extra mouse button!
Re: The big secret is this: your scroll wheel is also a button.
Obvious for decades. Even a super cheap PoundLand mouse has this feature, see BigClive for tear down details.
And for those Linux users without a mouse wheel, and can't afford a quid, then simultaneous LeftButton + RightButton usually does the trick.
Gen Z and Millennials don't know what their colleagues are talking about half the time
Florida man insists he didn't violate the law by keeping Top Secret docs
Family-owned aerospace biz throws a wrench in Boeing IP lawsuit
Can noise-cancelling buds beat headphones? We spent 20 hours flying to find out
Re: Old school here
Last couple of long haul flights I've been on had an option in the infotainment system that allowed you flag that you were not to be disturbed. There wasn't an option to say if the bloke in the seat next to me didn't want his meal then I would have it. But given the appalling state of todays inflight meals, that's probably a good thing.
Oh Snap... Desktop Ubuntu Core to arrive in 2024
Cunningly camouflaged cable routed around WAN-sized hole in project budget
Line of site can be a curse. I used to live in a house that was, literally, actually, no joking, 10m from a TV transmission tower. But it was a local repeater for only 18 broadcast stations, swamping everything else. Took a while to get the correct aerial alignment, TV configuration, and shouting from the roof "can you see it Grandad" to get everything worked out for a solid connection to Crystal Palace.
WTF is solid state active cooling? We’ve just seen it working on a mini PC
Airline puts international passengers on the scales pre-flight
I agree that it is a good safety measure. But making it voluntary is going to skew the results. Maybe it would be possible to add a weighing function to the security scan where you stand still in the round booth, while the scanner spins it should be enough time to get a half decent weight measure. No need to tell anyone, just collect the average over a day.