Meanwhile, Across 'The Pond'.blimey !

Other than this report being published, this is extremely old news. The dramatisation has already been run by most European tv stations.

This is also only the first part of the Report, so the Standard's emphasis on Fujitsu may be rather premature.

Can we please make more descriptive titles or put some basic information on the first post about the content of the links, etc.
Otherwise these threads are completely lost and unfindable in the not-too-distant future.
And no, I won't even click on the link unless I have some idea what it is about. Just saying.
Thanks.

I presume its related to this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_Ba..._Post_Office

- not the movie, but the actual event, and yes, Fujitsu clearly has serious blame along with others.

Computer software errors are believed and British postal staff wrongly fired for the software errors. Eventually sorted out. Incident published and a TV series produced about the issue.

Of course if people were NOT to stupid to double check the software no problem would have caused staff to be fired. Just wait until AI s more in-trenched in software.Even more folks will lack the knowledge to sort out the errors. The only way to stop this is to hold the software engineers civically and criminally liable for their errors.

*cough*, I'm a software engineer - and a clarification should be made here.

I don't blame Fujitsu for having some software errors (bugs).

They appear to merit blame for how they participated in the cover-up of this, and the denial of the fact that they were modifying postmaster's records without their knowledge -- leading to the postmasters being charged with crimes.

If the dramatisation is factual, it was Fujitsu that showed how to, remotely, change the data. They, then supported the Post Office in claiming it could not be changed remotely and errors could not occur.

Unlike the situation where a company sells a defective system coded by incompetent software engineers that is accepted by the user, Fujitsu cannot, seriously, claim it only was incompetent. The prosecution of postmasters, even when it had become clear the system was defective, and the consequent cover-up was purely a matter of the Post Office.

Fujitsu has come to the conclusion it should contribute to the compensation fund. Had it not done so, politicians might have called for the government to ban Fujitsu from competing for future government contracts.

I feel your pain txstamp but in my area, some software errors resulted in the "victim of the error" getting an average settlement of $10,000 per day they were affected by the error. More if it went to court. if traced back to a beta tester, QA or coder discipline resulted. Depending on the mistake, criminal proceeding could be possible.

More that one third party software firm was cut loose from their possible contract and without payment when they play fast and loose with the information (read as violated anonymization of data when it went to some folks with no right to know--criminal prosecution was next).