Engineer insists Post Office software did a 'good job'
Former Fujitsu engineer Gareth Jenkins defended Horizon IT system's performance amid Post Office scandal. Testimony contradicts system's reliability, sparking controversy and raising questions about sub-postmasters' convictions. Ongoing investigations and public scrutiny ensue.
Read original article
In a Post Office scandal involving the Horizon IT system, Gareth Jenkins, a former senior Fujitsu engineer, defended the software's performance, claiming it did a "good job" despite being used to convict sub-postmasters. Jenkins, who is under investigation, disputed criticisms of Horizon's reliability during a public inquiry, contradicting a High Court assessment that the system was not robust. The 72-year-old engineer's testimony clashed with the experiences of sub-postmasters who faced issues with bugs and errors in the system. Jenkins' denial of any wrongdoing related to his court evidence has sparked controversy among those affected by the Horizon system. The scandal has raised questions about the software's role in the convictions of sub-postmasters and its overall reliability, leading to ongoing investigations and public scrutiny.
Related
Free software hijacked Philip Hazel's life
Philip Hazel, creator of Exim and PCRE, started in free software in 1995. At 80, he seeks a successor for maintaining PCRE after 27 years. Hazel's legacy revolutionized email services and regular expressions, emphasizing long-term software maintenance and testing for future developers.
Public servants uneasy as government 'spy' robot prowls federal offices
Public servants in Gatineau are uneasy as a robot from the VirBrix platform optimizes workspaces by collecting data on air quality and light levels. Despite assurances, the Government Services Union expresses privacy concerns.
Microsoft admits no guarantee of sovereignty for UK policing data
Microsoft admits inability to guarantee UK policing data sovereignty on its public cloud, potentially breaching UK data protection laws. Concerns persist despite company's efforts to address issues, impacting all UK government users.
Snowflake breach snowballs as more victims, perps, come forward
The Snowflake data breach expands to include Ticketek, Ticketmaster, and Advance Auto Parts. ShinyHunters claim involvement, Snowflake enforces security measures. CDK faces ransomware attack, Juniper and Apple vulnerabilities identified. Jetflicks operators convicted.
Ex-Fujitsu engineer admits changing court testimony at request of Post Office
Former Fujitsu engineer Gareth Jenkins admitted altering court testimony for Post Office in Horizon scandal. Jenkins, key in Horizon system design, faces inquiry for perjury. Testimony reveals manipulation of evidence.
17 commentsThe vendor can't bring a prosecution, so this looks like an attempt to obscure the real villain to some degree.
This guy’s a real piece of work. Not only did he architect this software, he was a key witness in several postmaster prosecutions. Deserves every ounce of jail time the state can throw at him, which appears to be approximately zero. There is a special place in hell for this kind of extreme arrogance.
VB5 was not an entirely horrific choice for an UI running on Windows touchscreen hardware at the time, but the project was riddled with basic mistakes, like blocking foreground threads with long-running background operations, and, mostly, threading model mismatches between UI and back-end code (which was all C++, but not the good kind -- and oh, it implemented some weird distributed messaging bus, where you could do just about anything, but nothing really worked, especially not if the ISDN-based network was acting up...).
My recommendation was to upgrade to VB6, which made multi-threaded foreign function calls at least reliable-ish, to re-do the entire calling surface of the C++ libraries accordingly, plus to significantly improve documentation, since literally nobody seemed to know which calls did exactly what (as in: which parameters they required and what they returned) and how to handle retries.
The guy literally listened to me for 30 seconds (possibly less!), then turned around, and told his minions to escort me out and "get someone who understands what we're doing here". Well...
A priori it seems a little implausible to me that any software could make such a mistake in a way that didn’t make it obvious it was a bug, but I don’t know the extent to which the Post Office might have mishandled the evidence.
He can't imagine the bug so the most likely explanation is theft.
We see this attitude here all the time, e.g. the people that think they never write bugs, and tools to avoid them like static typing, Rust, tests, etc. are just for lesser mortals.
Related
Free software hijacked Philip Hazel's life
Philip Hazel, creator of Exim and PCRE, started in free software in 1995. At 80, he seeks a successor for maintaining PCRE after 27 years. Hazel's legacy revolutionized email services and regular expressions, emphasizing long-term software maintenance and testing for future developers.
Public servants uneasy as government 'spy' robot prowls federal offices
Public servants in Gatineau are uneasy as a robot from the VirBrix platform optimizes workspaces by collecting data on air quality and light levels. Despite assurances, the Government Services Union expresses privacy concerns.
Microsoft admits no guarantee of sovereignty for UK policing data
Microsoft admits inability to guarantee UK policing data sovereignty on its public cloud, potentially breaching UK data protection laws. Concerns persist despite company's efforts to address issues, impacting all UK government users.
Snowflake breach snowballs as more victims, perps, come forward
The Snowflake data breach expands to include Ticketek, Ticketmaster, and Advance Auto Parts. ShinyHunters claim involvement, Snowflake enforces security measures. CDK faces ransomware attack, Juniper and Apple vulnerabilities identified. Jetflicks operators convicted.
Ex-Fujitsu engineer admits changing court testimony at request of Post Office
Former Fujitsu engineer Gareth Jenkins admitted altering court testimony for Post Office in Horizon scandal. Jenkins, key in Horizon system design, faces inquiry for perjury. Testimony reveals manipulation of evidence.