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PBL,</div>
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Thanks for the detailed reply. I appreciate it.</div>
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Yes, in this case, there do appear to be a lot of unanswered questions before the root cause(s) is fully understood. So we can’t immediately blame the software. Yet. But the question still remains in the general case: more and more software is being delivered
which is leading to material harm to the general public—when will the developers and/or suppliers of such faulty software be held accountable and liable?</div>
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Take, for example, the Uber self-driving car that killed Elaine Herzberg. The following is directly from an article summarizing the NTSB report (linked below,underlining added by me for emphasis):</div>
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<div><font face="Calibri,sans-serif"><i>However, "if the perception system changes the classification of a detected object, the tracking history of that object is no longer considered when generating new trajectories," the NTSB reports.</i></font></div>
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<div><font face="Calibri,sans-serif"><i>What this meant in practice was that, <u>
because the system couldn't tell what kind of object Herzberg and her bike were, the system acted as though she wasn't moving</u>.</i></font></div>
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<div><font face="Calibri,sans-serif"><i>From 5.2 to 4.2 seconds before the crash, the system classified Herzberg as a vehicle and decided that she was "static"—meaning not moving—and hence not likely to travel into the car's path. A little later, the system
recognized that she was moving but predicted that she would stay in her current lane.</i></font></div>
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<div><font face="Calibri,sans-serif"><i>When the system reclassified her as a bicycle 2.6 seconds before impact, the system again predicted that she would stay in her lane—a mistake that's much easier to make if you've thrown out previous location data. At
1.5 seconds before impact, she became an "unknown" object and was once against classified as "static."</i></font></div>
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<div><font face="Calibri,sans-serif"><i>It was only at 1.2 seconds before the crash, as she was starting to enter the SUV's lane, that the system realized a crash was imminent.</i></font></div>
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<div><font face="Calibri,sans-serif">In spite of the fact that she was clearly moving WRT the vehicle on a course with constant bearing and decreasing range, they repeatedly re-classified her as static.</font></div>
<div><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">See: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/11/how-terrible-software-design-decisions-led-to-ubers-deadly-2018-crash/</span></div>
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<div><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Or,
</span><font face="Calibri,sans-serif">“<i>The US car company General Motors is recalling more than four million vehicles worldwide due to a </i></font><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><i>software defect linked to at least one death . . . the
defect concerns the sensing and diagnostic module. In </i></span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><i>rare cases it can go into test mode, meaning airbags will not inflate in a crash.</i>”</span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">See: </span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37321361</span></div>
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<div><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Or,
</span><font face="Calibri,sans-serif">“<i>the current software could result in high temperatures on certain transistors and possibly damage them. </i></font><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><i>When it fails, the error forces the car into failsafe
mode. Toyota says that in rare circumstances, it could </i></span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><i>even shut the hybrid system down while the car is being driven</i>” </span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">See: </span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">http://www.autoblog.com/2014/02/12/toyota-recalling-1-9m-prius-models-globally/</span></div>
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Or, “<i>The outage was caused by a software coding error in the Colorado facility, and resulted in a loss of 911 service for more than 11 million people for up to six hours. … Although, fortunately, it appears that no one died as a result, the incident – and
the flaws it revealed – is simply unacceptable.</i>”</div>
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See: http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2014/db1017/DOC-330012A1.pdf</div>
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<div><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Or,
</span><font face="Calibri,sans-serif">“<i>A flaw found in a calculator tool used by doctors at GP surgeries has potentially led to a number of </i></font><i><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">patients being erroneously prescribed or denied statins
across England. … Due to the unidentified error in </span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">the code, it's possible that the risk of CVD was overstated … This could—in turn—have led to mistakes in </span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><i>prescriptions
for statins</i>”.</span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">See http://arstechnica.co.uk/security/2016/05/bug-in-gp-heart-risk-calculatortool-</span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">tpp/</span></div>
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<div><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Or,
</span><font face="Calibri,sans-serif">“<i>More than 3,000 inmates in Washington state prisons were released early because of a software bug. </i></font><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><i>The glitch caused the computer system to miscalculate
the sentence reduction inmates received for good </i></span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><i>behavior, according to a press statement from the state governor’s office.</i>”</span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">See: </span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">http://www.techinsider.io/washington-prisons-software-glitch-2015-12</span></div>
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<div><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Or,
</span><font face="Calibri,sans-serif">“<i>The causes of the National Air Traffic Services (NATS) flight control centre system failure in December </i></font><i><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">2014 that affected 65,000 passengers directly and
up to 230,000 indirectly have been revealed in a recently </span><font face="Calibri,sans-serif">published report … How could an error not tolerated in undergraduate-level programming homework </font></i><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><i>enter
software developed by professionals over a decade <u>at a cost approaching a billion pounds</u>?</i>”</span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">See: </span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">https://theconversation.com/air-traffic-control-failure-shows-we-need-a-better-approach-to-programming-</span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">42496</span></div>
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I could, of course go on.</div>
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There is an organization here in the US called NSPE (National Society of Professional Engineers). From their web site, quote:</div>
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“<i>Creating a world where the public can be confident that engineering decisions affecting their lives are made by qualified and ethically accountable professionals.</i>”</div>
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See: https://www.nspe.org/</div>
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Also from their web site, quote (emphasis theirs):</div>
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“<i>NSPE was established in 1934 to realize a simple but vital goal: create an <b>
inclusive, nontechnical</b> organization dedicated to the interests of licensed professional engineers,
<b>regardless of practice area</b>, that would protect engineers (and the public) from unqualified practitioners, build
<b>public recognition</b> for the profession, and <b>stand against unethical practices and inadequate compensation.</b></i>”</div>
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See: https://www.nspe.org/membership/nspe-who-we-are-and-what-we-do</div>
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Why aren’t organizations like NSPE up in arms over all of the developed-by-highly-paid-amateurs software that is clearly putting the health, safety, and welfare of the public at significant risk? Like I said, until those that are directly causing material damage
get held liable and accountable for their mistakes, we can only expect that nothing will change.</div>
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Regards,</div>
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— steve</div>
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-----Original Message-----</div>
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From: Peter Bernard Ladkin <<a href="mailto:ladkin@causalis.com">ladkin@causalis.com</a>></div>
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Organization: RVS Bielefeld and Causalis</div>
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Date: Saturday, April 24, 2021 at 12:30 AM</div>
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To: Steve Tockey <<a href="mailto:Steve.Tockey@construx.com">Steve.Tockey@construx.com</a>></div>
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Cc: "<a href="mailto:systemsafety@lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de">systemsafety@lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de</a>" <<a href="mailto:systemsafety@lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de">systemsafety@lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de</a>></div>
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Subject: Re: [SystemSafety] Post Office Horizon System</div>
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On 2021-04-24 04:17 , Steve Tockey wrote:</div>
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<div>I’m wondering why nobody seems to be considering holding the programmers who wrote
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<div>that code accountable. > Why aren’t those programmers sent to jail for equal time they caused the falsely</div>
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> accused? Why don’t those programmers have to pay the reimbursements?</div>
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Because they are not the people who wrote the contracts which stated that </div>
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subpostmasters were liable </div>
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to make good any branch bookkeeping shortfall, no matter how that shortfall may have happened. And
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they are not the people who indulged in the abuse of process category 2 that sent people who jail
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and ruined the livelihood of others. In both cases that would be the company legal department,
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wouldn't it?</div>
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Had the subpostmaster contracts been different, and the company legal department not been as
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aggressive towards their contractors, this might well have been just another complex distributed
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system which took five to ten in-service years to debug. Unsatisfactory UK government or
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government-backed large IT projects are not an unknown phenomenon in the UK. Trying to push all the
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failures onto the users, and succeeding (until late 2019), is, however, unprecedented.</div>
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<div>As long as programmers who write crap code like that are not held accountable
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<div>for their obvious failures, why would anybody even hope for anything to </div>
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change </div>
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<div>in how software is developed?</div>
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I don't think anybody knows at this stage that the code itself was unusually poor for such a system,
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or, if so, why. The system itself was apparently described in a report prepared by the system
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auditors Second Sight in 2013 as, in some cases "not fit for purpose". But the system was/is a lot
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more than the code. As Michael Jackson has pointed out, there are all sorts of HW and devices
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involved. Unless all those interfaces are well understood and monitored (and the traces recorded),
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there are all kinds of things that can go wrong that are not necessarily caused by poor programming.</div>
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For example, consider phantom transactions. How did those happen? People suspect touch screens that
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were physically not reliable, and recorded "touches" that never happened. </div>
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To figure out that such </div>
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things are possible, one needs close cooperation, and transparency, between hardware supplier and
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system architects, as well as knowledge of the HW product that may not yet exist, especially if it
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is new. How can you attribute any of that to programming? You need good post hoc error logging and
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traceability down to the fault. That is a company process, not a programming speciality.</div>
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Such a large system needs good technical oversight during development. Ensuring such oversight is a
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task for organisational theorists and auditing specialists, not for programmers.</div>
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Finally, before the system was deployed, in 1999, the government stopped the pilot project after
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£700m pounds had been spent on it. It is not as if everything went swimmingly until deployment. It
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is an issue of management and mismanagement of an exceptionally complex IT project. It is not a
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matter for the IT supplier and its employees/subcontractors alone.</div>
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<div>Leave the taxpayers out of it. They (we) are completely innocent. Hang those programmers—and their employer—out to dry. That will teach them. For once.</div>
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Many people involved feel that the supplier (ICL/Fujitsu) was not the main issue. The behaviour of
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the client, Post Office Limited, was much more at issue (see above). That </div>
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entity went through many </div>
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organisational iterations during the time frame of Horizon and, in its current iteration, has
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admitted it cannot shoulder the liability arising from the agreed compensation. So in that sense it
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has already "hung [itself] out to dry."</div>
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However, public-facing Post Offices and the services they offer are socially far too important for
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the daily life of millions of people in the UK for POL just to stop doing </div>
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business. It doesn't just </div>
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offer the public-facing services of post/parcel, but is also a channel for many social insurance
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transactions (benefits payments and so on) and other government transactions (e.g., road vehicle tax
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payment and receipt). It is too important to just stop all that, to fail.</div>
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There are various suggestions out there as to how to avoid such disasters. Where there are clear
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interfaces, log the transaction-data items which pass through the interfaces. This has been done
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with common Internet services since the beginning. Every mail server has a log of what has gone
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through it and the handshaking that transpired. It is a matter of a few minutes for a sysadmin to
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tell you what happened to your email. Stuff like that is a matter for system design, though, not
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programming per se. Another suggestion is strict liability for harm (including financial loss)
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resulting through use of such a SW system. Such a regime would surely have caused Horizon system
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development to cease in 1999, if not before. But Horizon sort of now works. Would the UK really have
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been better off without it for the last twenty years? Not necessarily. But certainly the country
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would have been a lot better off without the aggressive attempts to blame </div>
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the users for all </div>
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problems, as the court of appeal established yesterday.</div>
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I imagine there are books and books and books full of lessons to be learned over the 25-year history
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of this system. But they won't be written because of non-disclosure contracts and proprietary
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interests (including those of the state), as well as the personal interests of some formerly "key
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players". A public inquiry might manoeuvre around some of these hindrances, but will necessarily
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stop short of anything which might point towards malfeasance or culpable negligence of individuals,
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unless there is a general amnesty.</div>
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PBL</div>
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Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Bielefeld, Germany</div>
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ClaireTheWhiteRabbit RIP</div>
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Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319 www.rvs-bi.de</div>
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