Today we learnt at the #PostOfficeInquiry that Angela van der Bogred authorised a drip drip drip feed of money to the widow of Martin Griffiths, a man who took his own life because a faulty computer system - Horizon- indicated that he had stolen thousands and thousands of pounds.
She paid off the widow in this way because she did not want her to speak out and spoil the brand of the Post Office.
The #PostOfficeInquiry has just been told that internally, #Horizon was described as having "military level encryption".
Remember, yesterday, we found out they were using MD5 for hashing the audit log data despite being being built after 1996 (and apparently having fairly shaky security on the stored hashes).
Also, remember the training slide: "Link for instance is unable to decrypt the encryption we have, so we have to decrypt before sending!" (para 80 of the Technical Appendix).
One more #Horizon#PostOfficeInquiry thought for the day—the email threads that are shown in the Inquiry are a synecdoche of the hellscape of working in the big corporate world.
Pages of blathering from deeply mediocre people incapable of thinking beyond hashtags, KPIs, bullet points and mission statements. Neverending CC chains for arse covering. Constant prioritisation of comms over reality. Hideous typography.
It's both aesthetically repulsive and morally bankrupt.
Today at the #Horizon#PostOfficeInquiry emails from Post Office were shown discussing what terminology could be used in place of “bugs” which was considered both “slang” and “emotive” (despite being a completely normal term used by software developers).
They considered using “defects”, and seemed to settle on “exception” which they treated as synonymous with “anomaly”.
(Let’s ignore the fact that “exception” has a very specific technical meaning in many programming languages…)
🗳️𝑳𝒆𝒕'𝒔 𝒔𝒆𝒆𝒌 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒂𝒑𝒑𝒐𝒊𝒏𝒕𝒎𝒆𝒏𝒕 𝒐𝒇 𝒑𝒆𝒐𝒑𝒍𝒆 𝒘𝒉𝒐 𝒘𝒊𝒍𝒍 𝒎𝒂𝒌𝒆 𝒂 𝒅𝒊𝒇𝒇𝒆𝒓𝒆𝒏𝒄𝒆
🔊We, call upon the PM and the Monarch to appoint Alan Bates as a life peer in recognition of his campaign for justice. #PostOfficeInquiry https://chng.it/dxKPPZbdv7