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Re:A TV Show Forced Britain's Devastating Post Office Scanda... by prof-dr-ir on Thursday January 11, 2024 @09:22AM (#38952509)
> a belief in the reliability and credibility of IT systems

I found it fascinating to learn that UK law explicitly does (but did not always) encode this presumption:

https://emptycity.substack.com/p/computer-says-guilty-an-int...

(This link is to the substack of David Allen Green, an excellent legal commentator in the UK.)

Re:A TV Show Forced Britain's Devastating Post Office Scanda... by tialaramex on Thursday January 11, 2024 @09:50AM (#38952889)
Unfortunately that post claims to be the first of a series, but the series doesn't (yet) seem to continue.

It's easy to see both sides of the decision to presume or not presume that machines work - we should like somehow to explain that on the one hand it's unlikely that without his intent Jim's iPhone sent Gemma a series of messages threatening to rape her, and so we shouldn't need to drag Apple engineers into court to convict Jim - but then on other hand it's far from certain that this bank database which says I made 590 cash withdrawals in sixteen minutes is correct, more likely a bug duplicated a single withdrawal I made, and we should require the bank to produce evidence otherwise if they insist I made these withdrawals.

I can imagine that smart lawyers motivated by some real world examples and assisted by independent software engineers could come up with a general formula for courts, something a bit larger than either the old rule or the new one, but still relatively pithy. Whether a government would ever make time to do that work is another question.

Re:A TV Show Forced Britain's Devastating Post Office Scanda... by bazzargh on Thursday January 11, 2024 @10:40AM (#38953684)
He does have a new article today about this scandal in Prospect magazine.

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/law/64464/post-offi...