Yup - and this is where we're at with car safety too. Car marque CEOs are free to say "Yeah, it'll cost hundreds of millions to fix, it's cheaper to pay out per death for a rare event".

We're all worn down by this and, in essence, we operate on blood money.

A*B < C

This is what I don’t understand. A company violates a law, makes 10 million in profit from breaking said law, and gets a 1 million fine.

Surely it ought to be: pay back all 10 million, PLUS compensation to the people from who you illegally got money, PLUS a fine, PLUS holding the actual people making the decision (because surprise, a company is just actual real people doing stuff) at the very least financially accountable.

Fujitsu's didn't prosecute anyone or send anybody to jail. All they did was write software that had bugs in it.

If you look at the version history of any software, you'll find it's full of bug fixes. Writing software without bugs is literally impossible. It's incredibly complex and written by "actual real people" and that means there will be mistakes.

If those mistakes lead to millions in liability, then you're going to have to start paying me those millions upfront, before I write a single line of code.

It's the same with a CEO - if people are criminally liable for mistakes made by people working under them... then nobody's ever going to accept a job where they delegate work to other people.

The solution to this issue is not to attack people who made a mistake. It's to put systems in place where you check for mistakes. I guarantee you the jury and courts that found these people guilty were presented with "facts" such as "nobody else can remotely access the software" which, it turns out, were total bullshit. The people who presented those facts in court are the ones to blame for this. They clearly either lied or made assumptions.

Both of those are serious crimes. You don't say anything in court unless you actually know it yourself. If someone else tells you something is true, you don't repeat what they said. You bring those people in as an expert witness to talk to the judge/jury directly, under oath, and you tell them not to make any assumptions either.

There should have been millions spent on a full code audit done checking for bugs in the software before allowing it to be admitted as evidence in court.

Obviously writing software with bugs in it shouldn’t be illegal, unless in violation of the SLA.

But knowing this and lying about it, as was done by the Postal Service, Fujitsu management and insurance companies, most definitely should.

You shouldn’t be liable for mistakes, but you should be liable for malcontent

There isn't even a fine here. The post office is owned by the government, and practically insolvent as it is. The claims against Fujitsu are theoretical and might already be too old.