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British Post Office Scandal

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Written by: Rod Boyle

Category: Rants

Published: 07 May 2024

Hits: 426

To summarize in brief: 

The British Post Office scandal, also called the Horizon IT scandal, involved Post Office Limited pursuing thousands of innocent subpostmasters for shortfalls in their accounts, which had in fact been caused by faults in Horizon, accounting software developed and maintained by Fujitsu. Between 1999 and 2015, more than 900 subpostmasters were convicted of theft, fraud and false accounting based on faulty Horizon data, with about 700 of these prosecutions carried out by the Post Office. Other subpostmasters were prosecuted but not convicted, forced to cover Horizon shortfalls with their own money, or had their contracts terminated. The court cases, criminal convictions, imprisonments, loss of livelihoods and homes, debts and bankruptcies, took a heavy toll on the victims and their families, leading to stress, illness, family breakdown, and at least four suicides. In 2024, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak described the scandal as one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British history.

Link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal

Takeaways: That the government/post office knew the software was flawed, and nevertheless made hundreds of it's employees scapegoats, with criminal convictions, lost wages, opportunities, credibility, and in worst cases lost lives.

This is peak Great Britain, only maybe remove the great. And - it's easy to see a miscarriage of justice happening overseas, but don't for a moment think it couldn't, wouldn't, or isn't happening as you read this here.

 

MacBook Air - Yosemite

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Written by: Rod Boyle

Category: Blog

Published: 03 May 2024

Hits: 618

This, left behind by my daughter as being too old and outdated, and so I powered it up and gave it a try. And - a bit to learn, the keyboard, Arabic and English, naturally, but - 120 GB HD and more than fast enough, apps the likes of which I didn't dare imagine on that old PC. I mean - there's a learning curve, for sure, and I'm pretty much against learning tech, it's no longer useful in my life, but - bloody hell, how did I deal with that fucking brick of a laptop for so long? Perpetually telling me I need to upgrade my OS (Windows 10), my antivirus, everything - yet, when I move all my files off of it - 50 MB, max, not even - and still it can't do a bloody thing, when every opening screen was recommending I finance a new laptop via "Windows Financing" - I mean, this is as far ahead of my old computer as my my old computer was an abacus. A 32 GB HD, of which 38 GB was consumed by an OS on which the only thing I could use was notepad, wordpad (crashed), and the internet, one tab at a time... And on this now, the super HD screen, super definition, all the fancy bells & whistles, I suffered for far too long for no good reason. SO now, time spent learning how to use it, not an Apple fan but most definitely a fan of a working PC... Now to wipe that brick of a laptop and donate it to Share, that's one bad memory I'll be glad to leave behind!!!

Monkey Man - Dev Patel

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Written by: Rod Boyle

Category: Film

Published: 01 May 2024

Hits: 559

Finally, one from the list of "to watch" and in no ways did it disappoint. 

You can download, watch online, find it in the theatre...

Any more information would be a spoiler. It's terrific.

5*.