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by shadowgovt 771 days ago
The software glitch that was involved in 1,000 people being arrested had nothing to do with street names.

By this point, the flaws are pretty well-documented. If you find anything in the reports about handling of apostrophes, feel free to cite it.

The underlying communication protocol from node to node wasn't even SQL; it was an XML format called "Riposte." There was, perhaps, SQL involved in eventual account database updating, but issues had occurred in message transit even before that phase, and it's those issues that led to account reconciliation errors and (incorrect) charges of fraud on the part of the subpostmasters.

1 comments

source for it being well documented? xml suffers apostrophe issues to.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/09/how-the-post... says As early as 2001, McDonnell’s team had found “hundreds” of bugs. A full list has never been produced,

seems almost guaranteed to me it had apostrophy bugs.

Source for it being identified as a root cause of the Horizon issues.

As far as I can see, there is no evidence that it was.

The evidence is they are changing the street names to stop bugs in software.

The question is what software is so hard to fix its easier to change the physical street names than fix the data entry for those street names.

Horizon seems the likely candidate, and the fix is equally stupid.