Nice to see Alan sticking his oar back into the public discourse, below; I’ve been too occupied to muse on the bigger picture of the Post Office/Horizon scandal, but in a world of bitflips from cosmic-ray events (not to mention as Alan does: malware) perhaps the law needs to stop relying on data which lacks a chain of proof of integrity and correctness?

One spreadsheet cell isn’t evidence, it’s an anecdote?

Research papers from Google (Cores That Don’t Count) and Facebook (Silent Data Corruptions at Scale), as well as a perusal of published errata documents, show that we should question very hard whether assuming a computer is reliable is a fit assumption for a criminal conviction, unless backed up by other evidence such as logs, audit trails and good evidence of internal self-checking within the software.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/22/computers-are-not-as-reliable-as-many-of-us-believe