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UK Serious Fraud Office Probes Autonomy With ... Autonomy!

Posted by timothy on from the audacity-of-autonomy dept.

judgecorp writes "The British Serious Fraud Office (SFO) is investigating whether British software firm Autonomy fiddled its accounts to inflate the price which HP paid for it to a whopping $10 billion. There's a problem though. Autonomy's Introspect software is used to trawl large data sets for information and is in use at the SFO for jobs such as this fraud investigation. It's not just ironic: the SFO says its £4.6 million contract with Autonomy could create a conflict of interest and it may have to pull out of the investigation."

8 of 34 comments (clear)

  1. Not sure if it's a conflict by Russ1642 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Suppose you're investigating Microsoft. Are you not allowed to use Windows, Word, Excel, Outlook?

    1. Re:Not sure if it's a conflict by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Except those are not analytics software. Autonomy's software is designed to find patterns and preforms advanced heuristics. It doesn't just store data without making judgements on it. This is a big difference as most analytics software rely on ever changing patterns and rulesets that are maintained by the manufacturer. In fact, much of this software runs on the software manufacturer's servers, making it possible and even easy for Autonomy to "adjust" unfavorable results.

    2. Re:Not sure if it's a conflict by clarkkent09 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Easy solution: require Autonomy to make available detailed logs of their server activity so that any fiddling can be detected. Then use Autonomy software to analyze those logs for any suspicious activity.

      --
      Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
    3. Re:Not sure if it's a conflict by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 3, Funny

      Suppose you're investigating Microsoft. Are you not allowed to use Windows, Word, Excel, Outlook?

      Of course you aren't, all such investigations are to be performed from secured GNU/Hurd workstations!

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
  2. In other words by UneducatedSixpack · · Score: 4, Funny

    In other words UK SFO has stack overflow. Recursion is a bitch.

  3. Serious Fraud Office: by Hartree · · Score: 5, Funny

    Thank heaven it's not the Frivolous and Silly Fraud Office.

  4. Serious Fraud Office? by wcrowe · · Score: 4, Funny

    "Good afternoon, this is the Serious Fraud Office."

    "Seriously?"

    "Seriously."

    "I'm not sure my fraud problem is that serious."

    "Ah, you're looking for the Frivolous Fraud Office. That's down the hall."

    --
    Proverbs 21:19
  5. Re:This is just a test of real requirements by Em+Adespoton · · Score: 3, Interesting

    UK Govt is now manned by a bunch of corporate whores (even more so than the last bunch) who just want to ensure that the software they're using to discover fraud can be "friendly" to those who are "on the inside".

    Last thing a corrupt government wants is any real transparency. The best is some form of translucency, like a shower door or rose-tinted glasses - so what you think you see hides what is really happening.

    ok, [/rant]

    I didn't RTFA, but I at least read the headlines... which stated that they raised a conflict of interest flag precisely because of the potential for what you said. I just wish more government offices would be this transparent. I also hope the SFO hands this over to some other competent group rather than just dropping it because the company could fiddle with the results of their own investigation.

    Personally, I'd still like to see Autonomy's analysis of their own books -- if they find themselves guilty, it'll be hard for the company in the short term, but extremely good advertising for them in the longer term (yes, we're good enough that we can even catch our own finance and marketing departments' shenanigans and not mess with the data!)