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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."

6 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.
  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