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OS-Independent Web Banking?
"I recently wrote again, and received no response at all, even though I mentioned that I would be writing an editorial for Slashdot, whether I could report a happy ending or not. That happy ending seems to be out of reach now. I even offered to contract to fix the problem myself.
The big question is, is there any bank with a good Web banking component that geeks can rely upon for good cross-platform support? TD's site is not only incompatible, but it relies on all sorts of client-side JavaScript to do things that could 99% of the time be just as easily done on the server side in PHP, CGI, ASP (which they are using now - another questionable decision), etc. Ideally I want to be able to log in from a text console using lynx and do my banking... and it seems to me with a little planning there's no reason I shouldn't be able to do so.
Another, broader question that comes to mind is this: Who makes the technology decisions at the big banks? These companies influence our daily lives to an astonishing degree, since they control our financial lives. When my bank decides to change their Web site to make it incompatible with my platform of choice, it really leaves me floundering. Who is responsible? What consulting firm is recommending these unfriendly, unnecessarily glitzy, and altogether unsound choices? If they're unaware of the needs of their less-than-mainstream customers - betraying a certain lack of thoroughness - can we really trust their security decisions?
Practically speaking, I'd like advice on a new, geek-friendly bank, if indeed such a thing exists. Preferably somewhere I can do my banking in a text-mode browser, but at least somewhere committed to supporting the most common graphical browsers on *all* platforms. For myself, the other requirement is that the bank be Canadian, though I think discussion of banks in other countries would be very interesting as well. The good thing about TD is that they have a no-fee minimum account level, which is convenient; a geek-friendly bank with a good service plan to boot would be ideal.
To be fair to my bank, I've been reasonably happy up until now. However, my inability to get any satisfaction on this matter has forced me to consider a move, if a better alternative exists."
Actually I too found this problem after they updated their site. I've been using TD site since it opened under linux without problems untill now. Infact will I called about setting up my brother they were surprised that we were using linux, that it even worked. Anyhow. I'm currently beta testing for their next web site. You can find it at https://webbankingpilotx.tdaccess.com. It works fine under linux. In fact it's meant to fix their linux problems. Note I don't work for TD I was just upset about this like the original poster, and found out about it. Conspircy theories aside, this proves to me that big business will support Linux, if it affects their profits.
Funny note - the VP in charge of Citibank's online retail banking operation is one of my limo customers, and has been for years. After many long conversations about Linux and alternative OSes, he made sure the Citibank site was totally cross-platform, which was not only a good customer move but also made a lot of the Unix and Linux coders who work there real happy and got him a *lot* of respect from them.
This person, who I would rather not name here, has since bought a dual-boot home computer from a small, local vendor, and is gradually falling off the edge into Linux.
BTW, I filed my taxes last year using TurboTax online -- in Linux -- and the small local bank where I keep both my personal and limo-business accounts runs platform-independent online banking and plans to keep it that way.
Let the bankers know you're out there, and that your choice of banks is at least in part dependent on their ability to serve your needs. This works especialy well with small local banks, and even better if you also own a business, even a small one, because business accounts are better profit sources than persoanl accounts.
- Robin
If you don't want to use an operating system that the bank's -- or ecommerce etc -- system supports, that is your perogative. However, you can't expect them all to support every operating system there is. That simply isn't possible.
Actually, in the case of a web app, it IS possable to support any operating system that has a browser with SSL capabilities. All that's required is keeping the display reletivly simple and functional. I don't know of any browser that can't handle a form with the POST method. That's all that's really required.
Simple pages like that also place less load on the server. If the banks insist on a bunch of eye candy, perhaps they should start with a simple form like that as a functional prototype and keep it available for those who aren't using exactly the same version of browser as the web developer.
Interestingly, simple forms like that are also more accessible for the visually impared and more adaptable to WAP and PalmVII. Another OS in a partition won't help a blind person use a clueless web banking app that only likes the standard (non text to speech) version of their browser.
I've worked on online banking systems. We could not support any X based clients on legal grounds, as there is no way to guarantee the security of the transaction: a direct SSL connection to a desktop running X over a Unix domain socket is one thing, but running Netscape on a remote machine, then the user viewing the page sent unencrypted over their LAN was judged by our client to be an unacceptable risk. *Shrug* so there you have it.
Barclays' (UK) Internet banking works fine for me from Linux and Netscape 4.7 -- it doesn't even use anything dodgy like Java.
Smile are 100% online (well, they're the online arm of Cooperative Bank, but that's good enough) and have nice touchy-feely we-don't-invest-in-arms-dealers value... also work OK in Linux/Netscape but I've suffered Java related crashes from them in both Windows and Linux. Of course, it's worse in Windows because the whole OS can go down...
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Fleet Homelink works just fine with Lynx and also Netscape on Linux. I'm not a big fan of big banks, but they've got their online banking stuff done right.
Also, x.com finance, which provides a no-fee checking account w/ Visa check card and ATM fee reimbursement if you keep a $100 minimum balance, works just fine with Lynx too. I have one of these accounts and keep a few hundred bucks in it for getting cash at ATM's where I'd be charged a fee. Fleet doesn't reimburse these fees, but x.com does.
After having being terribly annoyed at Bank of America who literally did not know how to execute a wire transfer, and various other banks with low rates or fees for talking to a human, I discovered First Internet Bank. Their checking account pays 5% interest and has no minimum. They've also got free online bill pay and scanned images of canceled checks. Highly recommend them to anyone.
But Java crashes all the Netscape browsers we've ever used under Linux here, regardless of Netscape version and regardless of RedHat release in use. (Yeah, we tried the fonts fix too, no change.)
So, what are you guys doing under Linux to make Java work for you in a web browser?
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Barclays has a really bad reputation for being willfully limited to Microsoft clients only, and of couruse they were running MS IIS servers. A colleague of mine spent months trying to get them to do something about it, but they were utterly unresponsive. Eventually he hacked the Id string in his Linux Netscape binary to make it pretend to be MS Internet Exploiter, and everything worked fine.
Lloyds TSB is client-neutral, it seems. Their Verisign certificate is registered to their Unix group, which might explain it. On the other hand, when I first looked they were running Stronghold/Apache on Unix but now their secure service appears to have changed to use Netscape:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Netscape-Enterprise/3.6 SP3
Date: Sat, 21 Oct 2000 20:59:47 GMT
Content-type: text/html
Last-modified: Tue, 05 Sep 2000 09:24:57 GMT
Is that still a Unix version of Netscape server, or they gone over to the dark side and now run NT like on their port 80 service?
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I have found that USAA and Dreyfus (www.edreyfus.com) both have excellent web based services that work in unix. Dreyfus even uses an AS/400 for a webserver. :)
-- dieman - Scott Dier
This becomes a problem if the check is on a secure page, though, because I don't think junkbuster can proxy the SSL stuff... but I'm not sure. I ran into a similar problem at my previous employer.
(I now work for linux-friendly SGI, so I don't have to worry about that silliness anymore!)
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Security First Network Bank works fine for me and I disable Java and Javascript. Images are only partially necessary; they have an image map toolbar once you log in. My two gripes have to do with their unnecessary 6 month password aging scheme and lack of progress feedback on snail mail deposits. But they are good otherwise. Get cash from gracery stores, because ATMs cost money after the first 5 (?) per month. Deposits have to be automatic deoposit or snail mail.
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Infuriate left and right
I use Chase. Can't recommend them as a bank, seeing as they charge fees if you so much as breathe. But their online banking works perfectly fine with Netscape on *nix, though their servers are a bit on the slow side. And they're American, of course, so I don't know what good that does someone in Tronna.
That said, give me a fucking break. The percentage of people running Linux on their desktop is somewhere south of 1%, and of those, I dare say half have access to a Windows or Mac system on a reglar basis. Because of the enormous risks involved, banking software is developed and updated very, very slowly and conservatively. Any feature change or bug fix goes through several levels of testing and typically needs sign-off from four or five people before it's allowed into production. Even for, say, a form-validation script.
Sure, most web sites don't have platform-dependency problems (at least in regard to IE 4.x-5.x and Netscape 4.x). It's a shame they wrote such cranky code that it exposes the tiny incomatibilities between Netscape on Win32 and Netscape on *nix. All true.
But how many customers does lack of Linux support chase away from any web site? I mean, really? I mean, there are profitable web-based services out there that don't even support Macs. And Macs account for something like ten times the number of web users than all Unixes combined.
If you don't like the service provided, just take your money and go elsewhere. Make a point where it hurts them most: their pocketbooks. They may not care about losing one small customers (banks really make money from business clients) but do not give them your business for below average service.
My bank does not use any client-side scripting, so as long as I have a client w/ 128-bit encyrption, all is fine. Remember, friends don't let friends use client-side scripting.
--weenie NT4 user: bite me!
--weenie NT4 user: bite me!
"Computers are nothing but a perfect illusion of order" -- Iggy Pop
I've been fine with TD's webbanking on netscape 4.05, 06, 08 (my current choice because it crashes the least on my box with nasty java/script sites) and .6 and .7 over the last year. Right up until about 2-3 weeks ago when suddenly something changed in their javascript and now I cant pay bills (thats it, everything else works). However, the billpaying is really the critical thing I need.
:)
/. mebbe someone over at TD who has some power will actually *DO* something about it.
.mov files I CANNOT watch.
I wrote them and asked whats up and got no reply.
So I got all snotty-assed and mentioned that 3 companies that I am a majority stakeholder in (the ones I founded) put about $5M+ thru TD per year, so please get back to me. They then sent me some platitudes the like of which the poster mentioned.
Bitching about yet another Microsoft-supporting cronie company (YAM$SCC?) on irc got me a slap from Blizzard: "use M17 silly!".
And I did, and it worked great.
So for now, til TD fixes things, I'll be using mozilla for my webbanking. Mebbe by the time they fix it Mozilla will be ready for primetime and I wont have to switch around.
I hope they switch to CT's EasyWeb, its super fast compared to TDs overly flashy system and their ass-like JS overkill. Somehow I doubt their developpers are going to choose CT stuff over TD now legacy crap.
Im glad this hit
How long til M$ starts PAYING banks and other businesses to setup M$-only-compatible systems
on the net? Imagine no webbanking at all with Linux? Already Apple seems have some sort of alliance with M$ at least vs Linux - there's extremely limited QT availability for Linux (Xanim) and tons of
Will this become more prevalent? How many backroom bux are moving around supporting that kinda crap?
-Math
im with scotia bank, if you want to use online banking, you have to load up there propriatary windows authorization client to do so. They do offer HTTPS however knowone at the bank seems to know about it.
My impression was that they'd just switched. Their website now only describes the ssl method, and the support people had no trouble getting me a password. You're right about the proprietary encryption filter though--it was obnoxious. I think the idea was to make sure everybody had 128 bit security back when you had to jump through hoops to get that version of netcape. So while I trust 56 bit ssl at least as much as the proprietary gadget they'd bought, their hearts may have been in the right place.
I've also been impressed with the signup mechanism. You call, ask to sign up, get authenticating secrets verbally, then they stick you in a queue where a computer tells you your temporary password. That way no employee sees or hears what it is. You then login and change it. Semi-instant gratification. :)
In any case, their ssl interface works fine under Linux/Netscape, probably because they avoid all the cute clientside scripting.
In contrast, I recently opened an account with Bank of America in part because they claimed to use SSL. They're even using JSP, but login in from Linux/Netscape causes an internal server error. Ouch. They said they were aware of the issue and were working on a fix; we'll see what that means in the next couple of weeks.
Another silly thing is that while you can sign up for BofA's online banking online, they snailmail you your login password, which seems an entirely unreasonable delay. It doesn't add anything to security either: searching someone's mail (after sniffing the application) is usually *easier* than tapping their phone.
As opposed to a coder who got into the business to promote every platform under the sun at the expense of her client's wishes?
-josh
Konqueror is a good OSS browser and was developed rapidly. Even M18 is not too bad, but it needs a bit more bug fixing (but, then, it's much more than a browser). The OSS movement doesn't have to be ashamed.
I ran into this as well. They supported Linux for a very long time and then they decided to make some updates to the page to make it non-Linux compatible. It was REALLY stupid and I even called them and told them how to fix the page to make it work with Linux again, but they would hear nothing of it. I actually posted a comment to slashdot about this a couple of months ago in a story that had some remote links to this topic. I told TD support that I would post information all over the web about their treatment of people who didn't want to use Windows or MacOS. They actually told me to go out and buy Windows if I wanted to use their site!! I was really pissed off and managed to speak to the manager, who told me that they were developing a better site. She gave me access to this beta site, which actually does work, and I can verify that they now do support Linux. I guess enough people called to complain. They were ->- that close to losing me as a customer after 21 years, and with me, losing some serious commercial business too. Be patient. Within a month or two (hopefully), it will work again. The new site is much faster and more full-featured too.
I know it's frustrating, but they know what it's all about now.
The blind have many more options than just text consoles. There have been speech digitizers that work with Windows and convert the text on web pages and in menus to speech.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
I second this recommendation. I use the Royal Bank with no difficulties on older netscape and netscape 6 for linux. Stay away from Scotiabank.
We talking about online "Web" banking... So, it should be pretty easy to avoid platform dependant stuff; and it would make more customers happy and wouldn't take longer to produce the same results.
If you add to use their own software to do online banking with them, I would understand their point of view about not supporting Linux as "Yet another platform". But, when doing web stuff, you can do (almost) anything without proprietary extension for web banking (i.e. no need for Shockwave and similar products).
Mario.
I was with Security First since the early days and its still IMHO one of the best Internet banks out there in terms of functionality and costs. I know its now owned by the Royal Bank of Canada so Canadians can use it too.
http://www.sfnb.com/
I'm now with CitiBank in the UK... very basic capabilities but it works (mostly). First-E (www.first-e.com) looks geek friendly (Java, PHP, etc.) but the security paranoia and the non-standard debit card aren't worth it.
I've been quite happy with Canada Trusts web banking and it seems to work fine under Linux and Solaris.
However, Canada Trust just merged with Toronto Dominion. With any luck, they'll both start using the Canada Trust web banking (EasyWeb).
I've been using it for years on Netscape/Linux and more recently on Mozilla/Linux with PSM (albeit slow). I don't even *have* Windows at home. I don't know what kind of trouble you're having...
I do know that if you have <128 bit SSL, or have JavaScript turned off, it won't work. Other than that, it's fine. I'd prefer not having the JavaScript, but I can't have everything.
Now I only wish Konqueror could do it, I'll try it out again on Monday (KDE2 final release), and change the reported browser type if I have to. Konqueror let's you change it for specific websites, a very cool feature.
As for using Lynx, etc, I don't even think you can get 128 bit SSL for it, just "export grade" SSL. I'm glad they're requiring 128.
Besides, most Linux users I know use Netscape, (and SuSE 7.0 installs the 128 bit version by default) so the market for Lynx users is *extremely* small.
As someone who has been there, I can say pretty safely that the folks coding up those web banking sites don't like to deviate from Microsoft too much, and it's for an interesting reason: the product sells better to non-tech types when you can say it's a Microsoft tech. Floored me when I first heard that, but I suppose some people haven't figured out that Microsoft != secure. As far as they're concerned, Microsoft products (ASP, IIS, etc) make for a quick rollout that has good security and customers are comfortable with. I'd say two of those are right...
Now, whether or not it will work with a text-based browser I don't know... I suppose that so long as your browser can make HTTPS connections you would be fine, as they don't appear to use javascript.
The fee is a little high; something like CDN$4 per month, plus there might be some transaction fees. But, if you sign up for telephone banking, you also get the online banking included, I believe.
shane.
mah na mah na.
Dunno about Canada, but in the USA you can get a lot of sites' management's attention really fast by asking about disabled access. Tell 'em you depend on, say, Lynx for speech-to-text.
The reason seems to be that unlike the random noncommercial or advertising sites, banks live under Federal regs give make disabled access regulations teeth.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Does w3c-valid HTML/Transitional count? If so, I hereby take up the challenge! Here goes:
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Don't think about using their investment stuff, it sucks. But the bank is actually a different company (used to be telebank) that E*Trade bought. They have very high interest rates and the pages work with Lynx. I've been very pleased.
Just don't get me started about their brokerage accounts.
I've been using NetBank and UsaBancShares for about a year now and both seem to work find under linux. For a while, you had to use a different link to the login page for NetBank, but that was fixed (after I complained). I'm not sure whether NetBank did something or if a new version of Netscape fixed it. I did have a general problem logging into UsaBancShares for a couple of days at some point. But that was both windows and linux, if it makes you feel any better
What about the whole generation of web-browsing devices that are coming out that _aren't_ desktop computers running Windows? For example, there's the "Internet Appliances", like our friends at Netpliance, the Compaq i-paq, and a whole bunch of competitors. I'm sure that web browsers in cars are coming soon, but they won't be running Internet Explorer, nor will they be running a desktop version of Windows. I think that there's an interesting chicken-and-egg problem here -- if not enough web sites are usable from standards compliant (but not Microsoft) browsers, these internet appliances are doomed to failure. However, without a large base of these clients, few web sites will be willing to "port" their code to more portable HTML.
Heya. I've read much of the above commentary and no one seems to've hit this part of things so I will.
Basic point: No online banking scheme is secure.
Sub-point: Some are more secure than others.
If your bank is not using SSL for online banking, stop right now and save yourself some trouble. Call them up and make sure that web access to your account is completely disabled. Without a lot of checking (which would be more of a pain in the ass than solving your problem -while- using your old bank... details below), you aren't likely to know whether internet traffic to your bank is properly handled and filtered or if there's another host at their end which can packet sniff. If they're just a colo or a virtual host on someone's webfarm, anyone else with an account on the same net can get curious.
If they use SSL, you're still not guaranteed security but it's at least not a completely trivial thing to get your account information. Then you get into OS security and how intelligent the hosting ISP -really- is when it comes to filtering at their routers. I've seen some that are. I've seen none that are vehemently pro-active about it. I'm fairly certain that many NT/Lucent shops out there are content to merely keep the frequency of reboots as low as possible. Sometimes a customer will want to keep using a piece of software that is dependant upon an outdated version of an OS (read: as secure as swiss cheese). That's where you really get into the necessity for filtering at the routers so that only the traffic that's absolutely necessary gets through.
Other posters have noted that there are protocols which are quite well suited for everything that could be needed for a (reasonably) secure and usable online banking transaction. You seem to understand the JavaScript used by this bank. If you telnet in to the server handling these transactions (and hopefully need to authenticate yourself via SSL) you can probably manually input any function you wish to call. I've not had personal experience with it, but I believe C-Kermit compiled with OpenSSL support will allow you to pull this off. It's all just bits in the end, and most of the time it's even ASCII. I've used similar methods to deal with mail via pop3 (and to a lesser extent smtp) for years. I didn't have a home base to read and save email onto, so learning a bit of the protocol was much easier than constantly installing and deleting mail clients. We don't need no stinking national ISP's! =)
Hope this helps some...
Lanir
It just hasn't ... so far (knock on fake wood laminate).
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
If you think you know the problem, can you point them to a fix??? This might make it more likely that they'll do something about the problem.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
If you can make it look good too, that's a big bonus, but not the necessity.
Ultimately, however, this pigheadedness is going to cost them. Bank of Montreal has announced wireless support ... What's tha chance that you're really gonna want to run JavaScript on a Palm, or your cellphone??
Sooner or later they'll figure out that simple, portable code is the way to support everything that's going to be out there, a few years from now. Then they'll have to play catchup with the banks that did proper design work from the start.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
That's funny, I don't remember ever getting spam from them. Thanks for the info, though.
I have found that Citibank web banking works excellently with Netscape on Linux, Netscape and IE on Mac, and Netscape and IE on Windows.
Union Bank of California has decent online banking. Their stuff works fine with any browser.
Doesn't do you much good if you aren't in California, and Toronto ain't.
There is an increasing presence of "ActiveX" controls (I think that's what they are) on web pages -- they simply will not work with non-MS products.
It really is a shame to see the internet, paid for with taxes, much of it built for free in spare time, by fairly selfless people, as a open and standards compliant means of communication, get bastardized by the scum at microsoft.
But I completely agree that if you can find another bank that has employees with enough skill to make their web presence platform neutral, go for it.
Make sure you let the previous bank know why you left.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Web based banking over ssl, and downloading transactions to a personal finance app are different subjects that should be considered separately--I don't see that going on in this discussion. My experience is that most of the major banks that I would choose from to handle my accounts, already do web-based online banking just fine. Looking at the comments here I see that there are a few exceptions in the world. But there is an EASY solution to this problem: don't bank with these fuckhead companies and be sure to tell them why you're withdrawing all your money.
That leaves the second problem: none of the banks, Netscape friendly or otherwise, currently allow direct, online banking from your personal finance app -unless it is Quicken or Money on Mac or Windows. Currently all banks screw over Linux/BSD/SOlaris/etc. users. And also they screw over the many Macintosh users who have sworn to never be reamed by Intuit again like they were by the Y2K bug in Quicken for Mac. Mac being a Y2K safe platform, this failure was just an intolerable example of shoddiness, and I certainly understand a Mac user vowing never to buy an Intuit product again.
It has also not yet been said that there's NO GOOD REASON for this exclusiveness and active discrimination. The data format that direct online banking uses is Open and documented. It's called OFX. You can look it up and build your own client for it.
And there is ALSO a Java application available right now to download and enter your OFX formatted data to your machine regardless of whether you use Windows, Mac, Linux, *BSD, Solaris or any other OS with a upto date JAVA VM. It's called Moneydance --specifically the 3.0ALPHA version.
It's not in the regular download area yet for Moneydance at www.seanreilley.com/moneydance. You have to ask for it, but it does exist and I suspect its ALPLHA status has mainly to do with the refusal of the banks to connect to their online servers. You will also have to pay 25 dollars to enable the OFX banking features it has. Otherwise you can use it free of charge.
It is this refusal by the banks to allow non-Intuit non-MS clients to connect that has to be focussed on and overcome. A FTC investigation into cartel style collusion between Intuit and the banks might not be too wacky of an idea at some point. ALways remember this--YOU ARE THE CUSTOMER! And you are NOT asking them to do something special for you.
PLease contact your bank's online banking dept. (that little button that says "contact us") and request that Moneydance be allowed to connect to their servers-whether you actually plan to buy the fully function Moneydance 3 or not. There is no other way yet availble for you to do direct online banking from Linux or BSD and if they are blocking a closed source commercial Java app that is OFX compliant they will certainly block GnuCash when/if OFX support is added to it. You don't get your rights by always being polite and non-confrontational. It can be easy to forget that movements like the civil rights push in the 60s pissed off and upset a lot of semi-well meaning white people who were not overtly racist and didn't actively support apartheid laws and parties. We have rushed to smoothe over the rougher edges in our cultural memory, but if you look back at the documents of the civil rights era, you can see that civil rights were not achieved by saintly black people sending in a few well-written, poignant essays into their local newspapers editorial section and parading quietly and dispersing when told to by the police. Sometimes you do have to get in their faces and demand fair and equal treatment.
Johnny Quest has two Daddies.
In the US, if you couldn't do your banking with lynx on a text console I think the bank could be sued under the Americans with Disabilities Act. As I recall, the only browsers that blind people can reasonably use are text-based browsers (through some form of text-to-speech conversion). AOL had some trouble over this within the last year or two (they settled by agreeing to spend money on developing interfaces for the blind, IIRC) and a bank is a "public accommodation" that should be subject to the ADA. If there are similar laws in Canada, pointing this out might do the trick.
Summit bank works quite well on all the platforms I've tried. In addition, their support staff is intelligent and friendly.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Having lived the frustration of dealing with all the bugs of Netscape, I sympathize with the bank. I know that I finally gave up and barely tested under Netscape for Windows, much less Netscape for any other operating system.
Instead of blaming the bank (and anyone who refuses to deal with crap software), how about if the Unix world finally writes a decent browser? And that may or may not be Mozilla ("may not" seems more likely based on what I've seen so far). The browser issue is making a laughingstock of the whole OSS movement ("heck, they can't even write a decent browser").
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I don't know what system you're using, but for me, I use TD Access Web to do all my web banking for Toronto Dominion, and I haven't booted to Windows in months!!!! Netscape 4.73 128bit for Linux. But I presume anything that'll do heavy encryption should suffice. This is leaps and bounds above TD's old system which was a Windows application that dialed up through a modem, which they used about a year and a half ago if I remember correctly. I love TD Access Web!!!
Does onybody remember when the Web was supposed to be the thing that made OS irrelevant, the thing that was supposed to be platform-independant?
Doesn't the W3C release standards to promote this effect?
And doesn't MS and Netscape blatently ignore these standards (specifically to create a platform-dependant experience, in the case of MS a Windows-dependant experience...)
I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but I lay the blame for ruining the interoperability of the web squarely on the major browser writers.
Who would have thought that Free (as in beer) software from companies with an agenda could do so much damage?
most large corporations, banks, etc. The problem is that most of the world out there doesn't know much about an operating system, let alone that there are so many types out there. They just implement what most of their clients will use.
The total number of non Windows using clients that bank has is probably very small. They really couldn't care, plus the bank's systems are probably implemented by some coder who just got into the business for the money, doesn't probalby know much either, and he/they jsut don't want to bother. They did what the book told them for implementing this stuff, and that's enough.
It's really bad for free OS people, but what can you do? Joe Schmoe out there doesn't care about what OS he uses.
-"Those who fought today will die tommorow."-
I like how easy it is to pay all of my bills! I don't have to leave the house! I can stay in and keep being a computer geek! Ya!
Shifter