Reading Archival CDs from the PayMyBills Service?

renehollan asks: "PayMyBills produces Windows-only year-end archive CDs, without warning. Has anyone tried to read these under Linux, Solaris or other non-MS operating systems? My experience to date is here." I can emphasize with renehollan, here: apparently PayMyBills sends out scanned images of the checks used to pay your bills, however they go to great lengths to make sure the information is only usable on Windows without mentioning it as a requirement for their archive CDs. I assume this is done so that the data on the disk can be "encrypted" (or just password protected) when the disk is published. Has anyone else using this service been able to get at the pertinent data?

Comments

Re:Stopped reading

[renehollan]

Actually, what bothers me is that they don't make a point of saying that Windows is required. They saw the CD is "browsable". A reasonable person would presume that it would be browsable by any moderately complient browser, espescially a browser that works with their online system. It isn't: you need Windows executables.

The ironic thing is they could at least provide a Linux JRE to permit Linux users to decrypt the CD and browse it normally. (Browsing the encrypted CD would require running Apache properly integrated with Tomcat, I imagine).