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Can Your ATM Play Beethoven?
bpiltz writes "A funk band in Harrisonburg, VA, called Midnight Spaghetti, has posted a story with photos about a newly installed Diebold Opteva 520 ATM at Carnegie Mellon University that crashed, then rebooted. The Windows XP operating system initialized without the actual ATM software. The result was a public desktop computer, with only a touch screen interface, left wide open for the amusement of the students at the most wired university in the U.S. Interestingly, Diebold is one of the leading manufacturers of e-voting machines."
I see you're trying to extract free cash from a bolloxored ATM cum jukebox. May I help you?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
So who got the fastest ATM minesweeper times?
Start --> Programs --> ATM --> Configure --> Flush Cash (sic)
The geek Jim goes to the election booth. Jim touches the opening screen. Jim watches while the screen BSoDs. Computer reboots. Jim is presented with the XP interface. Jim, finds the voting system back end. Jim "adjusts" the result:
Bush 15%
Kerry 15%
Nader 70%
Jim set's all Bush and Kerry votes to go to Nader.
Jim runs the voting system front end. Sets it to full screen.
Jim leaves.
Nader wins
Indefinitely Detained US Citizen
No you fool! You pry the thing open, push the rectangular boxes of money aside and plug a USB keyboard into it and get hacking!
Why's getting out money so hard?
Windows, Windows, every where,
It's eaten up my card.
The spirit deep within: O Gates!
That ever this should be!
Yea, buggy things did crawl with legs
Within Windows XP.
About, about, it must reboot
My card's still held within!
No beer to quench my thirst tonight,
Blue screen, and wallet thin.
And some in dreams assured were
Of the spirit that plagued me so:
The demon Gates had followed me
From Redmond's deepest flows.
And my poor tongue, through beerish drought,
Was withered at the root;
I could not speak, no more unless
This teller would reboot.
Ah! well a-day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, this penguin fine
About my neck was hung.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Reminds me of a couple of years back when by wiggling their god-awful pointer device too fast I managed to crash the in-flight seat-back entertainment system. BSOD, reboot, turns out it's a 90MHz Pentium running Win NT 4.0 Server Edition - no wonder the response was so sluggish (on the order of seconds).
:-)
I got to the desktop for about 5 seconds before their entertainment app autostarted again. I then spent a fun hour or two re-crashing the blasted thing and trying to defeat the autostart. Never managed it though - that's the only time I recall that I wished I knew more about Windows.
Eventually I had to stop because it turned out that poor old Pentium wasn't my in-seat client but actually the server for the entire cabin, and a lynch mob was starting to form... 8-O
Be faithful to your obsessions. Identify them and be faithful to them, let them guide you like a sleepwalker. JG Ballard
A friend of mine asked for $20 once and got $40. The bills stuck together. Cheap bastard wouldn't even buy supper that night. ;-)
let's say you doused the [credit] card in some poison that is absorbed through touch, and will stick to the card long enough. What kind of liability does the bank accepting and transferring this object open them up to?
Even better, let's say you doused a $20 bill in poison and deposited it in the bank. You know, they don't burn all the cash that's deposited, they reuse it and hand it back out, without even cleaning it first (due to short-sighted laws against laundering money). Shocking, isn't it?
And I daresay paper currency will absorb your poison better than plastic credit card, too. Where it will mix with the cocaine residue, the gasoline contamination from people who've just filled their car, and the bacteria from people who didn't wash their hands after scratching that hemorrhoid itch, forming a lethal brew.
Your best bet for survival is to only accept coins, and to carry a blowtorch to sterilize them with before handling them.