Slashdot Mirror
Software Glitch Leads To $23,148,855,308,184,500 Visa Charges
Hmmm2000 writes "Recently several Visa card holders were, um, overcharged for certain purchases, to the tune of $23,148,855,308,184,500.00 on a single charge. The company says it was due to a programming error, and that the problem has been corrected. What is interesting is that the amount charged actually reveals the type of programming error that caused the problem. 23,148,855,308,184,500.00 * 100 (I'm guessing this is how the number is actually stored) is 2314885530818450000. Convert 2314885530818450000 to hexadecimal, and you end up with 20 20 20 20 20 20 12 50. Most C/C++ programmers see the error now ... hex 20 is a space. So spaces were stuffed into a field where binary zero should have been."
While all this is plausible, of course, the 12 is octal for a UNIX newline and the 50 is the '@' symbol; let us not forget that there are a lot of assumptions being made here and a lot of speculation.
This is a boring sig
...is that this was not caught by validity checks. Was this perhaps an error that affected only the printing of the statement?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Is not so much the error(stupid; but, if corrected, not ultimately a giant deal); but the response of the cardholder to the error:
"The bank kept him on hold for two hours, during which time he contemplated the impossibly bleak financial future that might await him. He also felt a stab of fear that he had saddled all his unborn grandchildren -- and their grandchildren -- with a lifetime of debt. "Down the generational line, nobody would have any money."
For fuck's sake, people, the credit card guys haven't actually bought a law concerning hereditary debt slavery yet, and this guy thinks that it is already on the books?
Muszynski compared the giant debt reprieve to receiving "an amazing Monopoly card that says, 'Bank error in your favor.' "
Pathetic. This guy is grateful that Visa condescended to fix their obvious mistake(this isn't some he said/she said billing dispute, this is someone who allegedly spent more than the world GDP at a gas station)? What is this cringing bullshit? Either this guy is just a sad sack or, rather worse, the "customer service" we get, along with the kangaroo courts that are "mandatory binding arbitration" actually make thankfulness for not being screwed a reasonable response.
anyone who sees a 23 quadrillion dollar charge on their visa bill and thinks that should not be allowed to have children.
Stupidity is evil!
You're using a computer right now.
Tell that to the US Gov...
The "sin" tax on those smokes must have been part of the new anti-smoking bill.
That, or the president thinks the best way to prevent him from ever smoking again is to never be able to afford one.
Yep. UCS-2 is the tool of the devil. It's consistent, sure, but it's a heckuva waste if you've got a lot of strings that are mostly ASCII. Microsoft uses it for their APIs since forever, and Python uses it internally, but these are low-level situations where consistent and fast encoding/decoding are valuable. Most of the rest of the world (the parts that use a Latin-based character set, anyway) have standardized on UTF-8. You'd be pretty crazy to lard up a database that's 99% English text with UCS-2.
Probably more offensive is that a glitch happened at all, large or small. It could have just as easily been $2.31 in which case he may have not noticed the overcharge and paid it. Charge several thousand people $2.31 too much and you can make an alright profit.
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
Yeah, of course what happened after that was people started having to resort to bartering for goods using small amounts of Gold, Kinda like what they did TWO-Thousand years ago. So you take an economy and you screw it up so badly that you have to reset it back to the pre-roman levels of commerce.
.
And people laugh at other people for collecting and buying gold.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
That was not an "insightful" comment. WTF does it matter what a couple of hex digits mean in octal? What would you have said if it was 12 80? A field that should have held a binary large integer getting filled with ascii characters makes sense; a field that gets filled not with the binary representation of the ascii characters, but to suggest that some process would take the octal representation of those characters, discard the most significant digit and then pack them into hex nibbles (a kind of BCO - binary coded octal representation) is ludicrous.
The 12 50 is just an artifact of the number being rounded to the nearest $100 by the journalists reporting the story. Check it out; if you assume they were actually 20 20, you get an amount somewhere around $35-$36+some small change over the $23,148,855,308,184,500.00 figure mentioned.
Lemme debunk a myth real quick for you folks.
If you EVER see a bank error "in your favor" or if your payroll check is off and you are over paid.......DO NOT SPEND THE MONEY
You will be charged for what you owe, and in some circumstances you can be prosecuted for using money that "was reasonably evident that you did not earn"
"This is the value of a summer spent and a winter earned"
The thing is if the economy tanks that badly, gold probably won't be worth much either. Which is why buying large boxes of ammo, cigarettes, and toilet paper is the way to go!
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
"In a statement, Visa said the rogue charges affected "fewer than 13,000 prepaid transactions" and resulted from a "temporary programming error at Visa Debit Processing Services ... [which] caused some transactions to be inaccurately posted to a small number of Visa prepaid accounts.""
I call bullshit, Visa. Don't you people have some basic QA? If, say, a monthly statement (especially on a PREPAID CARD, for frack's sake...) exceeds the spending potential of a given client, flag the statement and alert a regional or local processing center manager.
FRACK! At the very LEAST your programmers should have been told (or, if they asked, been allowed) to put QA bounding-box fields on the statements. If a monthly charge font size to be printed is longer than the width of the statement imaginary box, eject the statement from the enveloping system, then punt it to a manager.
Having even FIFTY of these things get out is unprofessional, and plain stupid. Unfortunately, some dumbos pay without checking, then may have to wait several days or weeks, only to be told they won't get a reversal, but only a credit to offset future purchases...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
No, you're wrong.
Gold will just get ridiculously expensive - think $2000/oz or as much as $10000/oz - double its current price.
Just give it 5-10 years, you'll see.
What's really strange is they're using 64 bits to express a charge amount. How many people are charging manned missions to Mars or the military invasion of a superpower to their Visa? A 64 bit credit limit must be quite the status symbol.
...Except for the fact that if we ever get plunged into a state of war and chaos, a shiny piece of metal that is gold won't be worth anything. Lets see, if I'm barely surviving in the radioactive wasteland, which is going to be worth more, a huge can of food that would allow me to store it for later and not have to spend hours looking for my next meal, or a shiny piece of metal that looks cool, but doesn't help me survive, nor has the pleasures of drugs, etc.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Gold is only worth that much (in relation to other things) because of it's relative scarcity *and* because of the demand due to perceived value.
If there is no perceived value for gold (think: a post-apocalyptic world where people are just fighting to stay alive, not save up for later), cigarettes or clean food and water may be worth more.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
FRACK! At the very LEAST your programmers should have been told (or, if they asked, been allowed) to put QA bounding-box fields on the statements. If a monthly charge font size to be printed is longer than the width of the statement imaginary box, eject the statement from the enveloping system, then punt it to a manager.
That isn't even close to how the financial organizations function. There is simply zero drive to pre-empt problems as there is no major authority breathing down their necks and auditing every single iteration of their customer-facing software processes in great detail.
Moreover, the customers are individuals or small businesses, meaning there is practically nothing to fear in the form of loss of business due to dissatisfied customerbase or defamation. It's not like they have too many other choices.
Yet Socrates himself is particularly missed.
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed.
Gold would probably retain value (maybe even the same value; who knows) in that situation, because its main value is as a treasure metal and/or medium of exchange.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
People don't use gold for it's intrinsic value as a metal. It's used because sometimes you can't buy a herd of goats with a thousand cans of Dinty Moore stew. Gold is small, convenient, historical, and rare, so it makes a pretty good medium of exchange.
Historically paper money only had value because it was backed by gold, or some other known commodity. Now it's backed by faith. How's that working out for everybody?
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Actually that doesn't really work. In fact it is completely wrong.
There is nothing that actually pegs gold to a specific value. We (that is society) think that gold is worth something, and are thus willing to pay it.
If, in the future, we no longer value gold as much, it will no longer have the purchasing power it once had.
Gold, like all commodities, is priced loosely on supply and demand (yes, lots of other factors go into it, but I am being simple here). Even if there is a small supply, if there is no demand (because people are more worried about food then anything else), it isn't worth anything.
Do Or Do Not, There Is No Spoon, There Is Only Zuul. Everything in the above post is probably opinion.
Now it's backed by faith. How's that working out for everybody?
Gold also only has value because people believe it does - as the GP post said, you can't eat it, you can't really build a shelter out of it, etc.
In any event, why should the money supply be tied to a rare, precious metal? Matching the growth (or shrinkage!) of the money supply based solely on the discovery, loss, or recovery of a particular natural resource hardly seems like a good plan for managing the economy.
Join the Empire! http://www.empirereborn.net/
a post-apocalyptic world where people are just fighting to stay alive... cigarettes or clean food and water may be worth more.
If you're just fighting to stay alive... I'm thinking cigarettes aren't at the top of your shopping list.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
Gold is small, convenient, historical, and rare, so it makes a pretty good medium of exchange.
This is what people don't get. When you are transferring large amounts of wealth around there are very few other options. I've heard of using oil as a medium... but transferring the equivalent amount of wealth in oil would require fleets of tankers. There is nothing special about gold except that it is common enough to be common but rare enough to be rare. We could use platinum but that is too rare, or copper, which isn't quite rare enough. Silver is actually a decent alternative and what many economies used prior to settling on gold.
No, when you're starving, gold isn't worth much. But when you're just past the starving point and trying to create a base economy, crating around a wheelbarrow full of canned goods is inconvenient and makes you a target.
The difference is that the supply of gold fluctuates unpredictably based on natural deposits, industrial use, and the activity of mining companies, while the supply of dollars fluctuates deliberately according to the monetary policy imposed by the central bank. Generally we're better off when the supply is controlled by people who know what they're doing rather than random fluctuations -- if you think business cycles are bad now, take a look at how they worked before the Federal Reserve -- although the outcome can be catastrophic when it's controlled by people who have no clue (i.e. Zimbabwe).
So you're saying the people who didn't see the current crisis coming, assured us it was contained, and then told us we barely avoided catastrophe know what they're doing and are the perfect stewards for our monetary system?
Ben Bernanke: There is no housing bubble to go bust.
Ben Bernanke: Subprime Mortgage Problems Contained
Ben Bernanke: We barely avoided catastrophe
The Federal Reserve was founded in 1913. The Great Depression started 16 years later.
The intrinsic value of gold is that it is rare enough to hold large quantities of wealth and cannot be manufactured arbitrarily. The second reason is why every fiat currency has historically failed, despite the fact that people were told by the bankers that they knew what they were doing this time.
"...of all the contrivances for cheating the laboring classes of mankind, none has been more effective than that which deludes them with paper-money." -- Daniel Webster
If there is no perceived value for gold (think: a post-apocalyptic world where people are just fighting to stay alive, not save up for later), cigarettes or clean food and water may be worth more.
Cigarettes and clean food and water are too easily consumed to make a good exchange technology (in any case, food and clean water are the commodities one would most likely want to exchange). Assuming central authority breaks down in this post-apocalyptic society there will be a radical need for a universally recognised exchange technology. It is true, people could agree to use shells, but given the relative scarcity, the material integrity and most importantly of all, the cultural history of gold, my bet would be that the perceived value of gold would increase.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Historically paper money only had value because it was backed by gold, or some other known commodity. Now it's backed by faith. How's that working out for everybody?
So far, much better than the last global financial meltdown that happened when (and because) we were still on the gold standard.
*My* question, though, is this:
Why do Visa's systems have the bandwitdh to *allow* 23 quadrillion dollars to make it to a credit card bill.
Is there anyone, at all, anywhere, who's gonna carry a balance of even a megabuck?
6.2, really. That's all they needed.
people who are not nerds are actually USING COMPUTERS!
Correct.
What they are not doing, however, is reading Slashdot.
i forget
*My* question, though, is this:
Why do Visa's systems have the bandwitdh to *allow* 23 quadrillion dollars to make it to a credit card bill.
Is there anyone, at all, anywhere, who's gonna carry a balance of even a megabuck?
6.2, really. That's all they needed.
Full ack, 6.2 digits will be enough for all purposes eternally.
Just like no computer will ever need more than 64k RAM, and 32 bits will always be enough for time_t.
Say out loud: I'm an Aspie and I'm somewhat proud, I guess. Uh. Can I write an email in all caps instead? Hm...
Padding is used in fixed-length fields.
There. Was that so hard?
Oh yeah, it is. Let me finish this.
'Our' submission files use combinations of fixed-length and variable-length fields. Fixed-length is easy, but variable-length is usually designated by a check byte that tells you what sort of data follows. Our submission file can overall be submitted as either fixed-length or variable length. Yes, the terms are mixed in the specification.
Why?
Well, among other things, many submission files include data intended for disparate systems. Some of these systems are new and purpose-built, and the data format is fairly efficient, but some systems are ancient and were never intended to do what they do today. It happens.
Some systems talk EBCDIC, some can't tolerate decimal, others are sensitive to input data. One can't pass anything above dec 0x127. One has to accept a binary blob. Yep, we have to parse that stuff out and mske sure it goes to the right system. Input validation is a bear.
I'm amused at this problem, as allowing that much field width for transaction amounts is pretty bad design. It is supremely unlikely to see a $10,000,000 charge for your typical cardholder. Even for your commercial cardholder. Just an unfortunate example of bad execution. Here, fixed-width is your friend.
And yes, an XML file would be magnificent. How would we improve things when most of our systems cannot parse XML? No, doing that much parsing in a separate system system is not worth the cycles, and interpreting data is left to the actual receiving system. And while XML is extensible, you don't want that in a submission file. It is supposed to conform to the specification.
As an analogy, you don't answer your teen-age daughter's phone calls and then scream the conversation to her and scream her responses back to the caller. When you realize the call (data field) is for her (other system) you just hand the phone (data) to her. Let her deal with it. If she has a question for you, like how much money can she have to buy something, you deal with that.
XML is not the solution. Neither is putting everything on one system. Those of you in the card business know why fraud stays off to the side. Like integrating anti-virus into Windows for instance. Once some processes are integrated into others, it becomes *one* process. Checks and balances disappear. Chaos reigns.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.