As I was walking from the shopping center this morning I noticed a new ATM stuck to the side. It’s a Royal Bank of Scotland one. I recognise the screen except for the unusual message in the middle… It’s an error message of MS-Windows design informing that some device drivers failed to load, and the ok and cancel buttons.
ATM powered by windows. Good to know.
ATM powered by windows and also not stable. Even better.
I was under the impression bank’s networks ran on UNIX and windows is simply bolted on @ each device (via a program like Power TCP) to give work stations and ATMs a more-user-friendly look.
It used to be that many banks with IBM mainframes & support contracts also had ATMs running a stripped down version of OS/2 call NetStation. Since IBM has (all but?) officially dropped support for that operating system I’m not suprised they’re phasing it out for Windows.
What suprised me was seeing the Arrival/Departure boards at Logan Airport (Boston) showing the Blue Screen of Death; Windows 95 flavor IIRC. I just hope the plane’s fly-by-wire systems don’t need ctrl-alt-del in the middle of descent…
At Sea-Tac airport on Monday morning, I found one of the “Instant Travel” kiosks blue-screened with an NT kernel dump.
I think NT-based embedded systems are more common than you think. There aren’t as many security problems in a carefully-configured custom installation of NT as conventional wisdom suggests.
Yup. Our ATMs are just “thin” browser-based clients running some robust flavor of Win2K.
Of course, these things are physically and logically hardened and with just a 10-key pad and mouse input from the touchscreen, it’s not plausible that someone could manage to reboot or otherwise compromise it.
Being Web-based provides quite a few advantages - one notable one is the ability to provide the user with a wide choice of languages - IIRC, our “standard” collection of languages on an ATM is ten or so. AFAIK, we’re the only bank with Hmong as an option.
Dubious advantages include being able to play QuickTime (or whatever) videos and ads while your transaction is processing.
Could be worse. The spiffy new ticket machines for our BART transit system are powered by NT4. Think I’ve also seen OS/2 Warp on an “addfare” machine.
I can’t find a link to the story anymore, but at CMU an ATM got itself powercycled and came up in Windows XP with a touchscreen interface, to the amusement of all present. After some fooling around the machine was made to play classical music (some comes with each installation). Eventually, the group was dispersed by campus security, the power supply was sealed away carefully, and no one has since found a way to get at it.
For what it’s worth, there was no “click here to learn everyone’s PIN”, or anything of that nature. To mess with the machine in any serious way it seems like you’d need to steal it first.