What's that lurking behind the borked face of finance? Windows, of course ATMs are like sausages. Everyone likes them, but nobody wants to know what lurks inside. Come take a peek with another edition of The Register's look at computers behaving badly. Today's culprit was spotted at a branch of Tesco in the Isle of Man capital, Douglas. Register reader Peter Jackson was on the scene to record the …
Dunno. I just remember way back when (around the mid '90s) there was a really strong push to move to Windows for everything amongst ATM development teams. I never did figure out the rationale, though I do remember one of their managers asking me with genuine confusion why I wouldn't replace a router with a Windows PC with two network cards.
I believe they have to be certified for a certain OS on specific hardware, any major changes mean they have to go through the certification (very expensive) process again.
Another reason is that they have nailed the windows XP dumb terminal edition so well that (almost) no un-needed code is installed on them, Something which is near impossible to do on any version of Win 10
those black vertical lines on the bottom part of the screen usually mean there are stuck bits in memory and since these things don't have a dedicated graphics card it means we're talking about the main system memory here, not graphics card memory.
This means they either have to replace the memory or the entire thing if they don't have such vintage spare parts on hand.
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This is no surprise, maybe it was hack or someone just tried to hack it to send spam junk mail? An ATM would be far more secure if they ran a custom operating system designed to simply do the job and be completely secure. Windows is irrelevant in that environment - the only Windows that can't be hacked still have problems when a stone hits them..
Does that mean that IRQL is GREATER? And, is that Bad?
If this is the first time you've seen this stop error screen, restart your computer.
Translation: Meh, shit happens, just reboot. *Shrug*.
On a different train of thought: I looked at the photo gallery for the Island of Man and it looks indeed like a super-pretty place to visit. Wrote it down on my travel plans list.
On a collaborative software project I worked on many years' ago, my boss would always insist, post-crash, to simply restart the system and see if a repeat occurred. My protestations about "castles on sand" were sternly rebuked with the "B" word (budget). So long as managerial "musical chairs" meant that when the music stopped they were elsewhere in the organisational structure, it was of little consequence to their empire-building aspirations.
I suspect you will see the above message more frequently on systems built using the "castles on sand" methodology than those that don't.
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"Wrote it down on my travel plans list."
Tip: Be careful what mode of transport you propose to get there with:-
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-isle-of-man-55428761
>Tip: Be careful what mode of transport you propose to get there with:
I'm waiting for my turn to get vaccinated (COVID). Until then, I'm stuck in-place just like everyone else. Travel by plane seems nuts at this point.
The other week someone died of COVID on an United Airlines flight, here in the US. Of course he had declared he's had no symptoms, no fever, and to his best knowledge, he was not infected with COVID, prior to boarding the flight.
How many fellow travelers did he infect on that flight, considering the recycled A/C and everything?
It's a windows XP BSOD I think; lots of XP embedded still in action in ATMs
As far as I know, Galdmaat is just the branding for the network that's linking the ATMs together (like LINK in the UK) so that they play nicely across the banks and don't charge you extra for an out of bank transaction. The ATMs themselves will be updates of whatever the particular bank has in place, just a backend software/card switch update, unless the Bank decides to replace the machine in a particular location as part of the switch
XP Embedded was used in a range of ATMs, probably quite a lot still out there.
Also seen at my local train station was BSOD on the massive / fancy graphics passenger information board! That's despite the old small "legacy" board hidden away in the corner with LED matrix and a 9600 baud serial connection working just fine.
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