back to article Freezing in Newcastle? You're not alone: For one lonesome creature, the world stopped on 31 Dec 2020

A chill wind from the North greets today's entry in The Register's pantheon of Bork. A hidden (and frozen) cashpoint awaits visitors to Newcastle station. While London's Kings Cross may have a secret platform (handily marked by a luggage trolley sticking out of the wall and a shop filled with overpriced Potter tat), Newcastle …

  1. chivo243 Silver badge
    Coat

    just a guess

    The card scanner is connected via ALT_USBA?

    John Connor's coat from T2 - ATM cracking kit in the pocket

  2. David Robinson 1

    The last line says what is needed, Send Police Community Support Officer.

  3. James12345
    Coat

    The CASHUsbD sounds handy. Maybe that is where you are meant to plug the magic money tree into.

  4. Fruit and Nutcase Silver badge

    Potter tat

    The King's Cross Footbridge - Now at the Watercress Line at Ropley.

    "This footbridge was regularly visited by Harry Potter film fans prior to removal from Kings Cross, so it should make the Watercress Line a new destination for Potter tourism. We look forward to welcoming these fans, and hope that they will enjoy learning about our engineering heritage as exemplified in the steam trains we operate and the buildings and structure that we maintain.”

    https://www.watercressline.co.uk/article.php/1384

  5. aregross
    Thumb Up

    Windows system crash due to a hardware device that's gone 'missing'. The device that's *not* on the list is the offender..

  6. Pascal Monett Silver badge
    Trollface

    "A metaphor, perhaps, for Brexit Britain"

    Hey, you've taken back control !

  7. Warm Braw

    An achingly hip coffee shop

    It were all Costas round here when I were a lad...

    The last time I was at the station it still looked like a bastion of chain retailers: it truly must be the end of days if Network Rail find themselves having to let their commercial space to independents.

  8. mikeHingley

    I always find error messages like this in the wild really interesting. It's an opportunity to peak behind the curtain and see what goes into these devices, without needing to hack one open your self. It's amazing what a system can tell you about itself just by looking at what they cough up when they're dying - and if your headgear is "of the darker hue" then this is information that you didn't know before without needing to do anything illegal to get access to it.

    I found a similar ATM at my local Morrisons supermarket and it's interesting to see how much of the internal infrastructure is (or appears to be) USB based - even the alarm module in that example was usb based.

    1. Sceptic Tank Silver badge
      Paris Hilton

      Peak behind the curtain? Ag no gross man!

    2. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

      "I found a similar ATM at my local Morrisons supermarket and it's interesting to see how much of the internal infrastructure is (or appears to be) USB based - even the alarm module in that example was usb based."

      Because in most cases, it's a bog standard PC inside powering it.

  9. John Sturdy
    FAIL

    Maybe someone forgot the UX testing of the location?

    There's some neat hiding of machines in plain sight at Frankfurt (Main) Hauptbahnhof, where the ticket machines are in a row facing the platform entrances, so you can see them easily when you arrive by train... but not when you arrive on foot looking to buy a ticket and get a train.

    1. JonathanH

      Re: Maybe someone forgot the UX testing of the location?

      It's more that the station used to be completely open, and there were shops and stalls in the area this ATM is located.

      Then in around 2010 ticket gates were installed by National Express East Coast in response to a non-existent problem, which caused a reshuffle of how some areas of the station were used. Initially the 4 main ATMs, plus a newsagent, the station toilets and several other food outlets were stuck behind the gates!

      The things are more trouble than they're worth, disrupting the flow of passengers in a number of places, manned on an arbitrary basis, and after all this time still unable to read local tickets and passes.

      They should have been ripped out like their counterparts at Durham which were foolishly installed at the same time.

  10. This post has been deleted by its author

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    If I had to guess, I'd say that the device names are being capped at 8 letters, and the last letter keeps being overwritten until it receives a newline instruction.

    So SND_PcSo could have been something like "SND_PcSpeakerAudio" and MISCUSBM could have been "MISCUSBMODEM"

  12. sanmigueelbeer Silver badge
    Facepalm

    Can I submit this as "bork"

    As Adobe Flash stops running, so do some railroads in China

    The last line of the article is the "icing on the cake": Authorities fixed the issue by installing a pirated version of Flash at 4:30 a.m. the following day.

  13. Blacklight
    FAIL

    The reset card

    In the early 2000s I put a NatWest card into a German Sparkasse ATM.

    It reset, and ate my card.

    The next morning I had about an hour of joy convincing the bank to return my card from the bowels of the machine (and they were adamant the machine was fine) - until we got them to let me put it in again, and lo, it reset (again). They gave me the card back, and I used it in another bank across the street....

    So yeah, something in a (foreign) magstripe took out an ATM - which was nice.

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