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 …
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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