7 Jan
2008
7 Jan
'08
8:32 a.m.
jd wrote:
In defense of programmers, whether or not the programmer(s) failed to
do an adequate job depends far more on their employer's policies and
schedules than on the programmers' skill and experience. Mostly,
companies seem to go with whatever works, even if it isn't perfect, or
have a non-technical management type dictate precisely and strictly
what a programmer is to do, regardless of the potential consequences.
Or, rather, that /was/ a common policy. It's only slightly improved,
though, in all the years since.
==
Having been a programmer for a couple of decades, none of the companies I
have worked for are going to tell a programmer in detail, exactly how to
code something. They may specify a language and there might be a set of
guidelines to follow. You are given a set of requirements and you code to
them. Perhaps security wasn't a requirement. Though if something as bad
as this (allowing users to get to a command prompt or a GUI) got through to
a customer I would seriously suspect the company had little or no quality
checking. But as I pointed out there are a lot of photos of crashed and
hacked ATMs.
Mark
--
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Investigation, 1938
Fred Cisin wrote:
There are over 140,000 photos of ATM machines and quite a few of them with
crashed or hacked windows, on the internet according to Google. There is
no crime in taking a picture of an ATM screen. Now if you had an ax or
were attaching chains to it from your truck, then someone might get upset. :-)
I finally found two images of an ATM with an OS/2 error message. One has a
TRAP screen http://www.hotfad.com/?title=Image:ATM_OS2_Crash.jpg It was a
TRAP 000e which can be caused by bad RAM. The other
http://tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:Aih-JJ7ODXruuM:http://loss4words.com/~p…
gives an unable to operate a hard drive message. Both are most likely
hardware errors. Though either could have been caused initially by a
software error causing the system to TRAP or reboot. But that is not at a
command prompt.
On Sun, 6 Jan 2008, madodel wrote:
It's nigh impossible to provide proof, evidence, etc., when one has
"eyes only" access, not even carrying a camera around, "just in
case".
For ATM's at least, no one's going to let you have anything as
proof. If anyone feels otherwise I am sure the FBI would certainly be
happy to assist in disabusing such silly notions.
I've been using OS/2 since version 1.3.
I'm fairly well acquainted with
its capabilities. Yes I can be wrong and maybe you saw what you think you
saw, but all you have is a story. Where is your proof other then that you
think you saw it was OS/2? I can't prove a negative, but you should be
able to prove that it did happen.
You're certainly welcome to doubt whether he
was right, and/or think that
he was mistaken. But we rarely put up a "burden of proof".
but never at an OS/2 prompt. And as I also posted, if
the original ATM
code programmer had known what they were doing then the program itself
should have been set as the shell, so no command prompt should have ever
been attainable.
"IF . . . had known what they were doing"
I don't doubt that you could write some extraordinarily robust code.
But, do you assert that Diebold knows what they are doing?