The MasterCard of DOOOOOOM!

[MrDelirious]

Okay, Saturday was actually fun, despite having to get up at 7:20, and working 10 hours. It was homecoming, we won, and most of the customers were awesome. I was working with some of my favorite people, managers were scarce, and we had plenty of help. A long day, but the best working weekend I've had in a long time.

Setting: It's around 11:00 A.M. Game starts at 12:30 P.M. This means we are in FULL CHAOS RUSH MODE. Every purchase averages $150.00. Various versions of "Bear Down" play throughout the store. A good time is generally had by all. Then, a man walks up. He's probably in his 50's. He was nice.

Him: Hi.
Me: Hey there. How are you today?
Him: Good. You?
Me: Doing fine.
*scans clothes, etc.*
Me: Allll right. Your total comes to $313.46.
Him: Okay.
*hands me Mastercard*

Little did I know that somewhere in his past, this unassuming, middle-aged football fan had taken a trip to Hades wherein his wallet had copulated with Satan himself. I thought I noticed it glowing red when he retrieved the possessed plastic rectangle, but I was too busy humming along with a steel drum version of the fight song.

Me: Okay, do you have ID?
Him: Indeed, thank you for asking.
Me: All right. *swipe, enter*

The register freezes. It displays an error I've never seen before. It's not a rare occurance - the system runs on MS DOS and is older than I am. Thinking fast, I notice that the cashieress next to me has finished her transaction.

Me: Assmonkeys! Sir, my register just crashed. Your card hasn't been charged, but I'm going to need you to go right over here to Sarah (name changed).
Him: Oh, okay.

Some more explanation between the three of us occurs. Sarah rings him up.

Sarah: Okay, your total is $313.46.
Him: Familiar number. *hands card*
Sarah: Okay *scans, enter*

The same error appears, and the register locks down. Oh, crap. The man's MasterCard has literally caused two registers to fail within 3 minutes in the same way. I tell Sarah to reboot, and I take the items to another cashieress, call her Beatrix.

Me: Beatrix, I need you to ring this man up. However, under no circumstances are you to SWIPE his card. Type in the number. If you think you want to swipe it. Think again. It is a daemon, and will cause your computer to freeze and your credit score to decrease at Equifax.
Beatrix: Why?-wha?-
Me: Just do it. I'll explain later.

It worked, and the man took his underworld-influenced product acquisition device and clothes with him. Weirdest thing I have ever seen. He was nice the entire time, though, but his card was, I guess, entitled to repeatedly violate MS DOS.

[solemnwarning]

Programmers who actually write anything for real-mode systems, especially DOS should be hung

*waves fist at symantec*

[JustADude]

Programmers who actually write anything for real-mode systems, especially DOS should be hung.

Well remember, this system is older than MrDelirious, which means that when it was written, DOS was the latest and greatest.

On another note: I have SO got to get me one of those DaemonCards.

[Fawn]

:O Creeepy

[Bliss]

In fact DOS is still used a lot nowadays in the embedded market. it's not the OS itself that matters but how and what for you use it.

Delirious, maybe you should've helped the poor guy and exorcise the card before turning it back to him...

[Imogene]

Sarah
Beatrix

Someone's been playing too much FF 9. Was the old man Steiner?

[solemnwarning]

Well remember, this system is older than MrDelirious, which means that when it was written, DOS was the latest and greatest

DOS was _NEVER_ the latest and greatest.

UNIX

[Becks]

Delirious, maybe you should've helped the poor guy and exorcise the card before turning it back to him...

I don't know about you guys, but I always carry around some holy water for just such an emergency.

[Brightglaive]

Something interesting to note. About 3 -4 years ago the Subway sandwich shops in greater Las Vegas stopped taking the magnetic stripe "rewards" card. "Why?", you ask. Because some little malicious Hacker figured out a way to encode a virus in the magnetic stripe. When they would swipe the card it would take down the entire store network in about 2 minutes. When the register in question was re-booted it would then write the virus onto other cards. They had a devil of a time trying to get rid of the virus. How do I know this? The manager at one of the stores told me what was happening when I asked why they weren't accepting the Subway cards.

Personally I just think someone was trying to get free food with their subway points and were trying to hack the points system.

I wonder if the mastercard of DOOOOOOMMMMMM!!! was the same type of thing. Just that the operating system it was swiped on wasn't the expected one. (MSDOS vs. some form of linux shell or windows)

[solemnwarning]

More eliteist programmer ranting:

The cards should only contain data, you would have to be an idiot for cards to be able to do that, what do the developers do? Ignore buffer overflow attempts? Use nil-terminating bytes somewhere? EXECUTE CODE FROM THE CARD?!

[Geek King]

Something interesting to note. About 3 -4 years ago the Subway sandwich shops in greater Las Vegas stopped taking the magnetic stripe "rewards" card. "Why?", you ask. Because some little malicious Hacker figured out a way to encode a virus in the magnetic stripe. When they would swipe the card it would take down the entire store network in about 2 minutes. When the register in question was re-booted it would then write the virus onto other cards. They had a devil of a time trying to get rid of the virus. How do I know this? The manager at one of the stores told me what was happening when I asked why they weren't accepting the Subway cards.

I have to wonder on this one, do register swipes have the ability to rewrite the mag strip on a card? I would think that functionality wouldn't be included in POS scanners for just such a reason, or to prevent employees-gone-bad from committing fraud. I'm not up on that tech, so can anyone confirm/deny?

[Andara Bledin]

Re: Subway's reward system

Subway used to have those little stickers and cards, but they had way too much incidence of theft from employees and sucky customers alike, so they discontinued it.

The ran a swipe card program as a pilot in limited locations to see how it would work for them. It was never in wide release, and I'm not sure that particular roll-out was ever supposed to be permanent.

Properly, those cards would only ever need to be read as pure data and written to. Unless someone had done some seriously piss poor work on the programming (which isn't outside the realm of possibility, especially with a system just running as a test and not for wide release), there is no way it could bring systems down or change how they worked.

^-.-^

[Horsetuna]

We get a weird gift card at Sears on occasion. I've had two so far.

They're for promotional ones, which means that they have a beginning AND expiry date, and they have to be run as a return/exchange (Re, we type in a code to 'return' the money to be put on the card, then 'sell' the card for the same amount).

However, we found out that sometimes, the cards will do something wierd to the system. It wouldnt' go down, but take us back to the Main Menu after flashing an error too fast for us to see.

Not only that, but when we tried it again, it would take us back to the screen showing the transaction we just had (so it wasn't just voiding the transaction out). Finally I just started telling the others not to use cards or even TRY to use them. Just toss them and log out of the computer and log back in (Takes 2 seconds to do this... Escape, escape, enter number and password, enter.)

[MrDelirious]

Someone's been playing too much FF 9. Was the old man Steiner?

Wow, actually, I haven't played FF9 since...yeesh...6th grade? A while ago. I barely remember it. "Sarah" was just the name I pulled out of the air, and "Beatrix" was from Harry Potter (not really a reference, I just like the name).

I think I should clarify my DOS comment, though it might not need any. The computer itself runs on DOS, and executes the Prism POS (circa 1993, not as old as me, but close). Incidentally, the MediTech system that is the backbone of most hospitals I've been in is also DOS-based.

[Imogene]

Wow, actually, I haven't played FF9 since...yeesh...6th grade? A while ago. I barely remember it. "Sarah" was just the name I pulled out of the air, and "Beatrix" was from Harry Potter (not really a reference, I just like the name).

Spoiler Alert!






I'm not 100% sure, but I want to say 'Sarah' was Garnet's name before she got washed up in Alexandria.