ATM Fix Everything
from Midnight Spaghetti and the Chocolate G-String via Slashdot


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The Scene: Carnegie Mellon University

The Event: A newly installed Diebold Opteva 520 ATM crashes, then reboots. Suprizingly, it's vanilla-style Windows XP operating system initialized without the actual ATM software.

The Result: A desktop computer with only a touch screen interface is left wide open for the amusement of the most wired university in the U.S.

Eschewing more malicious schemes, the first move was to connect to the Internet. This plan proved unsuccessful as there seemed to be no network capability. The situation was complicated in that even typing proved extremely difficult due to the lack of a keyboard. The Character Map program was used to enter text by copy-and-pasting, yet the most that was accomplished by doing so was making the text-to-voice program say, "What, do you think I'm made of money?" Windows Media Player was set up to loop a series of Beethoven, Jazz, and Talking Heads (the sample sound files included with XP) while running a full screen visualization. Finally, an annoyed faculty member in an adjacent office unplugged the machine and dispersed the crowd. The story is humorous until one realizes that Diebold is the leading producer of electronic voting machines. We can all look forward to playing Minesweeper while exercising our citizenship.

posted by prof_booty | 01:45 PM