What's the technical reason behind the 2010 bank card problems in Germany?

tags:

banking

views:

534

answers:

2

+3 Q:

What's the technical reason behind the 2010 bank card problems in Germany?

It's been in the news (1) (2), but there's been no technical explanation, besides that it is a software bug on the chip.

Is there any further information on what kind of bug this is? A one-off bug, some number conversion problem or ...?

EDIT: Apparently the bug can be circumvented by modifing the terminals' software. I'd be nice to know, how this is done.

+2 A:

A similar problem what happened with SMS's received by some windows mobile phones. They appeared to come from 2016. This probably had to do with the interpretation of BCD numbers as hexadecimal.

This results in interpreting BCD 10 as decimal 16 instead of decimal 10

maybe something similar happened here.

Toad 2010-01-06 08:16:20

Yes, maybe there is a spec about an interface where it is not clear if a number is bin or dec. And i think two developer one different sides of the interfaces spec made different guessings about what would be correct.

Oliver 2010-01-06 08:48:52

A:

My guess is that we're simply seeing the results of management cutting costs on development and testing. There is probably just a simple little bug at the bottom of everything, and it escaped QA.

Carl Smotricz 2010-01-06 08:23:32

Not all bugs can be detected with a higher budget.

Georg 2010-01-06 08:24:23

Some historical perspective to refute you: Large quantities of money were poured into Y2K bug avoidance, and there was (almost) no problem anywhere. This particular bug should have been detectable by simply testing in an environment with advanced dates; apparently some outfit failed to do this.

Carl Smotricz 2010-01-06 08:38:06

`<sarcasm>` wait, after y2k I stopped checking for these sorts of bugs, we're good to for another 90 years. None of the code will live that long anyway...`</sarcasm>`

Kobi 2010-01-07 09:48:01

ansaurus

tags:

views:

answers:

What's the technical reason behind the 2010 bank card problems in Germany?

related questions