don't forget to ask permission...

[glowroper.livejournal.com]

...to spend your own money, if you bank at Wainwright and use an ATM card to access your hoard. (Disclaimer: I otherwise love Wainwright Bank, as they are not only progressive in policy, but in action.)

My partner and I were in yesterday, because they now need to be alerted IN WRITING that you wish to leave town and use your ATM/debit card. Otherwise they will interpret purchases as attempts at fraud, and deny the transaction. (Yes, this has happened to me. Most embarrassing.)

They say this is to prevent possible theft; I say it is a theft of my privacy. They will be getting a[nother] nasty note from me when I return from the trip I leave on (in about half an hour). I say "another" because the written notification I gave them was so...vivid...that the Davis Square customer service person was going to fax it over to the main office, probably so they could use advanced graphological analysis to see how infuriated I am.

If I wanted to inform the authorities of my whereabouts, and ask permission to spend my own money, I would face the satellite cameras and vote Republican.

Comments

[androidqueen.livejournal.com]

It is a non-bug error,

as a programmer, i can say without a doubt that that *is* a bug. it might be a bug in the specifications, but it is certainly a bug. programmers who work on secure transactions are paid to think about what it means for those transactions to be secure. if they thought it was a good idea to cache PINs, they clearly didn't design the system well.

[siderea]

Thank you, I am a programmer as well. And I am using the usage which I am sure you are familiar with of "bug" meaning a program doing something it was not intended to do or failing to do something it was intended to do. My point, which I'm sure you grasp if you actually spend any time working on secure systems, is that there is a difference between an error which is intended behavior and an error which is not, because the first is one which is much less likely to be detected.

Allow me to recommend the ACM's risks_digest to you.

[androidqueen.livejournal.com]

sorry -- i'm just so accustomed to using "bug" to mean behavior which is not correct. :)

but yes, this sort of error is much harder to detect. thanks for the link!