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Admin
That probably was the explanation for the variable: I would not place any money on it being implemented at_all, let alone sanely.
Thankfully, most current /dev/random implementations silently switch to well-seeded pseudo-random when they run out of real entropy. On FreeBSD boxes, there used to be separate /dev/random and /dev/urandom, but now the two are are links for the same device
Admin
Here in Helsinki I'm still seeing from time to time handwritten signs on shop windows and cafe counters apologising that Sampo cards aren't working.
Admin
I see hand of my current company here. I can only hope that they built native Sampo Bank infrastructure :)
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Not everyone needed to leave. I hadn't used my Sampo account in about 1,5 years (and previously used it only to cash in some Google checks and some random stuff) and when I finally decided to try out the online banking I found out that my account was no longer there.
I contacted the customer department who kindly notified me that they had just axed all the accounts with zero balance and "no use for a long time". Boggles my mind, that I still have an account in another bank which I haven't touched in almost 20 years and they're still happy to have me. I guess they have bigger harddrives than "Kanske Bank" to store my account information.
One thing not mentioned in the article which did make the national newspapers was that (someone I actually know IRL) managed to get a recurring monthly 352000EUR mortgage payment to show up in the online banking system, and they had only been discussing on getting that loan and had not actually signed any paperwork about it either. And as icing on the cake, their actual mortgage payment (the one they had signed up for) was deducted three times instead of just once.
I don't know how well off other TDWTF readers are, but I would be hard pressed to pay 352000EUR (or about 545000USD) a month with my current salary...
Admin
Perhaps they wanted all their employees globally to work with the same system to lower their support costs? It's granted that the start up costs may be expensive (e.g. loss of customers, employees, training and equipment) but in the longer run you only have one system to support and maintain (for better or worse).
Admin
... and that note was of course for the guy who wrote "why would you throw the old sampo system away"
Admin
A dane who is able to read and understand german and english is also able to understand most dutch texts :-)
Admin
Cursed be embedded images and all that other fancy-shmancy in emails!
Admin
This reminds me of a sign I saw taped to a cash register in Finland in 1997, saying "Cheques are not accepted because no-one uses them." Which was true, of course.
Admin
This just confirms my suspicions that the Danes can't program, at least not since Bjarne moved to the US.
Yes, I am a Swede, how did you know? :)
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My bank is owned by Danske, I can't authorise any transactions on my Linux machine, it pops up a box to put the code into, but this only works properly (for me) when I'm running Windows. On linux one of two things happen: Firefox - Box never pops up at all Opera - Box pops up but not the text entry field or 'OK' Button
Really frustrating when I have to borrow someone's machine anytime I want to do anything more than look
Also, my old Windows PC at work always used to get an invalid character error when I used to try to log in. Other PC's with same OS and version of IE worked though, so probably more to do with the piece of crap PC I was forced to use there
Admin
Not sure if this is a form of humour peculiar to the English language, but it's quite popular in the UK. The schoolboy's favourite being Robin Hood's sidekick, Friar Tuck ;)
Admin
I should remind the most important thing from Sampo story:
There was a fight over its ownership, during which Sampo fell overboard into the sea, broke and was lost.
Admin
Mo Mo Mo Mo Mo Mo Monsterfail fail fail
Admin
Ah, Finns.
What this article forgot to mention that every now and then (yes, even now), for a few hours at a time, the Sampo cards go offline. During the first disastrous week, there was a day when no payment was sent. That's right, not a single corporate client was able to pay bills or salaries -- what payday? Then there is the Finnish governmental railway system (VR) which had to extend monthly pass tickets by two weeks since clients from Sampo Bank were unable to send their scheduled or direct-billed money.
Needless to say, these caused a massive spike in people changing banks. Tens of thousands of people fled during the first few weeks, and every time there's a system failure (about 1/month, now), there's a spike. The people who haven't changed generally have loans there, which are expensive to move. Now, however, other banks have started to offer reasonably-priced loan-transfer settlements. Quietly, though ;)
Admin
Det gør det! :-)
Admin
Since when is an obfuscated application more "secure" than a non-obfuscated one ? Security-aware coders should ALWAYS assume the source code is public to enforce real security.
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Admin
[quote user="Walleye"][quote user="Ilyak"If it works, don't touch it"[/quote]
So, do you wait until the jet's engines break down in flight before doing preventative maintenance?[/quote]
Programs don't wear out from running, they wear out from "maintenance" programming.
Admin
Who cares if a candidate has experience with a specific programming language, as long as he or she has general experience and a solid educational background in e.g. Computer Science? I don't!
Captcha: Illum (a Danish store)
Admin
This is just another case in a long line of screw-ups by Danske Bank, even though my experience is more on the customer service side of things. My favourite was when I specifically requested to be transferred to another bank rep. because my current one kept screwing up my automated transfer setups. 'No problem', said Danske, and transferred me to another rep. When I called in 1 month later to talk to my rep. I found I had been transferred back to the one who kept screwing up my account. I changed banks immediately and got a whopping 5% interest rate reduction on my loan to boot. Don't use this bank.
Admin
I know it makes ME feel completely comfortable when I see lines like this in the code for a bank (snipped the end):
var __wpmExportWarning='This Web Part Page has been personalized. As a result, one or more Web Part properties may contain confidential information...
Admin
Also, when some payments appeared as double, they said in public "It's not a bug, it's a feature."
And then the "feature" made the TV license payment system crash.
Admin
Before this episode, there actually were a number of studies about the new systems and their (in)compatibility with what was used before. I know a person who was involved in one part of the evaluations, and he said there were numerous reports pointing out exactly the very problems that in deed did hit the fan. All of it was not a surprise to management; or, couldn't have been, if they only read the reports. Maybe they didn't, or maybe (more likely) they just ignored them.
Which brings me to another point: I've personally been involved in two fairly large "take overs" in Finland, and it seems to go almost exactly like the Sampo case, every time. I think there is something in the beginnings. Finland being a very small country, and we're generally not the ones that make a lot of noise about ourselves and our systems, so maybe we're thought to be backwards, or even a bit, eh, "less advanced" in these matters. Then a decision is made to bring those poor Finns a new system so that they'll get up to par with the rest of the world - and the fact that we actually have pretty advanced systems in many places already, is completely overlooked.
What's most puzzling about the Sampo/Danske Bank case is the elementary-ness of the problems. For example, we use a reference code for pretty much all payments, so that the payments can be automatically matched against invoices in financial systems. The new and improved Danske Bank didn't handle those at all. My company has several hundred rental agreements which are invoiced on a monthly basis, and many of the sums are the same. So now we get a bank statement, some 15 pages of printouts of sums, in a row, and no frickin' way to identify them.
My 5-year old girl could've spotted that one out, and fixed it in about 10 minutes before going live. But no, not Danske/Sampo... And their system is still riddled with idiotic, simple-to-fix UI problems which piss off people to no end, but they just won't get them fixed.
Admin
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I'm one of the Sampo customers. Luckily, it is not my primary account (any more), so I didn't have any problems.
Still. It is sad to see one of the world's best banks (at least technology-wise) gone down the drain.
At least I got an apology letter afterwards. Probably the same that every customer got. But still more than most other banks would care to do.
Captcha: "suscipere" - now, what is this trying to tell me?
Admin
Hey, there are many U.S. citizens reading here! They cannot understand the concept of direct-billing, i.e. company automatically charging your account. "WTF, somebody can pay bills without snailmailing checks?! Even by doing nothing at all?!"
I wonder how many people there are nowadays in the U.S. who really cannot believe bills can be paid via the Internet. Yep, my friend visiting the US told he was met with disbelief telling here in Finland we really do that. And have been for more than 20 years (at first via direct modem connections and national networks). They thought he was BS'ing them. I believe the practice back there still is to mail checks, and salary paid directly to your account is considered something revolutionary.
Admin
Having lived there (in Finland) for 5 years, I must say that this country has one of the most advanced banking systems in the world. Money transfers are usually completed within a few seconds (!) - my maximum was 20 minutes, but that was only because several technical problems came together :-)
Oh, and I just love these barcode-reading machines that make transfers really, really easy. It's in fact even faster to quickly drop into your local bank, swipe your bills through the machine, than entering the data in your home-banking application (which is easy, too)
Best of all - things just work. Really.
Should really finally go around to close this SAMPO account, though. Wanted to do that for years.
Admin
I can't tell if you're being serious or not. At any rate, unless your friend visited back in the 50s, this isn't the case. It's actually fairly difficult to find a job that doesn't do direct deposit (the name given to the process where your employer pays directly into your bank account). Small start ups and contracting, jobs targeted to students will still do paychecks but most places have direct deposit.
As for paying bills online, the only bill i can't pay online is my rent. Heck, I can even pay traffic tickets online.
Admin
Looks like keeping my money in a rusty tin can and hiding it under a rock is more advanced and secure.
Admin
Yeah, I'd have to give up both coffee and beer to take on a mortgage that size... :-)
Admin
Tip of the day: Use the "Quote" button instead of the "Reply" button and people will know what you're referring to without you making a second post to explain.
Admin
I think you're misinformed. We've had direct deposit of payroll here in the US for decades now, and can auto-pay bills at almost any of the larger businesses. (However, a lot of people, myself included, are very careful about who we allow to auto-deduct from our accounts, as it can be somewhat difficult to get them to stop even when you stop doing business with them. AOL is one of the major offenders in this regard - not that they have a lot of business any more.)
I suggest perhaps you need to upgrade to smarter friends. Or at least ones who aren't full of crap.
Admin
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When you break it all down that's all online transactions are. I'm telling my bank to transfer monies to their bank. The trick is making sure that city hall knows why they got 100 bucks from me and actually sees that i'm paying for parking tickets. I think that falls well out of the range of a bank's responsibilities.
Admin
Someone should send each member of the management team for this project a copy of The Mythical Man-Month and tell them the 2nd edition was published way back in 1995.
Admin
This is the part of the story that made me the most leery, especially considering that strong program obfuscation is a theoretical impossibility. Doing any form of security by obscurity is the inherent WTF, not doing it badly.
Admin
Basically what the bank does in online banking is transferring bytes of data that represent money. At the same time they can transfer bytes that represent a message or a reference number. The recipient then sees the message or the number. In case of the ref number (which usually is the ID of the bill and a check digit) they see immediately what was paid by checking the reference number against the numbers of the sent bills. This kind of system even allows your mom to pay your rent.
That's how it works in Finland.
We can argue about what belongs to the bank's responsibilities till dawn, but this is one model that works, even if it is some extra "work" for the bank in your opinion.
Admin
However, years later, a teacher who had been working in said bank during the "merger" told us that Citibank was about to do the "dump & rewrite" approach. Banamex countered with the argument that their own software even exceeded the crappy stuff Citibank was using... and they succeded! Sad thing was, while Banamex develops everything in-house, some stuff like the credit card processing systems used by Citibank were actually outsourced to Asia. One good thing that came out of this is that, in fact, Citibank started using the in-house software.
I think this case is the only one where I can safely say it was anything but a WTF. Sampo, however, got reamed.
Admin
Guess what was my last workplace.
Admin
The equivalent to direct-debit would be "domiciliacion", and that's managed by the bank; so if I want to cancel those payments, I ask the bank to do so, no hassle with companies like AOL. (Which crashed and burned over here, by the way.)
Admin
I'm a Finnish Sampo customer. At least here these problems show up when using Java 1.6. It works with 1.5 (I'm using Firefox 3 on Linux). Try downgrading your Java plugin.
This is, by the way, one of the many hard to understand WTFs about the situation. How hard is it to port one sad applet from 1.5 to 1.6? Or at least detect 1.6 and tell the user that it won't work. The way it is now, you can log into the app, enter a payment and then nothing happens when you try to confirm the transaction. This has been known by everyone since Easter, and probably longer by the poor souls who were Danske system users before then.
I only realized the full extent of the brilliance of the applet after reading these comments. Maybe that pile of crap cannot be made to bugde by any number developers, even if they are all pregnant women.
Java 1.6 is not exactly new and Murphy's law states that the more desperate your need to use online banking, the more likely it is that the nearest available computer has 1.6 and you don't have sufficient access to downgrade it.
To the people who were wondering why only 20000 customers left: I think this is the number published by Danske. The real number is much larger. A lot of Finns have accounts in several banks and they just started to use a different one and left the Danske one open but empty. I saw some estimates of well over 100000 de-facto lost 'daily use' accounts. This is pretty substantial given the size of the Finnish market.
To the Danes: go home and stick to sausage-making.
To self: go change banks (I don't have a loan and I didn't have major problems with Sampo, but that applet is not suitable for banking).
P.S. 'Kanske Bank' is probably an old joke, but it was new to me and I laughed (kanske = swedish for 'maybe').
Admin
The question is, was that the richest 20,000 of their customers or just the ones who were most annoyed by the new interface?
Admin
It wasn't just the interface that went FUBAR. Insanely complicated and rarely-used features like paying for stuff with your Visa Electron, getting money out of ATMs and so on were (and still are, from time to time) completely impossible. Not to mention the oddities with bank account balances. I was lucky since I gained 90€ after the clusterfu... erm, Danske Bank web banking system went live, but I know people who really got reamed (althought they did manage to get their money back eventually.)
The new craptacular web banking UI was just icing on the turd.
Admin
I was a customer of Danske Bank since some time in the eighties. At some point some transactionfees would be ten times as much if you did them in the bank rather than through netbanking. That was what got me to finally get netbanking access.
At that time the netbank worked on Linux as long as your browser was Netscape 4.7x and you had write access to "/", as some key files had to be stored in "/DanskeBank". The official advice from the bank was to have the system administrator create that directory and make it writable to the user who needed to do netbanking.
During the next few years, they managed to make the system behave worse and worse. There were times where logins would fail half the time. At some point there was a period of more than a month, where I was unable to log in at all.
When the second period of several months where I was unable to log in came, and I could see that there would soon come a period where I would absolutely need netbanking access, I finally decided to switch to Jyske Bank in early 2004.
Before that I had told Danske Bank on several occasions, that I could not wait any longer for a solution. The only advice they had given me, was to use a mulator to run Windows on top of Linux. That was not an option for me.
A year later the problems were supposedly fixed. You just have to tell the Danske Bank that you were using a Macintosh, and they would give you access to a platform independent version, that worked on Linux.
That was just too late for me. It requires more than just a working netbank to make me switch back to Danske Bank.
Admin
Today's breaking news: 28000 customers have left the bank (in Finnish, notice how the newspaper makes 28000 into 30000 for better headline). Still more than a million customers (i.e. 20% of Finnish citizens) left.
Admin
So they did pretty much all the typical mistakes you can make when running a software project: