Okay, it’s just an entry in a Photoshop contest, but with the explosion of new features in ATMs and kiosks, will a pizza ATM be far behind?
Archive for the ‘Fun’ Category
A really remote ATM
Friday, November 6th, 2009
Navy Federal Credit Union, based in Virginia, is the largest credit union in the world, serving 3 million members. But what really sets it apart is its customer base: membership is only open to people who work for the Department of Defense.
That means a lot of soldiers, sailors and Marines are members. And that leads to some unique situations.
Last month, Navy Federal installed an ATM at Camp Lemonnier — a small outpost in Djibouti that is the center of U.S. efforts to deal with Somali pirates operating off of the Horn of Africa. (It’s the red dot on the map above).
The credit union said it took two years to work through the tangle of technical and regulatory issues involved in putting an ATM in such a remote place.
Friday Fun: A virtual ATM
Friday, November 6th, 2009
How deeply are ATMs embedded in our cultural consciousness? So deeply that even online kid’s games have them.
Marapets is a “virtual pet” world, where kids can care for a pet, dress it up, play online games, and more.
Some activities earn Marapoints (MP), which can be used to buy virtual accessories in the game. MPs are stored in a bank account, and can be withdrawn through the ATM — for a small fee. Players even have to create and enter a PIN.
It’s an interesting example of social training: When the kids grow up and have real bank accounts, using ATMs to get their money will be second-nature to them. They won’t even think about it; it’s just something you do, like using a drinking fountain.
Friday Fun: Fake ATM receipts
Friday, October 30th, 2009
Ever been mistaken for a millionaire? Us neither. But if you’re into practical jokes — or really, really, REALLY need to impress your date this weekend — this website will provide you with a year’s supply of fake ATM receipts showing any bank balance you care to name. Just write a note on the back like it’s a piece of scrap paper, casually hand it over, and let your target make the discovery of your wealth on their own.
Oh, and it might help to drive a really nice car and wear designer clothes….
Tech Tales: The Case of the Missing Internet
Monday, October 26th, 2009
Editor’s note: ATM Network technicians have the experience to solve even the thorniest problems, and routinely go above and beyond to do so. This is one such story.
When ATM Network installed an ATM in a county licensing bureau, they set it up to use an Internet connection instead of a phone line. That was both faster and cheaper for the client, since the government office where it was located already had a high-speed Internet connection, and using it meant the ATM didn’t need a separate dedicated phone line.
There was only one problem: the Internet connection didn’t work. The machine kept reporting that it would connect to the transaction server, only to have the transaction server drop the connection in the middle of transactions.
ATM Network spent two weeks and five visits troubleshooting. Our techs met with the county’s IT department, who assured us that their network was working fine, and the problem had to be the ATM. But our troubleshooting team couldn’t find anything wrong with the ATM.
The team ran Internet traces and got a puzzling result: the machine reported that the server was dropping connections, while the server reported that the machine was dropping connections. It should have been one or the other, not both.
Finally, the team hauled the machine back to the ATM Network warehouse, set it up there, and ran a test transaction. The Internet connection worked flawlessly.
Certain that the problem was with the network, the team went back to the county’s IT department and began asking questions, tracing the exact path that the ATM data followed through the network.
It turned out that the data first went through a city router (the licensing bureau was located in a city-owned building), then a county router, then a state router before being sent on to the transaction server.
The team tracked down each router and examined them. They discovered that the middle router — the one owned by the county — had a web filter on it.
A web filter is software that restricts access to certain sites. So if you don’t want your employees playing online games, you would set your filter to block the addresses of known gaming sites.
For some reason that filter had decided it didn’t like the address of the transaction server, and was blocking it.
Rather than totally disable the web filter or risk it blocking transactions again later on, the team gave the ATM a unique “static” address and then exempted that address from the filter. The machine has worked perfectly ever since.
Friday Fun: Be an ATM for Halloween
Friday, October 23rd, 2009
If you’re still looking for a costume idea with Halloween a week away, you can always go as an ATM.
Friday Fun: When four languages aren’t enough
Friday, October 16th, 2009
Depending on where you live, ATMs in your community might have some interesting language options. Most machines have a Spanish option, of course, and quite a few also can be set to display other default languages like French.
But in some places, ATMs have more exotic choices.
Here in Minnesota, we have a large Hmong population. It’s a legacy of the Vietnam War, where many Hmong fought on the American side in Laos and then faced retribution after the war ended. Tens of thousands came here as refugees, and Minneapolis is now home to one of the largest Hmong communities in the United States.
Which means Minnesotans occasionally encounter machines like this. “Hmoob”, it turns out, is a variant spelling of Hmong. You can dig through the complex linguistic reasons yourself, but it’s basically an effort to represent a tonal language (where the pitch used to pronounce a word changes the meaning of the word) in English. So it’s spelled “Hmoob”, but pronounced “Hmong.”
Then, of course, there are the ATMs in London that speak Cockney rhyming slang.
But the real winner comes out of Africa, where it’s not uncommon to encounter a bewildering variety of national and tribal languages, not to mention choices catering to tourists. Take this South African machine, for instance. South Africa has 11 official languages, and this machine offers eight of them, including Afrikaans, English, SeSotho and isiZulu.
Read the comments on the link for examples of other multiple-language machines in Canada, the United States, Europe and the Caribbean. Machines in the Dutch half of St. Martin, for example, not only offer multiple languages — they can give you your cash in dollars, euros or Dutch guilders.
Tech Tales: The Case of the Missing Surcharge
Monday, October 12th, 2009
Editor’s note: ATM Network technicians are so experienced that they routinely uncover and solve problems that the manufacturers themselves missed. This is the story of one such incident.
A few years back, a major ATM manufacturer introduced a machine that offered lots of great features — big screen, modern operating system, reliable mechanisms and lots of expandibility. But its software lagged behind, making the machines run sluggishly.
So with great fanfare, the company released a software upgrade that turned the laggard into a blazing-fast wonder. Customers clamored for them, and ATM Network began installing them by the truckload.
But we quickly encountered a problem. Cash withdrawals worked fine, but every time a customer performed a balance inquiry, the machine would shut itself down for 15-18 seconds, disrupting transactions.
Our troubleshooting team got involved. After some testing, they discovered that during those 15-18 seconds the ATM was resetting itself by downloading fresh surcharge information and encryption keys from our transaction processing server. That was a normal function, but one that rarely occurred — it was only necessary when there was a discrepancy between the ATM’s settings and the server settings. In this case, however, the settings weren’t changing on either end, so there was no reason for the resets.
The manufacturer didn’t know what the problem was. So our team began asking questions. Were there programming errors in the software code? Had the software upgrade made any changes to how settings were stored? Were there new settings that the transaction server wasn’t reading correctly? The answers came back: no, no, no.
The team finally decided to focus on the odd fact that the problem only cropped up during balance inquiries. From the ATM’s perspective, the main difference between a balance inquiry and a cash withdrawal is the surcharge: balance inquiries are free, withdrawals generally are not. Maybe there was a problem with how the machine decided which transactions had a surcharge and which ones didn’t.
Programmers use something called a “flag” to determine status settings. A transaction that has a surcharge would have its surcharge flag set to “on”, meaning a surcharge is assessed. A balance inquiry has its surcharge flag set to “off”, meaning it’s free.
But as the team dug through the system, they discovered that this machine did things a little differently: the surcharge flag was always set to “true”; all it did for free transactions was set the surcharge amount to $0.
That was odd, but seemed harmless. The effect was still the same: withdrawals had a surcharge, balance inquiries didn’t.
The team did some more digging, with engineers from the manufacturer on the phone to help. Together they soon discovered the problem. Besides checking its own settings, the ATM also verified its settings with the transaction server. But the transaction server had only one surcharge amount listed — the surcharge levied for cash withdrawals. This made sense, because if the ATM used the surcharge flag properly, then the only time a surcharge would be triggered was during a cash withdrawal.
But in this case, the ATM was triggering a surcharge on balance inquiries, too. And that $0 surcharge didn’t match the surcharge information on the server. So the ATM assumed its settings needed updating, and took itself out of service while it downloaded new settings from the server.
Thanks to the combined efforts of ATM Network and the manufacturer, the manufacturer wrote and released a software patch fixing the problem.
Friday fun: Now that’s secure
Friday, October 9th, 2009
To make a withdrawal, please solve for x:
Worried about ATM security? Compared to this method, PIN numbers are leaky screen doors. Though you could still be ripped off by any mathematics professor or rocket scientist who happens by….
(For the curious: the equation is unsolvable without more information, because it contains at least two variables (z and n) for which there’s no way to derive a value. Two other symbols (Pi and Phi) might look like variables, but actually are Greek letters representing specific values: Pi and the Golden Ratio).
3-D model of an ATM
Friday, October 2nd, 2009
You might not think of ATMs as art, but luckily some people do. Check out these way-cool 3-D renderings of an ATM.
They were done by a freelance 3D modeler in Iran. It took him 2 months to make it, including more than four hours of final rendering time.
Some of the thumbnails have links to higher-resolution images. For the full-sized version of the picture shown above, go here.
