Hmmm2000 writes "Recently several Visa card holders were, um, overcharged for certain purchases, to the tune of $23,148,855,308,184,500.00 on a single charge. The company says it was due to a programming error, and that the problem has been corrected. What is interesting is that the amount charged actually reveals the type of programming error that caused the problem. 23,148,855,308,184,500.00 * 100 (I'm guessing this is how the number is actually stored) is 2314885530818450000. Convert 2314885530818450000 to hexadecimal, and you end up with 20 20 20 20 20 20 12 50. Most C/C++ programmers see the error now ... hex 20 is a space. So spaces were stuffed into a field where binary zero should have been."
Welcome, visitor from the past! In this futuristic year of 2009, people who are not nerds are actually USING COMPUTERS! Also, WOMEN are allowed to VOTE and WEAR PANTS.
Oh sure, but let them vote to wear no pants and the wheels come right off the whole system... Pity... I for one would have welcomed our bottomless female overlords...
Just hyper-inflate the dollar enough and you could spend 23 quadrillion on a bag of chips. Just look at Zimbabwe ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Zimbabwe [wikipedia.org] ) from the article "On January 16, 2009, Zimbabwe announced plans for imminent issue of banknotes of $10 trillion, $20 trillion, $50 trillion, and $100 trillion". So actually, its possible that the dollar could somehow inflate that high so 23 quadrillion isn't that much.
Yeah, of course what happened after that was people started having to resort to bartering for goods using small amounts of Gold, Kinda like what they did TWO-Thousand years ago. So you take an economy and you screw it up so badly that you have to reset it back to the pre-roman levels of commerce. . And people laugh at other people for collecting and buying gold.
The thing is if the economy tanks that badly, gold probably won't be worth much either. Which is why buying large boxes of ammo, cigarettes, and toilet paper is the way to go!
People don't use gold for it's intrinsic value as a metal. It's used because sometimes you can't buy a herd of goats with a thousand cans of Dinty Moore stew. Gold is small, convenient, historical, and rare, so it makes a pretty good medium of exchange.
Historically paper money only had value because it was backed by gold, or some other known commodity. Now it's backed by faith. How's that working out for everybody?
Now it's backed by faith. How's that working out for everybody?
Gold also only has value because people believe it does - as the GP post said, you can't eat it, you can't really build a shelter out of it, etc.
In any event, why should the money supply be tied to a rare, precious metal? Matching the growth (or shrinkage!) of the money supply based solely on the discovery, loss, or recovery of a particular natural resource hardly seems like a good plan for managing the economy.
Gold is small, convenient, historical, and rare, so it makes a pretty good medium of exchange.
This is what people don't get. When you are transferring large amounts of wealth around there are very few other options. I've heard of using oil as a medium... but transferring the equivalent amount of wealth in oil would require fleets of tankers. There is nothing special about gold except that it is common enough to be common but rare enough to be rare. We could use platinum but that is too rare, or copper, which isn't quite rare enough. Silver is actually a decent alternative and what many economies used prior to settling on gold.
No, when you're starving, gold isn't worth much. But when you're just past the starving point and trying to create a base economy, crating around a wheelbarrow full of canned goods is inconvenient and makes you a target.
Meanwhile, you're transferring the gold certificates around, complete with fees for every transaction (straight to the vault owner, naturally) and he still has an impervious vault full of gold. If society breaks down--which gold buyers seem to expect--you really think he'll honor those scraps of paper? No, he'll be riding it out inside the vault.
I'm too paranoid to buy gold, I invested in seed corn. Too large to steal, too real to lose value.
In EBCDIC, hex 40 is a space. Making this error if EBCDIC was used would make the charge a whopping $4,629,771,061,636,895,312 - 4 quintillion dollars!
Isn't that about the cost of a couple of packs of smokes and a bag of chips at one of those gas station stores? If he filled up the truck, too...well, that would just about account for it.
He also felt a stab of fear that he had saddled all his unborn grandchildren -- and their grandchildren -- with a lifetime of debt. "Down the generational line, nobody would have any money."
Is not so much the error(stupid; but, if corrected, not ultimately a giant deal); but the response of the cardholder to the error:
"The bank kept him on hold for two hours, during which time he contemplated the impossibly bleak financial future that might await him. He also felt a stab of fear that he had saddled all his unborn grandchildren -- and their grandchildren -- with a lifetime of debt. "Down the generational line, nobody would have any money."
For fuck's sake, people, the credit card guys haven't actually bought a law concerning hereditary debt slavery yet, and this guy thinks that it is already on the books?
Muszynski compared the giant debt reprieve to receiving "an amazing Monopoly card that says, 'Bank error in your favor.' "
Pathetic. This guy is grateful that Visa condescended to fix their obvious mistake(this isn't some he said/she said billing dispute, this is someone who allegedly spent more than the world GDP at a gas station)? What is this cringing bullshit? Either this guy is just a sad sack or, rather worse, the "customer service" we get, along with the kangaroo courts that are "mandatory binding arbitration" actually make thankfulness for not being screwed a reasonable response.
"Do you owe $23 quadrillion or more on your credit cards? Well I'm about to tell you a secret that the credit card companies don't want you to know. You can settle your debt for pennies on the dollar and get out of debt fast!"
Probably more offensive is that a glitch happened at all, large or small. It could have just as easily been $2.31 in which case he may have not noticed the overcharge and paid it. Charge several thousand people $2.31 too much and you can make an alright profit.
Things like this happen where I work with our AT&T bills all the time. We're on the smaller end of businesses and have a little over 200 lines. At least a couple of times a year we find a number on our bill that isn't one of our numbers. We contact AT&T, they act baffled, and then they credit us for the error. It's so common that they barely even ask any questions when we dispute the charge. I have to imagine that there are numerous other businesses out there in the same situation, but they aren't going through their bills and are subsiquently paying for services they aren't even using. AT&T even has some BS verbage on their statements that says charges not disputed within 60 days can't be disputed. So they can ream someone for years, and then if the company finds out, they can only recoup the last 60 days worth of over charges.
I work in this industry. The only novelty here is that the error got into production, and was not caught and corrected before it went that far.
Submitters send files to processors which are supposed to be formatted according to specifications.
Note I wrote 'supposed to be'.
Some submitters do, from time to time, change their code, and sometimes they get it wrong. For instance padding a field with spaces instead of zeros. Woopsie...!
Seems that's what happened here. Sounds like a hex or dec field got padded with hex 20, and boom.
This is annoying, especially when the processor gets to help correct the overwhelming number of errors, and then tries to explain that it wasn't their fault. Plenty of blame to go around with this one.
And then explains why they don't both validate/sanitize input, and test for at least some reasonable maximum value in the transaction amount. A max amount of $10,000,000 would have fixed this. That and an obvious lapse in testing. This is what keeps my bosses awake sometimes, fearing they will end up on the front page of the fishwrap looking stupid 'cause their overworked minions screwed something up, or didn't check, or didn't test very well. I love one of the guys we have testing. He's insufferable, and he catches genuine show-stoppers on a regular basis. They can't pay him what he's been worth, literally $millions, just in avoiding downtime and re-working code that went too far down the wrong path.
Believe me, this is in some ways preferable to getting files with one byte wrong that doesn't show up for a month, or sending the wrong data format (hex instead of packed binary or EBCDIC, for instance) and crashing the process completely. Please, I know data should never IPL a system. Tell it to the architects, please. As if they don't know now, after the one crash...
If you knew what I know, you'd chuckle and share this story with some of your buddies in development and certification.
And pray a little.
At least it didn't overbill the cardholders by $.08/transaction. That would suck. This is easy by comparison. Just fix the report data. Piece of cake. Evening's worth of coding and slam it out in off-peak time. Hahahahaha!
Holly: Busy, Dave? Lister: Well, yeah. I am, actually. Holly: Oh, then you won't want to know about the two super-lightspeed
fighters that are tracking us. Lister: What?! Holly: I'll leave you to your bubble blowing, mate. Lister: No, Hol, come on, come on. Holly: They're from Earth. Lister: Three million years away? Holly: They're from the NorWEB federation. Lister: What's that? Holly: The North Western Electricity Board. They want you, Dave. Lister: Me? Why? What for? Holly: For your crimes against humanity. Lister: You what! Holly: It seems when you left Earth three million years ago, you
left two half-eaten German sausages on a plate in your
kitchen. Lister: Did I? Holly: You know what happens to sausages left unattended for
three million years? Lister: Yeah. They go all mouldy. Holly: Your sausages, Dave, now cover seven-eighths of the Earth's
surface. Also you left seventeen pounds, fifty pence in a
bank account. Thanks to compound interest you now own
ninety-eight percent of all the world's wealth, but since
you've hoarded it for three million years nobody's got any
money except for you and NorWEB. Lister: Why NorWEB? Holly: You left a light on in the bathroom. I've got a final demand
here for one hundred and eighty billion pounds. Lister: A hundred and eighty billion pounds! You're kidding! Holly: (wearing Groucho Marx disguise) April fool. Lister: But it's not April. Holly: Yeah, I know, but I could hardly wait six months with a red-hot
jape like that under my belt.
Actually it looks even simpler then that.
It looks like $2.31 was his amount and the rest was his CC number, since the 4885 is a typical Visa Check Card sequence issued by BofA.
I wonder if this guy was smart enough to look at his card number and verify that was not the case here, especially before putting it out to the press.
I am one of the victims of this programming error, and I can tell you that several thousand VISA debit transactions were miscoded with the same amount: $23,148,855,308,184,500.00.
I was not smart enough to look at my card number before I sent it off to Consumerist [consumerist.com] so that VISA could be made fun of. Happily, the string does not contain my (or apparently anybody's) credit (or debit) card number.
Oh please... if the person on the phone knew anything about programming, they wouldn't be working the phones, they would be coding their apps like the guys who got promoted from answering the phones last week.
Hey (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hey (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Hey (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Hey (Score:5, Funny)
Welcome, visitor from the past! In this futuristic year of 2009, people who are not nerds are actually USING COMPUTERS! Also, WOMEN are allowed to VOTE and WEAR PANTS.
Oh sure, but let them vote to wear no pants and the wheels come right off the whole system... Pity... I for one would have welcomed our bottomless female overlords...
Parent
meh (Score:5, Funny)
Re:meh (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:meh (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:meh (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, of course what happened after that was people started having to resort to bartering for goods using small amounts of Gold, Kinda like what they did TWO-Thousand years ago. So you take an economy and you screw it up so badly that you have to reset it back to the pre-roman levels of commerce.
.
And people laugh at other people for collecting and buying gold.
Parent
Re:meh (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing is if the economy tanks that badly, gold probably won't be worth much either. Which is why buying large boxes of ammo, cigarettes, and toilet paper is the way to go!
Parent
Re:meh (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:meh (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:meh (Score:4, Insightful)
No, you're wrong.
Gold will just get ridiculously expensive - think $2000/oz or as much as $10000/oz - double its current price.
Just give it 5-10 years, you'll see.
Parent
Re:meh (Score:5, Insightful)
People don't use gold for it's intrinsic value as a metal. It's used because sometimes you can't buy a herd of goats with a thousand cans of Dinty Moore stew. Gold is small, convenient, historical, and rare, so it makes a pretty good medium of exchange.
Historically paper money only had value because it was backed by gold, or some other known commodity. Now it's backed by faith. How's that working out for everybody?
Parent
Re:meh (Score:5, Insightful)
Now it's backed by faith. How's that working out for everybody?
Gold also only has value because people believe it does - as the GP post said, you can't eat it, you can't really build a shelter out of it, etc.
In any event, why should the money supply be tied to a rare, precious metal? Matching the growth (or shrinkage!) of the money supply based solely on the discovery, loss, or recovery of a particular natural resource hardly seems like a good plan for managing the economy.
Parent
Re:meh (Score:5, Insightful)
Gold is small, convenient, historical, and rare, so it makes a pretty good medium of exchange.
This is what people don't get. When you are transferring large amounts of wealth around there are very few other options. I've heard of using oil as a medium... but transferring the equivalent amount of wealth in oil would require fleets of tankers. There is nothing special about gold except that it is common enough to be common but rare enough to be rare. We could use platinum but that is too rare, or copper, which isn't quite rare enough. Silver is actually a decent alternative and what many economies used prior to settling on gold.
No, when you're starving, gold isn't worth much. But when you're just past the starving point and trying to create a base economy, crating around a wheelbarrow full of canned goods is inconvenient and makes you a target.
Parent
Re:meh (Score:5, Funny)
Exactly. Then we'll use bottle caps for currency.
Parent
Re:meh (Score:5, Funny)
If inflation gets that bad, your currency *is* your toilet paper.
Parent
Re:meh (Score:5, Interesting)
Meanwhile, you're transferring the gold certificates around, complete with fees for every transaction (straight to the vault owner, naturally) and he still has an impervious vault full of gold. If society breaks down--which gold buyers seem to expect--you really think he'll honor those scraps of paper? No, he'll be riding it out inside the vault.
I'm too paranoid to buy gold, I invested in seed corn. Too large to steal, too real to lose value.
Parent
Re:meh (Score:5, Insightful)
*My* question, though, is this:
Why do Visa's systems have the bandwitdh to *allow* 23 quadrillion dollars to make it to a credit card bill.
Is there anyone, at all, anywhere, who's gonna carry a balance of even a megabuck?
6.2, really. That's all they needed.
Parent
At least it wasn't EBCDIC (Score:4, Funny)
Re:At least it wasn't EBCDIC (Score:5, Funny)
Excellent. Now please wait while we calculate your interest with an abacus.
Parent
Re:At least it wasn't EBCDIC (Score:5, Funny)
That would be a really large abacus run by a team of shackled slaves being whipped by a leather clad master.
So pretty much like any IT shop.
Parent
Minimum (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Minimum (Score:5, Funny)
$5. But if they've got any sense they'll pay the whole thing off straight away to avoid the interest.
Parent
Not an error (Score:5, Funny)
This is how Obama is paying for health care.
So what's the big deal? (Score:5, Funny)
Isn't that about the cost of a couple of packs of smokes and a bag of chips at one of those gas station stores? If he filled up the truck, too...well, that would just about account for it.
Dude should shut up and pay what he owes.
Re:So what's the big deal? (Score:4, Insightful)
That, or the president thinks the best way to prevent him from ever smoking again is to never be able to afford one.
Parent
Re:So what's the big deal? (Score:5, Funny)
The "sin" tax on those smokes must have been part of the new anti-smoking bill.
Wait... does that mean this is a sin tax error?
Parent
Sensationalist article (Score:5, Funny)
He also felt a stab of fear that he had saddled all his unborn grandchildren -- and their grandchildren -- with a lifetime of debt. "Down the generational line, nobody would have any money."
Give me a break.
What is truly appalling... (Score:5, Insightful)
...is that this was not caught by validity checks. Was this perhaps an error that affected only the printing of the statement?
Re:What is truly appalling... (Score:5, Informative)
No, it wasn't just the output. People were charged overlimit fees in addition to the erroneous amount.
Parent
The Sad Thing... (Score:5, Insightful)
"The bank kept him on hold for two hours, during which time he contemplated the impossibly bleak financial future that might await him. He also felt a stab of fear that he had saddled all his unborn grandchildren -- and their grandchildren -- with a lifetime of debt. "Down the generational line, nobody would have any money."
For fuck's sake, people, the credit card guys haven't actually bought a law concerning hereditary debt slavery yet, and this guy thinks that it is already on the books?
Muszynski compared the giant debt reprieve to receiving "an amazing Monopoly card that says, 'Bank error in your favor.' "
Pathetic. This guy is grateful that Visa condescended to fix their obvious mistake(this isn't some he said/she said billing dispute, this is someone who allegedly spent more than the world GDP at a gas station)? What is this cringing bullshit? Either this guy is just a sad sack or, rather worse, the "customer service" we get, along with the kangaroo courts that are "mandatory binding arbitration" actually make thankfulness for not being screwed a reasonable response.
Re:The Sad Thing... (Score:5, Funny)
Anything more then "Huh, what an odd error" and you really need to check your reality.
On the plus side you might be able to leverage:
Hey, if Visa lends me 23 quintillion dollar, surely I'm good for another 100 billion.
Parent
Re:The Sad Thing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you contemplated the possibility that maybe, just maybe, this guy was just cracking wise to the reporter?
"Can I buy Europe on pump 4?" That doesn't really sound like a guy who was taking the bill seriously.
Parent
I can hear the radio ads now (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I can hear the radio ads now (Score:5, Funny)
Actually calling up one of these companies and having them pull up your balance would be awesome.
Parent
Been there (Score:5, Funny)
reassuring... (Score:5, Funny)
It's good to know their system is able to handle $23 quadrillion charges, now I just need to get them to raise my limit a bit.
Only Notice Large Glitches (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Only Notice Large Glitches (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Nothing to see here, keep moving along please... (Score:5, Informative)
I work in this industry. The only novelty here is that the error got into production, and was not caught and corrected before it went that far.
Submitters send files to processors which are supposed to be formatted according to specifications.
Note I wrote 'supposed to be'.
Some submitters do, from time to time, change their code, and sometimes they get it wrong. For instance padding a field with spaces instead of zeros. Woopsie...!
Seems that's what happened here. Sounds like a hex or dec field got padded with hex 20, and boom.
This is annoying, especially when the processor gets to help correct the overwhelming number of errors, and then tries to explain that it wasn't their fault. Plenty of blame to go around with this one.
And then explains why they don't both validate/sanitize input, and test for at least some reasonable maximum value in the transaction amount. A max amount of $10,000,000 would have fixed this. That and an obvious lapse in testing. This is what keeps my bosses awake sometimes, fearing they will end up on the front page of the fishwrap looking stupid 'cause their overworked minions screwed something up, or didn't check, or didn't test very well. I love one of the guys we have testing. He's insufferable, and he catches genuine show-stoppers on a regular basis. They can't pay him what he's been worth, literally $millions, just in avoiding downtime and re-working code that went too far down the wrong path.
Believe me, this is in some ways preferable to getting files with one byte wrong that doesn't show up for a month, or sending the wrong data format (hex instead of packed binary or EBCDIC, for instance) and crashing the process completely. Please, I know data should never IPL a system. Tell it to the architects, please. As if they don't know now, after the one crash...
If you knew what I know, you'd chuckle and share this story with some of your buddies in development and certification.
And pray a little.
At least it didn't overbill the cardholders by $.08/transaction. That would suck. This is easy by comparison. Just fix the report data. Piece of cake. Evening's worth of coding and slam it out in off-peak time. Hahahahaha!
My question... (Score:5, Funny)
Does he still get the airline miles for that one? I mean, even at 1 mile per dollar spent.... He can now book a first class ticket to mars...
Visa Rewards? (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds like Red Dwarf (Score:5, Funny)
Holly: Busy, Dave?
Lister: Well, yeah. I am, actually.
Holly: Oh, then you won't want to know about the two super-lightspeed
fighters that are tracking us.
Lister: What?!
Holly: I'll leave you to your bubble blowing, mate.
Lister: No, Hol, come on, come on.
Holly: They're from Earth.
Lister: Three million years away?
Holly: They're from the NorWEB federation.
Lister: What's that?
Holly: The North Western Electricity Board. They want you, Dave.
Lister: Me? Why? What for?
Holly: For your crimes against humanity.
Lister: You what!
Holly: It seems when you left Earth three million years ago, you
left two half-eaten German sausages on a plate in your
kitchen.
Lister: Did I?
Holly: You know what happens to sausages left unattended for
three million years?
Lister: Yeah. They go all mouldy.
Holly: Your sausages, Dave, now cover seven-eighths of the Earth's
surface. Also you left seventeen pounds, fifty pence in a
bank account. Thanks to compound interest you now own
ninety-eight percent of all the world's wealth, but since
you've hoarded it for three million years nobody's got any
money except for you and NorWEB.
Lister: Why NorWEB?
Holly: You left a light on in the bathroom. I've got a final demand
here for one hundred and eighty billion pounds.
Lister: A hundred and eighty billion pounds! You're kidding!
Holly: (wearing Groucho Marx disguise) April fool.
Lister: But it's not April.
Holly: Yeah, I know, but I could hardly wait six months with a red-hot
jape like that under my belt.
Re:It's a Trap! (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Extremely speculative. (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Extremely speculative. (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
I'm afraid you're wrong, sir (Score:5, Informative)
I'm afraid you're wrong, sir or madam.
I am one of the victims of this programming error, and I can tell you that several thousand VISA debit transactions were miscoded with the same amount: $23,148,855,308,184,500.00.
I was not smart enough to look at my card number before I sent it off to Consumerist [consumerist.com] so that VISA could be made fun of. Happily, the string does not contain my (or apparently anybody's) credit (or debit) card number.
Parent
Re:stack garbage (Score:5, Funny)
Oh please... if the person on the phone knew anything about programming, they wouldn't be working the phones, they would be coding their apps like the guys who got promoted from answering the phones last week.
Parent
Re:Yeeeaaaaahh... (Score:5, Funny)
I had a roommate who had a calling card that had rolled over to maxint minutes remaining. He checked the balance on a speakerphone to prove it to me.
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