Bank ATM crashed by unactivated Windows
Windows wonga woes
Thursday, 4 October 2007, 16:27
AN ATM at a bank in Tbilisi, Georgia, crashed leaving what appeared to be a standard Windows pop-up error message.
But upon closer inspection it seems the bank had forgotten to activate its natty software.
Here's exhibit A. µ
Share this:
Share
Advertisement
Subscribe to the INQ Newsletter
Sign-up for the INQBot weekly newsletter
INQ Whitepapers
Business Intelligence Software
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Enterprise Accounting Software
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Enterprise Systems Management
Jobs
Advertisement
INQ Poll
Sounds like a blatant case of piracy....no doubt using illegal copies of Windows. Has someone notified Bill?

Time for me to bring the PAIN to suckas messin' with Bill's OS.
I get to openly bitch about our new Diebold ATM’s at Georgia Tech! The new Windows ATM’s at the school’s student center that replaced the old Linux (I think) systems are absolute crap. They are down about half the time and the time between you inserting the card and the ATM actually realizing it is, literally, measured in tens of seconds. Screw all these god-awful Windows ATM’s!

Thanks INQ, I feel much better.
Windows, on an ATM machine? Why, beacuse of windows' flawless stability and security record?

Hardly...
Imagine if it were a WGA notice claimining that "This copy of Windows isn't genuine". Now that /would/ be funny!
Your old ATMs didn't have Linux... I would be pretty safe to say that they ran OS/2.
Should have been using XP Embedded, which does not require activation.

It's just possible that they _are_ using XP Embedded but forgot to include the runtime key in the image, I'm not completely sure how this works, although I would have expected it not to boot at all without the runtime key.

Another alternative would be Volume Licensing - Volume License Keys do not require activation - but XP Embedded is the right choice for an embedded device.
So there are now ATMs running windows. Somehow I doubt it will be long before a person manages to hack these and end up with thousands of dollars in the middle of the street.
I've seen this kind of thing before, Its just plain stupid for people to use windows embedded on most anything. I would have to say I hate it alot. Having constantly dealt with it at my workplace, I would rather see a linux embedded OS then some poorly coded, bloated windows OS. 

Windows is alright (not that great) for desktops but embedded? It just plain fails.

The day microsoft dies is the day I will throw a party.
Most of the ATM's today run Windows. Ether NT or XP. 
Some of them run OS/2
In ten years of developing banking software I have never seen Linux ATM. Banks just do not trust Linux ;)
...it could have been running Vista.

Incidentally,

Malformed magnetic strip data --> buffer overrun exploit --> £££ ?