Reminds me of the time all those porn pop-ups hijacked my browser and filled my history. My dad thought I’d visited all those sites on purpose for a second there.
No they were ancient ROM based tills, I unchecked a box that was blocking firmware updates from being pushed to the tills. For some reason I still don’t completely understand, these tills received their settings by Ethernet, but received their data by dialup fucking modems. When I unchecked the box, it told the tills to cease processing commands until the firmware update was completed. But the firmware update wouldn’t happen until I dialled into every single store, one at a time, and sent the firmware down through a 56k modem with horrendous stability, to each till, also one at a time. If one till lost one packet, I had to send it’s firmware again.
I say for 8 hrs watchimg bytes trickle down to the tills while answering calls from frantic wait staff and angry managers.
Immediately applied, no save button. It was labeled something like “Allow/disable firmware updates” which is bad design. Label should say exactly one thing, either “Allow” or “disable” never “Allow/disable” The software was very antiquated.
I once bricked all the POS terminals in a 30-store chain, at once.
One checkbox allowed me to do this.
That’s actually pretty impressive
Was it the recompute hash button?
Nah. It was totally a virus attack.
Reminds me of the time all those porn pop-ups hijacked my browser and filled my history. My dad thought I’d visited all those sites on purpose for a second there.
No they were ancient ROM based tills, I unchecked a box that was blocking firmware updates from being pushed to the tills. For some reason I still don’t completely understand, these tills received their settings by Ethernet, but received their data by dialup fucking modems. When I unchecked the box, it told the tills to cease processing commands until the firmware update was completed. But the firmware update wouldn’t happen until I dialled into every single store, one at a time, and sent the firmware down through a 56k modem with horrendous stability, to each till, also one at a time. If one till lost one packet, I had to send it’s firmware again.
I say for 8 hrs watchimg bytes trickle down to the tills while answering calls from frantic wait staff and angry managers.
I’m curious - was it also a checkbox that immediately applied when toggled, instead of not actually applying until you press save?
Immediately applied, no save button. It was labeled something like “Allow/disable firmware updates” which is bad design. Label should say exactly one thing, either “Allow” or “disable” never “Allow/disable” The software was very antiquated.
I worked with POS machines once too. Ugh. Worst. Things. Ever.