More Apple Awesomeness
Maybe Apple's payment system is written in SWIFT.
Tim Cook's dream of bonk-to-pay global domination has taken a serious battering after customers using the new Apple Pay system were double charged. Fanbois took to Reddit and Twitter after finding their Apple Pay transactions had been duplicated. Apple said it was aware of "a Bank of America issue impacting a very small …
Well that may be your view. Shelling out a vast wedge of cash for a 'user experience' when the card in my pockets comes without an extra charge would make me feel it was a considerably poorer user experience from my parsimonious point of view. Since I have yet to even use pay by bonk for anything with anything I am unlikely to be near the front of the stampede. I instructed my card company to disable some types of transaction when they were offered
Because the vast majority of people don't have contactless payment cards?
Because in the US (which is the market for this) people are forced to use insecure swipe cards because the banks haven't invested in card technology for a decade and have been left behind the entire rest of the world?
The girl in the queue for overpriced coffee had the first iPhone 6 Plus I've seen in the wild. She didn't bonk it (being in the UK) but I was disappointed how ordinary the phone looked in the (or should that be 'her') flesh, certainly not as Purdy as a HTC One M8 or orange Lumia 930 (the latter might be just my own preference for day glo moves). It was perfectly flat though.
Anywho, the time she spent getting the loyalty app for said rank coffee shop to open she could have slid her card in and punched her pin in. Hopefully apple pay doesn't require quite so much faff.
>Anywho, the time she spent getting the loyalty app for said rank coffee shop to open ...
It would have been much worse if paying with cash. One upside to pay-by-bonk is that the means to pay is almost certainly already in-hand (literally), so there's much less need for the hard-of-thinking to go faffing about in pockets and purses for the necessaries--after the total has been announced over the store's PA system.
>One upside to pay-by-bonk is that the means to pay is almost certainly already in-hand (literally),
I'm considering taking my rarely used credit card out of my wallet so the only contactless card left in there is the card I want to pay with... Then I can just wave my wallet across the terminal.
My Aussie bank actually does support pay-by-bonk on Android (has done for about 12 months - didn't hear the media praising that innovation), but rudely only on a preselected collection of phones. My phone has NFC, but no support from them.
It is their fault.
It is fundamental to check for duplicates before charging, and to lock the account before charging.
After that, you have to check for duplicates.
The reason is many systems can guarantee that the transaction will happen AT LEAST ONCE (tibco, I'm looking at you), it is your responsability to check that only one is valid.
Happened to me once, years ago, won't happen again.
Seriously haven't ever worked in this space have you? The typical solution to this is that the initiator of the transaction creates a unique transaction ID along with the rest of the details, this passes to the FI. The FI then _should_ de-duplicate the transaction ID's, with at most only one ever being presented per ID. The initiator can sometimes (legitimately) send duplicates, if the initiator doesn't receive a timely (or correct) response it may re-present the transaction (identical, same ID, so it's easy to spot). Many Issues at the FI end may cause this, but as long as the transaction is identifiable as the same one, it's fine.This allows for scenarios like someone buying something for £9.99 from a vendor, then deciding a second later once the transaction has went through that, you know what, they really needed two widgets, not one so another transaction from the same vendor comes through immediately after for the same amount.
I was going to deploy my favourite rant (not used in a while) about the weasely apologies that technology companies seem to have all adopted these days. Their cloud system goes down for a day and they apologise for the inconvenience to a "limited or small number of customers". Which you know is a big fat lie, as it was probably the majority of them.
Although limited is a great word, as it doesn't actually mean small, it's just often used that way. It really means not all, so as long as you can keep one customer's service up, only "a limited number of our customers were affected" is still true.
However, small number was about 1,000 I can accept.
Although with my cynical hat on, I might wonder if there have only been 1001 transactions so far on Apple Pay. In which case the wording would be strictly truthful, but wildly inaccurate..
Sure, this may not be Apple's fault. But the banks are huge cloud players too. After all, what is a High Street bank? It's a huge database with some customers' money attached. And when the bank systems go titsup, they wheel out the same dishonest-non-apologies.
But obviously here Bank of America got it right, that a small number of customers really was. It'll be interesting to see if they come out with a number if they have a bigger outage though...
Let me help you re-write it Jasper style:
Desperate Apple have locked Fanbois financial gonads to the iSyphon. Utter chaos has ensued, with huge wads of cash being spirited from their accounts. We reached out to Apple asking if the fuck-ups we, at El Reg just keep on identifying, will ever end. The stuck up c**ts couldn't be arsed to reply. Wankers. As predicted for over two years now, the arrival of that Peak is imminent. When it does arrive, you know where you heard it first. Ooh yer!
ok, maybe slightly exaggerated. But not by much.
Hilarious!! Apple made people pay way too much money to buy their state-of-the-art phone that finally got some features that Samsung has had for years, and then doubles up on the charges. Now that sounds like the perfect way to toss more money onto that humongous $92 Billion pile of cash they already had...
Too funny, after years of faithful service, de BOA closed my credit card account as I didn't utilize the card enough, I had paid off all balance(quite a large sum) ant then only bought plane tickets once a year. Glad I don't use an iPhone or BOA thanks to their clear insights.
Some call karma, I call it dumb luck...