Diebold ATM Media Player
Midnight Spaghetti causing a ruckus as always.
The Scene: Carnegie Mellon University
The Event: A newly installed
Diebold Opteva 520 ATM
crashes, then reboots. Suprizingly, it's vanilla-style Windows XP operating system
initialized without the actual ATM software.
The Result: A desktop computer with only a touch screen interface
is left wide open for the amusement of the most wired university in the U.S.
Eschewing more malicious schemes, the first move was to connect to the Internet.
This plan proved unsuccessful as there seemed to be no network capability.
The situation was complicated in that even typing proved extremely difficult due to
the lack of a keyboard. The Character Map program was used to enter text by
copy-and-pasting, yet the most that was accomplished by doing so was making the
text-to-voice program say, "What, do you think I'm made of money?"
Windows Media Player was set up to loop a series of Beethoven, Jazz, and
Talking Heads (the sample sound files included with XP) while running a full
screen visualization. Finally, an annoyed faculty member in an adjacent office
unplugged the machine and dispersed the crowd. The story is humorous until one
realizes that Diebold is the leading producer of electronic voting machines.
We can all look forward to playing Minesweeper while exercising our citizenship.