As reported by Slashdot and everybody else (here’s a decent summary), the Royal Bank, one of Canada’s largest, suffered a major glitch during a software upgrade. This apparently affects ‘millions of transactions’. I’m past the days of living pay cheque to pay cheque, but there was a time when it’d be pretty worrying if I wasn’t paid in a timely fashion.
Anonymous like most royal bank customers, i now have a serious concern that this incident points at major problems with the technology carrying our financial data.
anyone working in software should be familiar with
the term “the half-life of code”, meaning that the longer a software engineer continues to work on an application, the more difficult it become to locate and fix bugs. the code becomes exponentially “radioactive” when engineers are forced to work on code they didn’t originally author, and even more under stressful conditions. rbc may have fixed this “glitch”, but it’s a battle won in a lost war. the canadian public has lost trust.
myself? i’m withdrawing all of my money and investing in something tangible: a full set of gold teeth.
I’m not supposed to say much as an insider, but I can’t resist saying at least that this was not such a technology glitch as the public press releases say.
I work in the ‘computer monitoring’ centre of another bank and we’ve had to deal with the domino effect of Royal Bank’s so-called glitch.
Think ‘operator error’ is all I can say.
I can’t speak to the veracity of this, but a Slashdotter reports that ‘it was a single-character typo in the command line.’ From http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=109984&cid=9336713.
That’s done, and it looks like Google didn’t index the page in the meantime, so you’re in the clear.
