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Roland Perry · July 14th 08, 10:22 AM posted to uk.transport.london

In message
, at
03:03:47 on Mon, 14 Jul 2008, remarked:
On Jul 14, 10:02 am, Roland Perry wrote:
That's a fascinating conspiracy theory, but the only cards that are
supposed to be disabled are ones that were actually used early on
Saturday.

If the mechanism for permanently disabling a card means they have to
be touched to a gate that would rather follow wouldn't it?

So you think the idea was to disable *some* cards, but the system had a
brainstorm and disabled *all* of them?

As it seems very likely that the problem was a software update gone
wrong, that update might have indeed been about hacked cards - even if
the idea wasn't to disable all the hacked cards [1] by stealth (in
addition to making hacked cards easier to spot).

Software update to what, the cards or the gates? If the latter how can
that brick a card?

I don't know if you can update the firmware in the cards. Do they even
have something to update?

If it was the former and they were doing a firmware
update to all the cards then they obviously learnt the hard way that
firmware updates should only be done very carefully, and preferably
not at all unless its really really essential.

That is always the case with any kind of critical update.

Given LULs track record however I wouldn't put it past them to do
something that dumb. Alternatively perhaps the cards have some sort of
irreversable kill switch or flag that was enabled by mistake.

This is more consistent with their inability to "reverse" the process.
It's more scalable to do it that way than to have a blacklist of cards
available at every single Oyster reader.

Either way , I suspect we're not going to get the whole story.

I have a feeling we haven't heard the end of this.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07...uter_problems/
--
Roland Perry