On 14 Jul, 11:46, wrote:
On Jul 14, 11:22 am, Roland Perry wrote:

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?

That would be my guess - a simple programming mistake caused some
isThisADodgyCard() test always to return true so it killed them all.

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

Some simple cards are hardwired with just a couple of numeric
registers to carry values but Oysters will have onboard software
because they have to store a simple database of places and times
visited plus there's encryption going on. Whether that software is in
ROM or something read-write akin to flash that can be updated I dunno.
Obviously it has some sort of R/W memory to store the DB , balance etc
anyway.

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.

Yup.

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

Certainly not from the poor buggers who got stranded with a broken
card either. )


I am not a techy, and I was thinking at first that surely there is
something that can be reset rather than having to replace the card.

But I wonder if it's something like the way that (the surely soon to
be extinct because useless) CDs and DVDs become useless if a write
operation fails. Like some sector that tells the reader where to look
next is corrupt, rather than just a readable setting that says the
card is invalid.