I got a sneak peak at stuff customers in stores rarely ever see .

The employee at the local store screwed up and the Ethernet cable plugged into the card reader fell out cos they tried moving the card reader too far away from the stand.

The card reader, which in this case is made by Ingenico, threw a fit and decided to reboot itself.

During which time I saw some interesting but scary shit. 
 

For one, the card readers are using a proprietary OS with the most potato CPU and ram ever although I don’t know how little ram there is (probably less than 128MB) or how bad the CPU is (probably worse than the CPU in Ti84 calculators).

For two, the card reader was running the 2017 version of Ingenico’s OS . Not a newer version. This doesn’t surprise me considering not a lot of retailers seem to update their Card readers (Read: This is why it’s hard to find stores which accept Apple Pay or Google Pay above £30) but this situation is still quite bad. Especially considering these devices connect to the internet every time there’s a transaction.

Three, I know not everybody is into tech or whatever but come on. People who work with equipment should know how to use it properly and quite often the people who work with card machines in their job have no idea how they should use them. Even to the extent that this person tried to tap my Coop card (not a bank card) onto the card reader before realising that wasn’t going to work.

I don’t even know anymore.