Newsletters

Select newsletters below and click the button to sign up!

Boston News NY News
DC News Internet Daily
SiliconValley News
InternetNews Business Report




Become a Marketplace Partner


Partner With Us


Internetnews Bloggers

Recent Entries

Archives

September 2009
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
    1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30      

Monthly Archives

Search The Blog

Software's Sublimation by Alex Goldman (bio)

Data's diffusion throughout business and into the cloud



Updated: Would your database accept $23 quadrillion?

By Alex Goldman on July 14, 2009 6:05 PM

UPDATED: The Consumerist reported (h/t BoingBoing) that a teenager managed to charge $23,148,855,308,184,500.00 to a prepaid VISA BUXX card at a CVS drug store.

How could that happen?

Update

A poster to Slashdot believes they understand the immediate cause of the problem.
"What is interesting is that the amount charged actually reveals the type of programming error that caused the problem. 23,148,855,308,184,500.00 * 100 (I'm guessing this is how the number is actually stored) is 2314885530818450000. Convert 2314885530818450000 to hexadecimal, and you end up with 20 20 20 20 20 20 12 50. Most C/C++ programmers see the error now ... hex 20 is a space. So spaces were stuffed into a field where binary zero should have been."

But that still doesn't explain everything. Databases should have common sense limits on fees and charges. Consumerist noted that the database did do one thing right: it added a $20 "negative balance" fee.

The teen's parent, "Dale," had a sense of humor about the incident, writing to Consumerist, "My lectures about financial responsibility appear to have failed."

"That's 2,000 times more than the national debt, which is a paltry 11 trillion," Dale added.

Update: A Visa representative said in an e-mail to InternetNews.com:

Late yesterday, July 13, a temporary programming error at Visa Debit Processing Services, caused some transactions to be inaccurately posted to a small number of Visa prepaid accounts. The technical glitch has been corrected and all erroneous postings have been removed. Importantly, this incident had no financial impact on Visa prepaid cardholders.

Visa regrets any inconvenience to our customers and has taken immediate steps to ensure this error doesn't occur again.

A CVS representative said that CVS was not responsible. "We're looking into this posting on the Consumerist. We don't have a record this transaction taking place and our bank vendor has informed us that their message format only supports a maximum transaction amount of $9,999,999.99.," he wrote to InternetNews.com.

Visa admitted the error to Dale and said that there was a system problem. But surely there should be a limit to the negative balance that can be charged to a prepaid card?

Although some respectable publications are predicting hyperinflation (along with numerous fringe blogs) no individual is likely to spend a quadrillion dollars any time soon, let alone 23 of them.

Recent reports say that IT departments are struggling with the tasks currently allocated to them. Commentators say that IT managers need to apply common sense to the challenges they face.

Today's news shows that somewhere in the financial system, there exists a database that can charge more debt to a single credit card than currently exists in the world today. That's a basic flaw in management and procedures and is not just a simple computer fault.

| Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0) | Share

Tags:

0 TrackBacks

Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Updated: Would your database accept $23 quadrillion?.

TrackBack URL for this entry: https://swarm.jupitermedia.com/mt-tb.cgi/8472

5 Comments

Steve Stout said:

As a web programmer I deal with numbers and large sales figures all the time, but to of designed a database to even hold a sale amount that large is just asking for errors.

It looks like they got what they asked for.

DOH!

July 14, 2009 7:37 PM
Randy said:

This also happened to my D's Visa Buxx card yesterday except there were two transactions for that amount from CVS and Toys R US. When I called Visa they pretty much acted like I was a moron for even questioning it ("OF COURSE it is an error") yet my D was walking around NYC with a suspended Visa card and no idea of when it would be released. Fortunately for us it was fixed by the end of the day but I was panicking that they may try to take that $46Q out of my funding account! Oh and they sent me an email stating that I had 45 days to bring the balance to positive or the account would be cancelled. LOL

July 15, 2009 8:33 AM
Indian said:

Alex Goldman, are you really that stupid to say database should have commonsense to handle it? It the application that need to handle it, it is a progamming/design error. If you design database to store a quardillion number then it will. Before you write understand what the problem and report it correctly. It is not the database that is lacking commonsense, it is you that is lacking commonsense.

July 15, 2009 2:39 PM
Warrigal said:

Both the database and the application behaved in a manner that allowed the problem to happen; either one could have prevented the problem by behaving differently. It's better to design the database assuming the application to fail than to do it otherwise.

July 15, 2009 7:18 PM
Wesley Chandler said:

has anyone given it any thought that people are accidentally typing in their card numbers and security codes

July 21, 2009 11:31 PM

Leave a comment