Another Glorious Failure of Technology

[billroper]

shsilver has one of the ISFiC credit card machines at his house so that he can process mail orders for ISFiC Press, a company whose books you should be buying so that Steven and gundo's houses don't sink into the swamp. Unfortunately, the credit card machine that Steven had in his possession wasn't behaving well (not dialing out correctly, waking up and trying to submit charges at 5 AM with loud modem noises, and other annoying activities or lack thereof), so Steven drove out to Crystal Lake or thereabouts to visit ramchip and pick up a different credit card machine to use.

Which promptly failed to dial out this morning. Steven called me after a fruitless session with the credit card processor's technical support department. I said (roughly), "Duh!" and passed the phone off to daisy_knotwise who said a slightly longer-winded version of "Duh!" (Ok, she was actually a lot better than that, but unfortunately had no ideas that easily translated themselves into action.)

Later in the morning, I realized that these machines had been working a few weeks ago at Windycon. This meant that there could only be three possible answers to the question, "What the heck is going wrong here?"

Both machines had broken. (Seemed unlikely.)

There was something wrong with the software load that was allowing swiped cards to work while mail-order transactions would fail. (Possible, but the machine that Steven had used to work and we hadn't updated the software.)

There was something wrong with Steven's phone line.

Now, I had been over at Steven's a few weeks before as we sorted out the ISFiC Press taxes and while I was later helping sort out some problems they were having with their new router, Steven mentioned that their phone lines were handled by Vonage. So I called Steven back and suggested that he swing by my place this afternoon as he made his rounds, bring the machines, and we'd try them from here on our AT&T service.

He did. Everything worked fine.

A quick round of Googling explained that the credit card machine has an analog modem which gets really, really picky when you drop a packet, an activity that Vonage will engage in with fair frequency. Ok, but the machine used to work from Steven's place, so...

Well, it worked from his place right up until his old Vonage equipment was ruined by water in his crawl space (along with the router, which is why I was fixing up the configuration on the new one). And the new Vonage equipment doesn't work at all with the credit card machine.

Just as well. Apparently, the credit card machine doesn't encrypt data on the phone line, which means that you don't want to use it on a VOIP line anyway, because it's much less secure than POTS.

And, as it turns out, now we can't.

*sigh*

(Yes, solutions exist. We're looking into them.)

Comments

[madfilkentist]

Did you really say "the credit card machine doesn't encrypt data"?

[billroper]

According to an entry I saw in a forum, that's the case for transmissions over POTS. It could be incorrect.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Um. Yay for getting the problem sorted out?

Boo for a credit card machine that doesn't encrypt.

[billroper]

Well, the problem isn't exactly sorted out, but we have a solution. :)

As I told Gary above, I don't know positively that the machine doesn't encrypt, but that's the info I saw online. Of course, the Internet is always correct...

[dave-ifversen.livejournal.com]

I really hate VOIP. ComCrap keeps trying to get me to sign up for their VOIP service - what the heck am I supposed to do when the cable goes out? (Which it does here several times a year, anywhere from a few minutes to a couple of days.) I keep telling them that I'm very happy with my Illinois Bell/Ameritech/AT&T service and have no desire to change.

Sounds like Steven needs to go back to a good old POTS land-line. Those will survive just about anything except a direct strike by a nuclear weapon (or a major fire in a central office, but even then it will continue to work until the wires finally melt).

[madfilkentist]

In October mine didn't survive a tree falling on the lines.

[jennlk]

Then again, neither would VOIP.

Based on the behaviour of the internet service, ours couldn't be counted on to stay up for more than 20 minutes into a power outage. The only thing that's killed our POTS in the last 15+ years is water or mice in the tombstone (all utilities in the subdivision are buried), and the big NE/MW power outage of 2003.

[dave-ifversen.livejournal.com]

We've been lucky so far - our utilities are buried (not that that's made any difference with the cable), and we've never had a POTS failure due to a physical problem (wind storm, contractor line-cut, etc.). Every time we've had a power outage (the longest was 6 days), the POTS keeps right on working without a hitch, while the cable goes out at the drop of a hat. (Yea for rooms full of batteries at the central office!)

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Square (https://squareup.com/).

[rono-60103.livejournal.com]

Our TiVo hasn't successfully dialed in since we left Bartlett, for the same reasons. This hasn't been helped by the lack of hard wire connections from the Vonage box to the TiVo, so we haven't really tried.

Other than that, we're pretty happy with our VoIP service - but I'm still thinking about changing to Ooma for the savings.