Why card payment in Germany stopped working last Tuesday | Hacker News Reader

Why card payment in Germany stopped working last Tuesday

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39 pointsjwildeboer16 comments

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Yet cash continued to work.

I was going to say - it’s Germany. They still use cash for everything anyway.

Infuriating, really.

It got better in the last years.

But, yes, in a small village, you will probably still need cash.

The strong (read as "any") culture of privacy after having one of the worst invasions of privacy and security take place in the country isn't an unreasonable response to me.

The reason cash is predominant in Germany is not privacy concerns but horrendous fees for every transaction for smaller shops like bakeries. So the small shops often enough don't offer card payment that you simply have to keep cash on you. I have never met anyone that payed in cash because they want the privacy it offers. Quite on the contrary: people regularly complain about having to pay in cash.

Add to that a lack of "customer service" mentality (i.e. I don't care if I have to send the customer to an ATM) and probably a healthy dose of tax evasion.

At least where I live almost all bakeries have added card payment as an option during the pandemic. So clearly it's financially feasible to at least some extent.

So did cards, AFAICT. I haven't noticed any disruption at all. Not sure how many shops I've visited in the past days, but zero of them had problems.

I presume that the model that broke isn't particularly common. If the installed numbers are very small, that would also explain how the manufacturer failed to notice the new sales after 2018.

I'm in the north, it's affecting a lot of supermarkets and restaurants here.

And today I ran into several shops that had the problem. Hadn't until today.

So if the update was released and available, why so many of these devices have not received it? Does the update require physical access for the „normal update path”?

Quote:

Now Verifone is working hard to get an update out but replacing such an important certificate is not a simple act of „install update“. I guess they simply didn’t expect this to happen after they announced EOL of this terminal. Oops.

Seems such an update will need some kind of manual intervention (as in a service technician physically interacting with the device) so it’s quite a nightmare from a logistical perspective.

So, yeah.

There was a later tweet clarifying that an update (presumably over-the-air) was released in 2021 but for some reason not all devices received it.

Quote:

Now it seems an update was available and has been rolled out end of 2021. But many H5000 did not get that update and now, as the certificate has expired, this update cannot be installed in the usual way.

So, yeah. I read that. It says that now it’s a nightmare. One tweet says that normal upgrade procedure was easier.

I’m asking what was it and why did it not work.

In my neighbourhood, the cinema and multiple supermarkets are still impacted: all using that exact same Verifone H5000 as expected.

It would be nice if certificates didn't arbitrarily expire based on date.

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