The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) means they need to have it sorted – and the credit card reader is an off-the-shelf unit that talks to the ticket machine, so it’s secured from that perspective. Also the current card readers date to 2015.

https://twitter.com/aussiewongm/status/682084611459973120

Looks like they are still using Windows CE, end of life 5 years ago. I hope those payment terminals are secured somehow.

This is just the top-up machines, not the other touch-on/off readers. Whatever software runs them is likely to be a lot simpler and may not even require a regular full and dedicated PC and OS, so it wouldn’t need to have daily reboots.

Also this is just a local reboot of the machines, it’s not like they would bring the entire system down daily for a reboot as the servers running it all would have it’s own redundancy systems.

But even if it the whole thing did to down, I still don’t see it just dropping any ongoing fares. If done right it should write to a log and not just keep it in memory as that would be horribly prone to data loss otherwise.

I’d have to try it out, but it seems like it might work that way – I’d assume a touch on at 2.59am would still lets you touch off within the next two hours as normal, but a second touch on would trigger a new ‘2-hour fare product’ to be created.

Pretty sure it’s just a standard overnight scheduled reboot. Most enterprise computers a scheduled to reboot once a day to stop system slowdowns and get any server side updates that might need loading.

What happens if you’re travelling when daylight savings starts and ends?

Good to see Hitachi still making a contribution to Victoria’s public transport!