Yet another reason to love the T

Now you have to check your credit-card statements to make sure you didn't get charged multiple times for a CharlieTicket you never got. John Daley concludes:

That is a huge public confidence issue.

Ed a-little-knowledge note: The Globe says:

T officials said they did not realize until the false transactions were made that the network had a limited capacity. They said that none of the data was compromised and that the problem had been fixed by isolating the financial data and building a firewall.

As somebody who works for a trade publication that covers computer networking, can I humbly say there's just all kinds of wrong with that paragraph?

A firewall won't stop the system from collapsing again at the next usage peak - all it does is help you secure the network (nice to know that the network wasn't secure before). Sounds like the T really needs better servers or routers or something - and who was it who failed to figure out just what sort of capacity the system would need? It's not like the T didn't have some rough idea already of A) How many riders it has and B) how much data your average credit-card tranaction involves. What the story seems to suggest is that nobody at the T thought about C) The fact that lots of people would try to buy monthly passes before the start of the new month. Failing to account for peak usage patterns? Priceless.

BadTransit's editor, who actually works in the field, details the issues in, um, more detail:

... Deputy General Manager for "modernization"? Good show! We need more modernization like this, Joe. Bring it on.

"Overloaded the system" is a data processing excuse that is as old as the hills. If the T's servers couldn't handle the load - or the network that the data is designed on is insufficient, why, Joe? Didn't anyone think to make certain your backbone is wide enough (and redundant) to handle much more than the system might ever produce? ...

Bonus bloggy goodness: The Globe reports it learned about the problem from readers. We learned about it last week from bloggers - yes, bloggers broke the story.