Bork!Bork!Bork! Today’s Christmas bork comes from London’s Victoria train station, just before the festive season got underway, and is an update to the old IT standby: “It isn’t DNS. It can’t be DNS… It was SSL.”
In this case, the victim is one of the digital advertising screens so beloved of public spaces these days. Rather than having a human paste up posters regularly, these things allow seamless content updates to delight passing travelers until, of course, the bork fairy pays a visit.
This example of the fairy’s evil work can be found at one of the station’s entrances and is both an example of an unhappy update and the infamous Progress Bar of Lies.
To our uneducated eye, the screen appears to be running a version of Android. The wheels have come off during an update, possibly due to an issue in an SSL library. The message also references BoringSSL, Google’s fork of OpenSSL tweaked for the ad slinger’s needs and “not intended for general use.”
A hopeful progress bar is visible, but all is not well within the signage. It’s probably not a touchscreen, so prodding the “Update Immediately” and “Browse Update File” buttons is unlikely to help.
With luck, a tired administrator will be notified that passengers are not being shown ads and will resolve the problem remotely. Or at least rotate the screen so that tired, emotional customers do not inadvertently topple over while trying to read the text.
Still, while a Progress Bar of Lies might be on display here, it’s a step up from what lies beyond, where Victoria train station has what can only be described as a Departure Board of Optimism. Here, SSL means something quite different – Signals, Staff shortages, and Leaves – in the canon of UK transportation bork. ®
