Posted on 07/28/2004 8:35:33 PM PDT by Smogger
Anyone who logged into their Microsoft Money file between Monday (8/26/2004) afternoon and Tuesday (8/27/2004) morning and logged out again has been locked out of their money file. They are going crazy on the newsgroups about this and people are calling the WSJ and ABC news and anyone else they can think of to resolve the problem.
I have already spent an entire day installing and uninstalling and restoring backups. Hopefully I haven't screwed up my money file because as it turns out there is nothing wrong with the file or the backups at all.
From Microsoft:
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Subject: Users locked out of their local Money file From: "Russ Paul-Jones" Sent: 7/28/2004 3:47:26 PM
Redmond, July 28, 2004, 15:45 PDT
Here at the Money team we are sorry that we have caused this problem, and we are working as quickly as possible to fix this unfortunate situation.
Let me take a moment to explain what the Money team is doing about this problem. First, let me assure you that none of your financial data has been lost, and none of your personal information has been compromised. In fact, the result of the situation has been that your information has been locked up more tightly.
Here is what happened, and an analogy to help explain it. On Monday, one type of our servers was updated and inadvertently pointed to the wrong location to verify authentication. The authentication process worked perfectly - we caused the problem by looking in the wrong server location. This mistake only affected Money services. (If you think of your login information as a key, and our servers as a lock, then we changed the lock on the safe, and the old key wouldn't work anymore. There is no way for the user [or anybody else] to create working login information. The good news is that nobody could open the local file because of this mistake at any time; your information is still protected.)
We corrected the "wrong server location" problem Tuesday morning, and users who did not login between late Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning should be able to use their files normally.
Those who were affected may continue to be affected, however, since Money downloaded some of the garbled information from our servers. (Basically, we made a copy of the lock on your local file. Why did we do this? Because when you change the lock yourself, you don't want the old key to continue working on your local file. You also wouldn't want there to be an easy way for somebody on your machine to ignore the change in the locks. Of course, we will look at this scenario to see if we could solve it without decreasing security in the future.)
The next step is to fix the locks for those of you who are affected. We are putting every effort into a solution to this problem, which we will deliver as soon as possible. We expect to be able to address every user that we affected. I'll use this newsgroup to keep you posted.
-Russ Paul-Jones MSN Money
Whoa. Fustercluck.
Trust me this will be breaking by tomorrow.
Call Nostradamus. You've got a whole months advance warning.
THIS is why I am not an advocate of keeping all your financial stuff ONLINE (if I'm understanding this correctly).....sure, have accounts at banks, brokerages, etc., but keep your own consolidated info to yourself.
Quicken.
Doesn't matter to me. I don't have any money anyway!
Pencil and Paper
heheh.. my bad 7/26 and 7/27.
YOUáll need to know who Bill Gates really is, and who he meets with regularly. I occasionally read the Portugal Paper in English...Gates visits Brussels, Belgium regularly for meetings. The largest computer system in world is there, and the USA does not own it. In fact, many of our global transmitions go through it. The nickname of the computer there is "the beast". Don't think for a minute that this lockout is an error. It is probably a trial run to see if what they want to do can be done!! He also attends the Bildebergers meetings of the richest, most powerful people on earth, and the only newscaster I know who is allowed in is Peter Jennings. Need I say more..
Is this real?... I wonder because the date of the article seems to be 2/28/04 and the article references 8/28/04
the Money team ?
What are you locked out of, your online bank?
It's like Quicken and Quickbooks.
If you are familiar with those. You can't access either. There is no way to. Period. The files are encrupted.
Unfortunately, I do not have any money to trouble me. The market got it all a few years back. I will sleep good tonight.
Egads. You must be using their servers. Scary.
The latest in the MS "Trusted Computing Initiative".
Ahhh, the beauty of ".net" and passport.
Even the pre-launch hype, years ago, made me cringe.
Fortunately they have not had the widespread adoption they expected!
Have a look at
http://www.linux.org/dist/
I like Slackware personally. (suits me fine :-)
Your mileage may vary.
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