Danske Bank – For those of us who likes being told what to do with our computers!

On Monday at roughly 11:10 AM, I came home from a weekend trip to London, England. I went to visit a friend of mine, whom I had, up until Friday last week, only spoken to over the Internet, never met in real life. Well, that’s no longer the case, and the trip was by far one of the best vacations (The first one in close to 8 years) I’ve ever had.

While in England, I used my VISA card quite a lot, so when I came home I wanted to use my bank’s (Danske Bank) online banking facilities to get an overview of all the transactions that had occurred while I was in England. But guess what! A few days before I went to England, Danske Bank decided to “improve” the security features of their online banking, and now it no longer works with my computers. Their online banking requires Java, and they specifically mention Sun’s Java. However, for me, the IcedTea JDK, which is shipped with Fedora 8 (The GNU/Linux distribution that I use) had been working really nicely until they made their little “improvement”, in fact it was working better (The fonts and Java GUI stuff, looked better!) than Sun’s non-free proprietary Java platform, but with this bullshit “improvement” of theirs, it does not work at all. And in addition to that, which in the first place pissed me off, they also check what version of Java you use and start bitching if you don’t use Sun’s Java. That really upset me, because I pay them for a service, and they fucking dare telling me what I can and cannot use!!! That’s just utterly retarded, and is intolerable. Yesterday I sent them an email, wherein I acknowledged that the Java I use is not a “official Sun Java”, but made the point that it was working fine before, in fact better than Sun’s Java, and that their “improvement” (Sarcasm!) was a huge regression for me. After that they changed their stuff a little, so that it’s possible to bypass that stupid-ass Java “check” of theirs, which was actually forcing everybody to use Sun’s Java to use the online banking. This is, in my opinion, vendor lock-in, in other words, Microsoft’s specialty, which I cannot tolerate being subjected to.
My argument is not that they should test their system with every implementation of Java in the world, but if something works well, but they make a change and break it for me, that is just bullshit! This is the kind of shit some retarded, moronic fool with an MSCE certificate would do! Luckily I am not using GNU/Linux on PowerPC as my primary platform, because if that had been the case, I would have been completely stuck, as Sun’s Java platform is not technically available for GNU/Linux on PowerPC, and GNU Classpath would have been rejected by Danske Bank’s Java “check”. I use a standard x86 PC, so in theory I could install Sun’s proprietary Java, but why should I have to? The license conditions are not acceptable to me, IcedTea is included and integrated, in and by my distribution, and for fuck’s sake it was working fine before the idiots at Danske Bank “improved” their system. Ugh! Frustrating!!!

I can see that I am not the only one who has had trouble with Danske Bank’s retarded “improvement”:
http://home.coming.dk/index.php/2008/02/07/p774
http://home.coming.dk/index.php/2008/02/13/p776

So hopefully these morons will fix their shit! They have a few more days, and then I’m switching to a better bank, because this is just intolerable and extremely absurd!