Mother of all contradictions:

Banks and security.


Rant incoming, consider yourself warned.

I recently configured and ordered a Lenovo Thinkpad w530 for my mom:

Core i7 blah blah blah
8GB of ram, expandable to 32GB
Nvidia Quadro K1000M 2GB video card
500GB in RAID 1
Windows 7 Pro
etc, etc.


Anyway, I ordered it with Windows 7 Pro for compatibility reasons and the fact that she hates Windows 8. So a bank that shall not be named sent her a new check scanner for her business. You go to the bank site, and it will scan in checks. With one little caveat:

1. It only works with IE. It gets better. Not with IE11. Not even with IE10. I had to downgrade her to IE9. So much for security updates...
2. It doesn't work with .NET 4.5.1. Nor with 4.5. It has to be 4.0 and no higher.

So how does a bank get away with claiming to be secure, but limit versions of software you can use, exposing you to more security threats??

Before anyone chimes in, yes, I verified with said bank that this is the only way to get it working.

 

I had something very similar with my bank for a while, where I had to use an old version of IE (although it would play with Firefox if I had an older version) in order to use online banking. And I had to disable my firewall and anti-virus when I accessed their website or it wouldn't work.

I had the exact same reaction. Their answer for me was they had to have it that way because they have to make their products accessible for everyone, even the idiots who don't update their software (which is free). It's kind of like the thing where even in business you have to write for a 7th grade reading level so everyone can understand it. At least with my bank, the IT guy I was talking to was equally frustrated about it. And they worked out a way that it no longer is that way. I've never used a check scanner, so I have no idea if that makes a difference or not.

 

The check scanner works fine in probably even Windows 8.1. However, in this case, they simply have a poor development process on their website. They are using a .NET dll with activeX that for some reason doesn't work with newer frameworks which leads me to believe they are using deprecated code.

There are better solutions out there that make it more compatible, with more machines and OSes.