>It’s only recently that I’ve started accepting responsibility for that.

I can understand someone not wanting to work for, say, a firearm company if they didn't like what guns did. But what you're describing is more akin to someone in a steel mill feeling bad because some particular alloy they worked on was used in a pipe bomb. The connection is so tenuous as to be nonexistent.

I do hope you are speaking to a therapist about this.

(Completely serious, I see one regularly for my own reasons, and it's been a great help over the years. Yes, it frequently does take many tries before you find someone you click with. It's worth it.)

I mean, the product you worked on was part of the causal chain of this, but that's something entirely different than responsibility. You might be considered responsible if you could have known that this would happen, yet pushed on nonetheless. In this case, however, I cannot imagine you could even suspect something like this would happen.

Of course, with the power of hindsight, you wish you hadn't worked on it. But you didn't have that power when you were working on it.

Anyway, not sure if this helps - I know it's easy to feel guilty for things like this. I'm not a psychologist, and everybody confirming you weren't responsible probably isn't enough to convince you of that. If you do feel guilt, however, seeing a psychologist might be a good idea.

You know, if you ever want someone to chat about this with... a former product I was building wound up being used by a journalist who was held and killed by ISIS. It's something I still try to internalize to this day, and it's never really been easy. It's really surreal to go into a museum and stumble on a feature for it.

If you'd rather not discuss it, that's cool too.

You cant blame yourself for that. Would you blame a front camera inventor for the deaths of people taking selfies on the edge of a cliff and falling down?

I'd met one of those students, they went to my university.

Whoever signed off on the badly designed process is to blame. It should not have been possible for the card reader to verify a PIN. It could easily generate a code with a fake PIN, and leave the banking website to verify that.

It was already known that criminals would escort someone to an ATM when streaking their card, and demand the real PIN was given. This made it a lot easier.

How would this work for offline transactions? Cards need to be able to verify PINs offline and provide feedback to users & merchants, otherwise someone can type a wrong PIN at an offline terminal (on an airplane, etc) and get away with free stuff because the transaction isn’t valid.

Good point, but allowing a device given away for free to anyone with a bank account to test a PIN opens up a much bigger risk than limiting it to merchant terminals.

I think you're really overstating the difficulty of acquiring a merchant terminal, which are available at literally any shop or restaurant that accepts cards.

You know the EMV specification is open and anyone could write software to check a PIN using a standard smartcard reader (10$ on Amazon), right?

From the news you linked it seems that the attackers went to an ATM and it ate one of the cards for whatever reason.

> Both students must have provided their assailants with their pin numbers. However, one nearby cash machine retained Ferez's card. "So to take revenge for the fact that they had been unable to steal money from Mr Ferez," the court heard, "both men were murdered in a way that one can only describe as inhuman."

Seems a stretch to think you are responsible for that. But damn that is depressing news.

PINs have been universally used all over the world for 40+ years. You have seriously have nothing to do with this terrible event.

Not your fault mate.

how could that possibly make you even indirectly responsible for the crime? It says in the article that the attackers went to the ATM anyway and got mad that one of the cards got eaten by the machine. So they would have done that regardless if they had your product or not.