Microsoft has had to take its ecommerce system, Passport, offline for 48 hours after a programmer in Seattle found a way to steal users' credit card numbers.
It's driven some to search Google through a Bulletin Board System-like interface or, in the case of programmer Peter Nitsch, it's compelled him to graft ASCII art onto the physical world.
It turned out that the programmer who had built the link between the front-end sales system and the back-end inventory system had somehow managed to duplicate a line of code.
And even the programmer concerned said that users of Microsoft's new Windows XP operating system, which is irrevocably integrated with Passport as a means of forcing it into the mainstream, would not have been affected.