Yesterday morning (or what ever the time was around the time I woke up) I tried logging on to my web-bank. Not that I had any bank business like bills to pay, just to see if there was still money left in my account.
Instead of the usual log on screen I was greeted by a page explaining that the data center my bank is using has got a new security certificate, that needed to be accepted.
So far so good, I clicked to log on, got the dialog to accept the new certificate, accepted, and then the trouble started. The applet to choose my key, input user name etc. was not what meet my eyes.
So, after fiddling around a bit to see if it was a error on my end, I called the support hotline. After a short wait, I got through to some fellow and explained to him my problem. His response was that I was not the first person to report that problem today. So, that indicated that it was indeed not a problem on my end. His advice was for me to downgrade my java to 1.4.2. However when asked, he said that he would not directly pass on my problem to anyone ‘above him’. Maybe I just misunderstood him, but that seemed odd to me.
Anyway, although downgrading java on my Ubuntu Linux is not that hard, I decided to wait a bit and hope that someone somewhere would fix the problem. Later in the evening it all worked again…
I can only guess what happened and what was changed.