I got a couple of love letters in the mail to day from the North Texas Tollway Authority. It seems I dared to use one of their roads which used to be free back in 2008 and now I owe them money. I have until the end of the month to pay up or be subject to a $250 fine plus court costs, tolls, and fines. Naturally I'm going to pay. Doesn't it seem odd that they had 15 months to send me a bill for the $1.71 and 65¢ tolls, but I only get 24 days to make my payment -- or else?

It's not like I can dispute the charge. I vaguely remember driving on that road that night. I specifically avoid that road nowadays. When I drove on the road I saw the signs warning me to pay the tolls or else but there are no toll booths. I remember thinking, oh no, I must have missed the toll booths -- all of them.

When I got home I tried to find a web site to gather more information. The number one hit on Google takes you to an Oracle App Server page (https://csc.ntta.org). Its convenient of them to display their administrative username right on the web site like that. It is a real help to hackers. It is also helpful to know exactly what release of the Oracle Application 10g Release 3 they are running: 10.1.3 with J2EE 1.4. Nice. I wonder if CSC is involved in this project. Actually CSC means Customer Service Center. But come on guys, put a redirect link or a static page in the root of your web server.

So I thought I had the right domain but the wrong host so I dropped the csc host part of the URL and went straight to https://ntta.org. I failed to notice the s in the protocol. This caused an invalid SSL certificate warning to pop-up. The certificate is for help.ntta.org. I click Ok on this error because now I'm just curious and it takes me to a familiar .NET Configuration Error page. Now we know what OS that machine is running, what version of .NET and even the path on their E drive to the CMS Web Application called cmswebapplication -- such an original name. For the uninitiated, there's a setting in .NET to prevent the user from seeing such an error message if this were actually a production system. Just for grins, I tried http://help.ntta.org and 404 Error. At least the certificate is valid. There actually is some valid content on that host. It only comes into play if you click on one of the links for Privacy Policy or Supported Web Browsers. Once again, no root web page.

Eventually I made it to http://ntta.org and found their web site. On the invoice I received in the mail it told me how much money I could have saved if I had a TollTag. Curious I wanted to see if I could get a TollTag and save some money. To tell the truth I actually got two invoices in the mail today. The other one was for my wife's car for committing the same infractions of driving to Lewisville. We've learned our lessons. So I am looking for a simple way to pay these fines and perhaps get my own transmitter beacon to aid the NTTA to more easily charge my credit card. From what I can tell there are three problems with my plan: 1) you cannot use a new TollTag to pay a past transgression 2) The TollTags are prepaid you hopefully you have an idea how much you are going to spend -- I'm not sure how long those prepaid credits last. And 3) The TollTags are not transferrable from vehicle to vehicle. So I would have to buy 2-3 of these.

Bottom line is it makes no sense for me to buy a TollTag. I have paid my debt to the private corporation that now controls the taxpayer-built State Highway. I do not plan to use that road again (unless there is traffic on every other road). And I would think really long and hard about doing any financial transactions on a web site configured so poorly. Then again, it would be easy to verify that the system versions were current.