Since when has nonce been a banking term?

[SunnyDays5678]

Sainsbury's Chop Chop app. First attempt to order today. WTAF??

It's a rather unfortunate term. It's basically a one-time passcode (Number used ONCE) but obviously has an alternative meaning in UK slang.

Lol. Neither my bank, the Sainsbury's helpline nor the ChopChop helpline knew that!

It's a cryptography term, means "Number used once". It's been around for decades at least, I learnt about it in uni 20 odd years ago.

Not sure which one came first. Apparently the cryptographic usage has been around since at least the 2nd World War, not sure on the sex offender one!

Edit: Looks like the cryptographic usage originates from a word used in the 12th Centrury!
https://soatok.blog/2021/06/11/on-the-word-nonce-in-cryptography-and-the-uk/

It's a coding term and likely showing in the app due to an error in their code. Usually, you'd have something coded along the lines of [nonce]=print("one time passcode"), but if they've missed a " or ( somewhere it will print nonce instead.

Seems daft to use a term that's familiar to coders and cryptographers but baffling to the rest of us.
Why not just say "one time password" instead of using a word that only has the UK slang meaning for most shoppers?

It's unlikely to be an error that's intended for customers to see. Generally the idea is to "handle" errors, so coders will take the error message that the program spits out, and then display a more user friendly error to the user.

But you don't always know what errors are going to crop up ahead of time, so it's hard to write code to handle it in advance. When this bug is fixed, they'll also likely add a bit of error handling code so that it displays a more user friendly error next time it occurs.

Thanks for explaining. Every day's a school day on MN 😄

Clinton Baptiste..I'm getting the word..Nonce.

That's a really helpful explanation. Thanks

I’d never come across this cryptographic use but of course Shakespeare uses phrases such as ‘for the nonce’. And I’ve just discovered the concept of a ‘nonce word’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonce_word

I had this pop up yesterday! It disappeared so quickly I thought I'd misread it!