HAVE YOU HEARD the latest telephone scare story? It goes like this: 鈥淚f
someone calls your cellphone and asks you to key in 90#, don鈥檛 do it because
they will then be able to take remote control of your phone and make
international calls at your expense.鈥�
Worried cellphone users who are told this think they can help by passing on
the warning to friends, calling radio phone-in programmes and posting messages
on the Internet. So more people get scared and warn more people. Feedback has
received the warning several times.
Don鈥檛 worry, though. All four of Britain鈥檚 networks, as well as BT and the
Telecoms UK Fraud Forum, assure Feedback that they have checked and their
engineers have been unable to find any risk.
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So is the story a hoax or just a mistake?
The engineers believe it all began with a legitimate warning about office
switchboards that give staff access to their phone line from outside the office.
Access relies on keying in a password and some users do not change these from
the factory settings. So any outsider who knows these can call an extension,
dial the standard password and steal phone time.
Somehow, this warning about a real problem got garbled into the 90# scare.
And this, in turn, could get more garbled still, as reader Dominic Gill
writes.
鈥淚t鈥檚 actually much more dangerous than that,鈥� he warns. 鈥淚f you dial #90
while talking on your mobile phone to another mobile phone user, that other
user鈥檚 head explodes. The Accident and Emergency Department of University
College Hospital have confirmed this to be true鈥攖hey get around half a
dozen cases of EVD (Explosive Virtual Decapitation) every day. Try it.鈥�
ONLY THE MOST up-to-date technology will do for the Australian Department of
Industry, Science and Resources. So the departmental conference room has been
fitted with motion sensors that switch the lights on when anyone enters the
room.
This is fine, so long as the meetings in the room are lively and interesting.
But one of Feedback鈥檚 colleagues recently attended a conference there that was
so crushingly boring that everyone present started to fall asleep. The lack of
significant movement persuaded the sensors that the room was empty, so the
lights dutifully switched themselves off, leaving the delegates literally in the
dark.
HERE IS an interesting prediction. If present trends continue, half of all
doctors in the US will soon be married to other doctors.
A report in Annals of Internal Medicine cites two reasons for this
increase in 鈥渄ouble-doctor鈥� households, or MD2s as they are inevitably called.
First, nearly half of all new doctors are female. Second, 鈥渢raditionally, half
of women doctors have married other doctors鈥�.
The authors surveyed 2200 doctors who graduated from medical school between
1980 and 1990. They discovered that 70 per cent of MD2 households earned over
$200 000 per year, compared with only 47 per cent of one-doctor
couples.
Sadly, however, these households are scarcely egalitarian: women in MD2
homes, compared with their husbands, work fewer hours, earn less money, and are
more often the main carers of their children.
THIS IS what Penguin Books felt it was important to tell the world with a
special press release it sent out after a 14-year-old girl approached Penguin
author Richard Dawkins as he left a public meeting recently.
鈥淲hat did she want? Did she want him to explicate a complex piece of
evolutionary biology? Enlarge upon a crucial aspect of Darwinian science? Um,
well, no actually鈥︹�橮rofessor Dawkins, we think you鈥檙e really cool,鈥� she
breathed. `And a dude.鈥� Warming to her theme, she went on: `And all of us at
Berkhamsted High School think you鈥檙e absolutely rocking!鈥�
鈥淣ot the response a scientist is used to getting, perhaps. Who says science
isn鈥檛 the new rock and roll?鈥�
Yuck. Pass the sick bag.
IT TURNS OUT that the Japanese/ English translation machine we featured on 20
February was, as we suspected, a spoof. But Philip Ronan writes to tell us he鈥檚
got a real Japanese/English translation software package called 鈥淧C-Transer/je鈥�,
made by Nova.
Following in the footsteps of our imaginary one, here鈥檚 what it came up with
when Ronan fed in the preface to its user manual: 鈥淭his time thank you very much
for purchasing Japanese and English machine translation system PC-Transer/je. In
a central book, fundamental operating instruction or command distinction
function of PC-Transer/je have explained each function carried by PC-Transer/je.
Please read a central book by all means in order to utilize PC-Transer/je fully
before it is used鈥︹��
And so on. Ronan says it鈥檚 quite reassuring to know that human translators
like himself are unlikely to be out of work for some time to come.
SOMETIMES a surprising amount of effort goes into the creation of
redundancy.
Novell systems retain information about the attributes of files stored on a
network computer system: the file name, its size and so on. Whoever built this
system devoted precious R&D time to creating one Novell file attribute
called 鈥淟ast Accessed Date鈥�.
This is updated instantaneously each time the file is accessed. But
unfortunately, this includes when you access it to check when it was last
accessed.
So every time you check the last access date of the file, all you are shown
is the date when you are doing the checking.
Useful, or what?