• JoLoCo (unregistered)

    TRWTF is the number of people who don't have the slightest clue how to dial internationally. (Though there's quite a good number of people here in London who aren't even sure how to dial locally!)

    Also, the phone system probably wasn't at fault, as people have pointed out that India's country code is 91. So the fax probably dialled 9 (which got an outside line) then 91 (for India) then the Indian local number must have started with a 1 also.

    They probably just blamed it on the phone system rather than their stupid FaxBack software!

  • (cs) in reply to Rootbeer
    Rootbeer:
    Wolfan:
    Surprisingly this didn't end in someone getting charged with a felony; which is what it is when you call 911 falsely (at least in the US)

    There's no criminal liability without mens rea, which an idiotic faxing script designed by an idiot cannot be said to have.

    I don't know if felony is right or not, but it seems to me there can be a legal penalty without criminal intent.

    For example, there is a fine for a security system that generates a large number of false positives. Another example would be a speeding ticket.

    I have no idea if calling 911 is a strict liability crime, civil violation, or what- But I suspect if they can fine security systems that call 911 inappropriately in that jurisdiction, they can fine the fax machine. (Or rather, the company that owns the fax machine, as the fax machine is unlikely to pay the fine)

  • OMG_PONIES!!! (unregistered) in reply to hello
    hello:
    Dialing 911 when calling India is fairly common. I believe 9 signifies an international call and 11 is India's country code.

    the real WTF

  • monkeyPushButton (unregistered) in reply to Hello caller, you're on the fax
    Hello caller:
    iSucker:
    For some reason, I expected for two fax machines to get into an infinite loop of FaxBacks leading to death, destruction and twitter outages.
    Had this happen. User wanted their email forward to their home account. Someone sent them an attachment, their home account refused it as to large and replied WITH the attachment to the work email, which saw the incoming email, forward it, with the original attachment still there to the home account, which again refused it since was obviously still to large, etc.

    Only time I've seen an ISP refuse an email with attachment and reply with the attachment still attached.

    Had something similar at the last place I worked. Had a salesman in our home office go on vacation and forward his emails to his home account (we had no web access to the email system). His home account was full so it replied as such which got forwarded ad nauseum. Worst part was it took our tech guys two days to find it which killed our system the whole time.

    Of course, since our plant's IT guy was someone's brother-in-law who "knew about computers" that was called when there was a problem, I assume the home office IT staff was equally as professional.

  • Spivonious (unregistered) in reply to silent d
    silent d:
    The obvious solution here is a phone keypad that goes to 11.

    Why don't you just make the dial tone louder?

  • r2k (unregistered)

    Am i the only one who thought this was going to end differently? (With an infinite loop of fax-faxBack-FaxBackBack... over some kind of an error-prone line)

  • NM (unregistered)

    India's international dialing code is "91", not "11", I call BS.

  • Packetslave (unregistered)

    Um, India's international country code is 91, not 11.

  • John Preston (unregistered) in reply to Spivonious

    I'll sell you a phone keypad that goes to 12.

    Who uses a fax? This story needs to be 15 years old, or it's another layer of fail. At least the programmers claim to have argued against the stupid FaxBack idea in the first place. Too bad they never had an international use test case.

  • Irina (unregistered)

    What happens when two faxes equipped with FaxBack come into contact with each other? Do they explode in a blast of antimatter?

  • Axe (unregistered) in reply to Lorne Kates
    Lorne Kates:
    Timothy Baldridge:
    But on the other hand, are you going to remember to dial 9911 when there's someone dieing on the floor next to you?

    Dialing 9911 won't get you the emergency services. So remember the new number.

    0118 999 881 999 119 725... 3

    I'v just snotted coffee out of my nose I laughed so hard! well done..... :)))))

  • mypalmike (unregistered)

    This is why phone systems should always be set up so that you dial 8 for an outside line.

  • (cs) in reply to Timothy Baldridge
    Timothy Baldridge:
    everythingdaniel:
    Wait, so dial '9' to get out, so the outside world only sees '11'? Or the internal phone system recognizes 911 internally and forwards it? Makes no sense to me...

    But on the other hand, are you going to remember to dial 9911 when there's someone dieing on the floor next to you?

    After one phone system change where I worked, blaze-orange stickers appeared on all the phones saying "YOU MUST DIAL 9-911 FOR EMERGENCY CALLS".

    (Now Akismet is flagging comments making fun of the comment errors as spam? Real genitus there. 4 errors so far.)

  • Bobble (unregistered) in reply to Wolfan
    Wolfan:
    I would think that both would work, No?

    Surprisingly this didn't end in someone getting charged with a felony; which is what it is when you call 911 falsely (at least in the US), and not surprisingly it took 3 times for the cops to stay around until they found out why the 911 call.

    Some of these WTFs are getting to seem like someone is just writing them and not real stories, losing some of their oomph.

    Calm down, drama queen. This is not surprising at all. The cops came out three times because they need to investigate 911 calls, not because they are looking to arrest people for 911 abuse. On the third time out they probably requested that the company figure out what is going on so they didn't have to waste their time on another false alarm.

    Simple mistakes and technical glitches don't result in felony arrests. Anyone who has accidentally dialed 911 knows this.

  • Philip Sandifer (unregistered)

    So the WTF isn't so much the unnecessary and ill-advised FaxBack feature, but rather the fact that the phone system was designed to make calling New Delhi impossible?

  • Peter File (unregistered) in reply to Lorne Kates
    Timothy Baldridge:

    Dialing 9911 won't get you the emergency services. So remember the new number.

    0118 999 881 999 119 725... 3

    or just send an email to the emergency services.

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to nick
    nick:
    Surely TRWTF is that the emergency operator didn't realise that it was a fax machine calling?

    I doubt that it would matter. I think they are obliged to respond either way. What if the fax machine was the only phone somebody in trouble could get to?

  • (cs) in reply to cdosrun
    cdosrun:
    I don't know if felony is right or not, but it seems to me there can be a legal penalty without criminal intent.

    [...]

    I have no idea if calling 911 is a strict liability crime, civil violation, or what...

    "Liability" applies in civil cases (and can be apportioned between multiple parties). In a criminal cases you're guilty or not guilty. Crimes require intent as previously noted, but many criminal offenses have corresponding civil complaints that can also be pursued when mens rea is absent but an affirmative duty exists and was neglected.

    Having said all that, I don't know if there are civil penalties for dialing 911 frivolously (maybe to recoup the cost of repeated police dispatches, but probably not for the actual dialing).

  • Marc B (unregistered)

    Ha! Everyone knows the real number to call for emergencies is 912.

  • Magin (unregistered) in reply to NM
    NM:
    India's international dialing code is "91", not "11", I call BS.

    Maybe it happened in Spain, police number is 091 and the usual key for outside call is 0. Transalting the article to USA phone system is the TWTF

  • (cs) in reply to ReverendJ1

    Four!

    No, Five!

    No, Fire!

    Now I'm going to have that jingle stuck in my head all day.

  • Bob (unregistered) in reply to Lorne Kates

    Nice IT Crowd reference.

  • Doug (unregistered)

    I worked at the computing center at college. We were told about one particular oddity about our phone system.

    As in other systems, a prefix of 9 was required, so 9-9-1-1 was the "correct" method of reaching 911. But our system was special-cased to accept 9-1-1 as well. That much is normal.

    But in our case, it also had the special case of 9-1-disconnect, in which case it will assume you wanted to dial 9-1-1 but got murdered in the meantime. Or something like that.

    Apparently the staff would start to dial a long distance number and hang up before finishing. Yeah, that went well.

  • Syntax (unregistered) in reply to frits

    As long as you're not in the UK ;) (999 is emergencies)

  • (cs) in reply to Anon
    Anon:
    I think they are obliged to respond either way. What if the fax machine was the only phone somebody in trouble could get to?

    Recently at a party we ran into an interesting take on this. My 17-month-old daughter was playing with a friend's BlackBerry, and the friend locked it so she couldn't make phone calls accidentally. I remember warning her "If there's a way to do anything with that phone while it's locked, Alex will find it."

    Later she noticed she had a missed call and a voicemail from a number she didn't recognize. I Googled it and it turned out to be the State Police barracks. Apparently this model of BlackBerry has a feature where even while it's locked, you can still get to a menu that will dial 911, but of course my daughter wasn't responsive to whoever or whatever answered the phone. So the State Police called back and left a voicemail saying "If there's an emergency, please call us back."

    I assume they know about these phones and when they saw (presumably yet another) cell call with no one on the line and no obvious indicators of an emergency, they made the correct assumption, but it still makes one wonder.

  • Homer J (unregistered) in reply to Lorne Kates

    Well played sir!

  • (cs) in reply to Kensey
    Kensey:
    Timothy Baldridge:
    everythingdaniel:
    Wait, so dial '9' to get out, so the outside world only sees '11'? Or the internal phone system recognizes 911 internally and forwards it? Makes no sense to me...

    But on the other hand, are you going to remember to dial 9911 when there's someone dieing on the floor next to you?

    After one phone system change where I worked, blaze-orange stickers appeared on all the phones saying "YOU MUST DIAL 9-911 FOR EMERGENCY CALLS".

    (Now Akismet is flagging comments making fun of the comment errors as spam? Real genitus there. 4 errors so far.)

    Don't F- with Akismet, or you'll be blackballed.

  • Fnord (unregistered)

    I wonder what would happen if both sides of a call were using FaxBack. Could they get into a nice infinite loop on an unreliable connection?

  • Erik (unregistered) in reply to Bobble
    Bobble:
    Simple mistakes and technical glitches don't result in felony arrests. Anyone who has accidentally dialed 911 knows this.

    True. I once accidentally called 911 from a hotel room because my finger had a spasm at just the wrong moment and dialed 911 instead of 91. I panicked and hung up, and 5 minutes later the manager of the hotel knocks on my door and asks if I'm okay, and requests that I please don't do that again.

    Of course, the real WTF in that story is using a hotel phone for long distance, but this was before cell phones were ubiquitous.

  • Lee (unregistered)

    India's country code is 91, not 11. That is all.

  • Bollogg's Crispies (unregistered) in reply to Tom Woolf
    Tom Woolf:
    Ian:
    So what if the fax failed at sending the error report, so it sent an error report, which then failed, so it sent another report, which then failed, so it sent another report...

    A coworker had a similar situation with email that almost took our servers down. She left town with an automated "I'm not in the office" reply set up. She also received daily emails from an online coupon company. Her "I'm not in the office" was responded to with "Do not reply to this email address, it is not monitored", which in turn received the "I'm not in the office"...

    9,000 sent and 9,000 received emails later, her email account was shut off.

    Shortly thereafter, we upgraded to an email system that recognized when it had already responded with one "out of office" email and did not send a 2nd (or 3rd, or 9,000th).

    I'll one-up on this one. Back in the university, around '95, every CS student had a *nix account both on the CS lab (.cs) and the computer center (.cc) like every non-cs student. The *nixes had procmail installed, as well. Now, some bright mind set up a system that forwarded all emails from .cs to .cc and vice versa. That in itself was hardly catastrophic. Now, the bright mind left - for a summer vacation, or internship to get the work experience credit, no idea what - and added a procmail rule to auto-reply to all emails with an 'I'm not available' message.

    The first email he received after setting up this system set off the mailbomb.

    Two out-of-disk-quota-crashed university mail servers later, his email accounts were locked and soon after the mail server software was updated to a version which had quota limits for each user.

  • It Happens (unregistered)

    I lived in India for a year and a half. My mom (in the United States) experienced the same thing when she tried to call me. Some officers showed up at her house and wanted to take a look around, just to make sure no evil criminal was hiding in her closet.

    Ironically, a similar incident happened to me while I was in India. My office manager was dialing McDonald's in India (because McDonald's does delivery there), and he mis-dialed. The code for NOIDA was 0120, and he managed to type 120 ... that's the emergency line to the police station. Fortunately the police didn't show up, we probably would have had to pay them a bribe.

  • (cs)

    The real WTF is that for quite a few years the fax protocol has a per-page confirmation and resend features (this is a reason it holds the page it just scanned in the rollers for a while). It doesn't require any stupid faxbacks.

  • indian (unregistered)

    but India's international country code is 91 and new delhi's region code is 11, so even if the fax machine was dialing new delhi it should have dialled 9-91-11...

  • (cs) in reply to toth
    toth:
    Isn't this analogous to "log a 'Cannot connect to database' error to the database exception log"?
    I worked on a system that did this prior to the rollback. :-)
  • Anonymoose (unregistered)

    It is not a FLAW with the phone system it's a feature.

    When we installed our new phone switches, I had to get special approval from the local 911 dispatch office to perform a test of the 911 vs 9911 feature.

  • (cs) in reply to John Preston
    John Preston:
    I'll sell you a phone keypad that goes to 12.

    Who uses a fax? This story needs to be 15 years old, or it's another layer of fail. At least the programmers claim to have argued against the stupid FaxBack idea in the first place. Too bad they never had an international use test case.

    Although I am not a lawyer, I am guessing that lawyers still make significant use of fax machines. Do I need to explain why?

  • Bob (unregistered) in reply to thatsodd
    thatsodd:
    That is a little odd. International access requires dialing 011 first, then the country code is 91 for India, then area codes etc. So the fax back should have been 9-011-91....

    This story doesn't add up...just like the quoted user posted, the international code is 011, not 11.

  • Charles400 (unregistered)

    Dial 42. It's the answer to life, the universe, and everything.

    In case of emergency, don't panic.

  • Anon (unregistered)

    Has anybody mentioned that the country code for India is 91 not 11 yet? Also, has anybody speculated on what would happen if two fax machines with faxback faxed each other and got caught in an infinite loop?

  • Usher (unregistered) in reply to Tom Woolf
    Tom Woolf:
    Ian:
    So what if the fax failed at sending the error report, so it sent an error report, which then failed, so it sent another report, which then failed, so it sent another report...

    A coworker had a similar situation with email that almost took our servers down. She left town with an automated "I'm not in the office" reply set up. She also received daily emails from an online coupon company. Her "I'm not in the office" was responded to with "Do not reply to this email address, it is not monitored", which in turn received the "I'm not in the office"...

    9,000 sent and 9,000 received emails later, her email account was shut off.

    Shortly thereafter, we upgraded to an email system that recognized when it had already responded with one "out of office" email and did not send a 2nd (or 3rd, or 9,000th).

    MS Exchange will only send an out-of-office once per day to each sender.

  • Daniel Faraday (unregistered) in reply to Jimmy McJimbo

    [quote user="Jimmy McJimbo"]If 2 faxback machines try to talk to each other over an erroneous line, a whole tree could be destroyed. Also a timewarp could be created, sending us back to 1972.

    [quote]

    Clearly you'd have to throw the fax machines down a hole along with a nuclear bomb to fix this.

  • farthead (unregistered) in reply to Lorne Kates

    phone system passing through 911 is normal. I guess the software writers should know more about phone lines and phone systems.

    This is a programmer WTF, the phone system was configured properly.

    My WTF is why is the fax incoming line on the phone system?

  • (cs) in reply to Kensey
    Kensey:
    cdosrun:
    I don't know if felony is right or not, but it seems to me there can be a legal penalty without criminal intent.

    [...]

    I have no idea if calling 911 is a strict liability crime, civil violation, or what...

    "Liability" applies in civil cases (and can be apportioned between multiple parties). In a criminal cases you're guilty or not guilty. Crimes require intent as previously noted, but many criminal offenses have corresponding civil complaints that can also be pursued when mens rea is absent but an affirmative duty exists and was neglected.

    Having said all that, I don't know if there are civil penalties for dialing 911 frivolously (maybe to recoup the cost of repeated police dispatches, but probably not for the actual dialing).

    I'm not a lawyer or anything, but the term "strict liability" is a term I picked up from traffic offenses- Specifically, why lack of knowledge or criminal intent isn't a defense for speed or other traffic citations.

    It's my understanding that the term "strict liability" applies to criminal cases where mens rea does not need to be proven. Another such case might be involuntary manslaughter- No criminal intent exists, but you killed someone through recklessness or negligence.

  • (cs)

    When I was in college, the phone system would route any dialing that contained the sequence "911" to the security office. So a call to 819-1153 would not go to your intended recipient, it would go to the security office. I had a friend who I could not call from my dorm room because of this.

  • legal weasel (unregistered) in reply to Kensey
    Kensey:
    Recently at a party we ran into an interesting take on this. My 17-month-old daughter was playing with a friend's BlackBerry, and the friend locked it so she couldn't make phone calls accidentally. I remember warning her "If there's a way to do anything with that phone while it's locked, Alex will find it."

    Later she noticed she had a missed call and a voicemail from a number she didn't recognize. I Googled it and it turned out to be the State Police barracks. Apparently this model of BlackBerry has a feature where even while it's locked, you can still get to a menu that will dial 911, but of course my daughter wasn't responsive to whoever or whatever answered the phone. So the State Police called back and left a voicemail saying "If there's an emergency, please call us back."

    I assume they know about these phones and when they saw (presumably yet another) cell call with no one on the line and no obvious indicators of an emergency, they made the correct assumption, but it still makes one wonder.

    I was kind of a douche as a kid - before there were (common) cellphones there were payphones, and the same applies there [and as your story goes, it wasn't less prank-calling than simply 'wow, you can make the phone do something without putting a quarter in!']. All cellphones sold in the US are supposed to process and put through a call to 911 as long as there's service - hence all the charities that will accept old phones to hand out for emergency use - though I still see signs posted in some localities suggesting the 'real' number to call for emergency use - some of that must be a holdover from the bad old AMPS days and some because the routing for 911 is spotty and will generally get you the state police (who'll have to forward it back out to the local authorities).

    I'm not sure where penalties kick in with live calls and annoying kids - the police don't like doing paperwork, so they're only going to file charges if they're sufficiently annoyed/inconvenienced - but a lot of places seem to have a civil fine for too many false alarms (more than 3 within 30 days?) from an automated system - presumably the fax SNAFU would qualify, and that probably arrives in the form of a ticket or something equivalent.

  • (cs)
    As far as technologies go, faxing is ancient. It predates the telephone by over a decade and, despite vast advances in scanning and email technology, the fax still remains a standard form of communication.
    Holy mother of god, this sort of braindead "It's old, therefore it sucks!" attitude pisses me off. It's especially egregious here, where the author strongly implies that fax technology has remained unchanged since the pre-telephone days, which is a flat-out lie.
  • Paul (unregistered) in reply to Bob

    I'm an IT guy that fixes computers at all kinds of random places. And I can attest that ALL law offices have an old fax machine. And they ALL hate software based solutions that run on a filesystem.

    decet

  • HUH (unregistered) in reply to Lorne Kates

    [quote user="Lorne Kates"][quote user="Timothy Baldridge"] But on the other hand, are you going to remember to dial 9911 when there's someone dieing on the floor next to you?[/quote]

    But on the other hand, are you going to remember to dial 9911 when there's someone dying on the floor next to you?

    FTFY

    CAPTCHA - paratus - machine going through patent process

  • informatimago (unregistered) in reply to Lorne Kates

    Incredible, I DO remember it (as you did, as we can see)! :-)

    But since they're calling from USA, wouldn't they have to dial:

    944 118 999 881 999 119 725... 3 ?

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