• aristos_achaion (unregistered) in reply to Mayhem

    Hmm...two such machines could get trapped in the Byzantine Generals' Problem. Except with more wated paper.

  • David (unregistered)

    I thought this would be about the fax machine sending an error back, to then receive an error from the original, and so on until someone noticed...

  • (cs) in reply to Sanderman
    Sanderman:
    This whole thing could have been avoided by using 0 as the dial-out digit. What emergency number starts with a 0? None.

    I didn't even know other people used other digits for dialing out. No wonder it's confusing.

    We used to have a 0611 emergency number in Dutchland, but it was replaced by 112 in 1997.

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to Mayhem
    Mayhem:
    Bob:
    In the UK (where 999 is the "official" relevant number) only the first two digits are generally required.

    This has two advantages:

    • When in an internal system 999 is still enough to get to the emergency services.
    • With old rotary dial phones 99 starts the connection, the third 9 keeps you busy, so that by the time you finish dialling the operator is already there.

    Interesting. The tale I heard from a telecom engineer was that 999 was chosen so that it would have to be a deliberate effort for someone to ring, since the numbers went 9 > 1,0 and to register a 9 you had to rotate the full dial as opposed to a small flick that could be accidental. 111 was chosen for use in New Zealand for the same reason except that their dials were numbered the other way from 1 > 9,0. In both cases 0 was the shortest possible rotation on the dial as it got you the operator.
    How the americans ended up with 911 I have no idea.

    Are you suggested that phone rotate in the opposite direction in the southern hemisphere?

  • Tom (unregistered) in reply to Lorne Kates

    Fascinating Roy, fascinating.

  • Fedaykin (unregistered)

    911 should be a special case in all telecom systems.

    It's also why choosing 9 as the digit to get an outside line is the real WTF of this story.

  • Trex (unregistered) in reply to frits

    Fact: The country code for India is 91.

    This.

  • somedude (unregistered)

    98675309

  • Christopher (unregistered) in reply to Usher
    Usher:
    Tom Woolf:
    Ian:
    ...

    ...

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

    Not in my last office it didn't... well something went wrong because when one of our team managers went on vacation his inbox ended up in some kind of infinite mail loop. He received an e-mail sent to the general mailing list, and his out-of-office mailer would reply to the general mailing list that he was out of office, which went to his inbox where he once again replied to the list with his out-of-office reply... ad infinitum.

    At least that's how I remember it. Basically you log in and you see 100+ and counting new e-mails from "Frank Bishop". This was several year ago now.

  • Worf (unregistered) in reply to Hatterson
    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.

    Actually, one should, after changing phone numbers/phone systems/etc, call 911 to ensure that your address pops up correctly.

    When the 911 operator comes on the line, say you are conducting a test to ensure that 911 works properly, and that you'll hold for priority calls. The operator will usually put you on hold to handle other calls first. Then when they're freed up, they'll get back to you and verify all your call details - the reported address, phone number, etc.

    Otherwise, there'll be no way to ensure that 911 calls bring up the right information.

    It's perfectly legal and the operators won't mind as long as you state that you're doing a test so they can lower the priority of your call.

  • Shea (unregistered) in reply to Lorne Kates

    Regarding the phone system set up - in some states this is a legal requirement. You must create a special case for "911" because it's the law. In places where it is not the law, a company is opened up to legal liability the first time someone has a heart attack and the person calling the ambulance is not able to get through with "911".

    Even if they then think to dial "9911" - time is lost.

  • Serrif (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.

    captcha: bene - theer done that.

    Sorry about that! (Who would ever send me a 60 MB word document, though!?)

  • you sit-ass (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    Sanderman:
    This whole thing could have been avoided by using 0 as the dial-out digit. What emergency number starts with a 0? None.
    Totally incorrect. Autralia uses 000 for all their emergency services. Want to know who else uses 0 as the first digit of their emergency numbers? Here's an incomplete list:

    Azerbaijan Belarus Christmas Island Cocos Islands Egypt Georgia Kazakhstan Latvia (sort of) Lithuania (sort of) Norfolk Islands Tasmania

    ... I could go on but I'm sure you get the point.

    Wikipedia disagrees.

    Oh, yes. Yet again I am an evil spammer.

  • Some1Somewhere (unregistered) in reply to Peter File
    Peter File:
    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.

    not Email - U gotta Fax 'em. That way you'll be sure you know if they got it !!!

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to frits
    frits:
    Fact: The country code for India is 91.

    If there is a flaw here, it's with the PBX. The rest of the story is just fluff.

    Yes - country code for India is 91, and the city code for the capital (New Delhi) is 11. What likely happened here is that the Fax machine got 11-local_phone_number as the Sender Phone number, instead of (+91)-11-local_phone_number.

  • Quirkafleeg (unregistered) in reply to Phone guy
    Phone guy:
    Quirkafleeg:
    Phone guy:
    3) It's not using caller-id. You have to pay extra to get your phone system to work with caller id. It's extra cost,
    Not always. BT, for example, will provide that for nothing if you tell them to register your number with the TPS (Telephone Preference Service, intended for those who don't want unsolicited sales/marketing calls).
    OK, I'll make it easy: find one (1) just one, one only, phone system, key system, digital system, PABX, PBX, that provides caller-id to the stations using BT TPS.
    ”BT TPS”? You need to read this.
    Quirkafleeg:
    and probably requires ISDN.
    Seems unlikely; as pointed out elsewhere, DTMF is sufficient (and I've observed a delay before the number is shown which seems to correspond to use of DTMF).
    Seems unlikely only if you've never bought phone systems.
    Looks like CCITT V23 is used here.
    Quirkafleeg:
    5) The fax handshaking use the number the sender provides. In this case, 91 11 xxxxx. that is, India, Delhi.
    It therefore makes sense to configure that fax machine to report the number in international form, so long as the local telcos properly handle intra-principality/territory/country/state calls made with the international prefix.
    ...only makes sense if you've never tried to implement it. That is the international form, and it caused a call to 911. Which is where I came in...
    Prefixed properly (‘+’ is ideal, being the standard representation of the local internationall-call prefix), and of course the receiving software would need to know how to handle that. There may be technicalities which prevent this, of course…

    In this particular case, the number evidently wasn't prefixed (couldn't be?), or the prefix was ignored.

  • nitpicky (unregistered)

    Small correction: india's international dialling code is +91

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to Lorne Kates

    @Timothy Baldridge

    Epic. Obscure reference for the win.

  • Anynomous Coward (unregistered)

    Wait... I'm confused... the business analyst is stupid because he made a programming mistake? Oh he didn't program it? But the person making the mistake is the stupid one right?

  • oheso (unregistered) in reply to thatsodd
    thatsodd:
    International access requires dialing 011 first

    From the US, dude.

  • oheso (unregistered) in reply to Anon
    Anon:
    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?

    Nope. The field is yours.

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

    This comment should be in blue.

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

    This comment should be in blue.

  • Quirkafleeg (unregistered) in reply to Melnorme
    Melnorme:
    This comment should be in blue.
    There you go.
  • Dontesnot (unregistered) in reply to silent d

    I'm a bit confused how this worked, since India's ISD code is +91 not +11...

  • Srikar C (unregistered)

    I thought the Faxback dialed 91-11-xxx (country code + city code for New Delhi), which the PBX took in as 911.. the special rules might have made it to ignore the third 'one' in the number!!

    Did you try Facback on some other Indian city? Like Jullunder (91-181) or Jaipur (91-141) ? It should give the same error!!

  • Someone too lazy to login and at work (unregistered) in reply to everythingdaniel
    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...

    The phone system sees 911 and assumes you meant 9911.

  • (cs)

    The real WTF here is that they used 9 for dialing outside numbers. Why not use 0 like most companies. That would also avoid clashing with 911 as an added bonus.

  • NiceWTF (unregistered)

    What if two companies both have fax machines of this type, and sending back the "sending your fax failed" message itself fails?

    Hello physical version of mail forwarding loops, I guess...this is a terrible idea at so many more levels than currently explained in the article.

  • random anonymous poster (unregistered)

    In the UK, 999 is the emergency number and 9 is the prefix for an outside line. So you can pick up any (fixed-line) phone, dial 9999, and you're speaking to the emergency operator. If you didn't need the outside line prefix, then the last 9 is ignored.

    (I have no idea how GSM handles a 9999 call, and don't want to find out).

  • Annon (unregistered) in reply to Mayhem
    Mayhem:
    Interestingly it says Sweden used 1 click for the 0 and 10 for the 9. I wonder what their emergency number was before Europe standardised on 112. 888 maybe?
    In Sweden the emergency number was 90000 before we got 112.

    Try #3.

  • Trapa (unregistered) in reply to Lorne Kates

    WIN!

  • (cs) in reply to Joey
    Joey:
    Thats "special case" is actually pretty std on most telcom systems.

    However the logic is usualy a little deeper.

    You want to catch the 911 dialed by someone in a panic situation who reaches and grabs ..

    So the telcom /pbx / whatever should only treat it as a special case if the second digit, the 1 in this case ,is heard before the release of dial tone ( the change in tone from internal to 'real dial tone'

    <rant>I just don't dig the whole "dial 9 for outside line" thing. It's kinda ancient, and the concept of 'real dial tone' doesn't exist on many popular digital trunks.

    The dial tone concept really applies to old last mile circuits.

    The "dial 9 for outside line" is really, really silly IMHO. From day 1 I've had our Asterisk set up so that you dial all numbers directly. Extensions (3 and 4 digits long) are looked up in a list of allocated extensions. Everything that is not an extension goes to an outside line, including 911 and whatnot. If you want to make sure that a number is not treated like an extension, you can prefix it with *9. This is only useful for testing, as there are no local short numbers that overlap our extensions, and noone has ever had to use that trick.

    I've added special case for a 911 call placed when there are no free trunks. The first channel not carrying a 911 call is disconnected, and the connection is placed using that trunk.

    We've first had T1 DID wink trunks going into a Digium card, processed by Asterisk. Those trunks had no dialtone, you initiated the connection by flipping the LSB of the always-on audio channel just so (a.k.a robbed bit signaling) and immediately sent the digits of the dialed number using fast DTMF. Incoming calls were signaled using robbed bits too, and as soon as you opened up your end of the channel, the external switch would send, via DTMF, something like xxxyyy*, where xxx is the 10 digit called number, and yyy is the calling number. As soon as that was sent, Asterisk would wink (indicate onhook state for a short bit), and that would establish the connection and open up the audio to both parties -- the initial DTMF exchange was not audible to the caller, who stil heard the ring tone.

    Same goes for the ISDN trunks we currently have. The dialed number is sent in a packet over the auxiliary channel (D channel), and audio packets start flowing only after the connection has been set up.

    Heck, we even provide our own numeric caller ID -- it goes into a packet sent over the D channel, and the carrier's switch happily swallows it without questions as long as it's 10 digits long. On valentine's day I have a special case for calls to my home number from my desk -- they show up as 1-143-1431. It's a two liner in Asterisk. AFAIK, we also have control over answered/unanswered state of the call, so we can provide diagnostics to the caller without having them get billed for, say, calling a unused number in our pool.

    Before Asterisk, we had an old Nortel switch (4 outside lines, 8 inside extensions, one ata). Then our office grew and we looked to extend the system, as it had capacity for one or two more line cards. It turned out that Nortel requires you to be certified in order to get access to their technical documentation necessary to reprogram the system (moves/adds/changes). What a complete waste -- why the heck should we be forced to pay for some "professional" to do what is about as complex as programming a VCR to record at preset time (LOL). It's the classic vendor lock-in tyrrany, where any shortcomings in the product are pasted over by having a big network of consultants, who deal mostly with trivialities that can be solved by fixing the darn product -- usually its firmware, software, or documentation, quite often all three, and in our case it was about fixing the support side of things (or lack thereof).

    All companies that believe in such a model should die a slow, painful death, and I won't mourn them at all. Many CAD companies are similarly frozen in early 80s, ergo I'm a proud Alibre convert.

    Alas, it became clear that rolling out a VoIP system from scratch will be easier and cheaper. And it was. Got the digium T1 card for maybe $300, it went into an existing server. Found nice Zultys ZIP 4x4 VoIP PoE phones for $50 each on eBay. Those have 3 managed 100mbit ethernet ports for your perusal, with VLAN support. That's like getting a free VOIP phone for the cost of a desktop switch. Remember what Joel said: people should have extra ethernet ports on their desks, and I agree with him. Especially when those ports are "free".

    Had the idiots at Nortel provided documentation for their effing hardware, I might have actually placed an order with them. Instead, I tell everyone who cares to listen to avoid anything branded by Nortel or Cisco, as they have similarly draconian non-support policies (no documentation, no firmware, lock-in network of "consultants" and "trained professionals" a.k.a. trained monkeys). I stick with HP Procurve networking gear and it works about as expected. Never had any major snags. Their wireless access points are a bit twitchy during reconfiguration, but in normal operation they just work.

    About the only good thing about that old Nortel switch, and the phones, was that the company got ~$200 for them on eBay.</rant>

  • sino (unregistered) in reply to Annon
    Annon:
    Mayhem:
    Interestingly it says Sweden used 1 click for the 0 and 10 for the 9. I wonder what their emergency number was before Europe standardised on 112. 888 maybe?
    In Sweden the emergency number was 90000 before we got 112.

    Try #3.

    But...that's.... OVAR 9000!!NINE!1!THOUSAND!!

  • Priyank (unregistered)

    India's international code is "91" not 11. This is a common problem but the explanation is slightly different.

    91 > Calls to India 11 > Calls to New Delhi

  • Anonmymous Coward (unregistered)

    Thus proving yet again that we got it right over this side of the Atlantic by using 999!

    =p

  • mal1024 (unregistered)

    I am almost certain that this story has been lifted off another site, unless I have some sort of extreme deja vu.

    captcha: jumentum

  • AdT (unregistered) in reply to cdosrun
    cdosrun:
    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.

    Traffic offenses are typically misdemeanors, not felonies. I don't know much about US law, but in Germany, they are not considered crimes at all (with a few exceptions such as severe cases of DUI, the corresponding article explicitely covers the case of negligence) and therefore criminal intent is irrelevant when it comes to them.

    It's an important distinction under German law, because, for instance, you cannot be sent to jail for committing a misdemeanor, you can only be fined or have your driver's license suspended. Neither will a misdemeanor be listed on your criminal record.

    Anyway, even if the negligent abuse of an emergency call is a felony in a country, not every accident is due to negligence ('failure to take proper care'). To avoid negligence, you do not have to check for every possibility. In this case, there was an unfortunate interaction between two subsystems, which makes negligence seem quite unlikely, providing they fixed the problem ASAP.

    However, the police can and will send you an invoice for illegitimate emergency calls in many countries, as has been mentioned.

  • piyush (unregistered)

    India's contry code is '91' not '11'.

  • Mysid (unregistered) in reply to legal weasel
    legal weasel:
    Really, TRWTF is Caller ID not being brillant enough to represent the incoming number in the manner required to call it back, despite it being served from the same telco systems that require the access codes. Very few 'merkins know how to dial for international access, and it's often just as stupid when using a landline phone's built-in Caller ID to call back a long distance number (dial 1 first).

    Also, Caller ID is not suitable for this, since Caller ID numbers can be spoofed easily!

    Imagine a sheister spoofing a caller id number to cause the fax machine to generate outrageous tolls, which the sheister collects in their (foreign) country.

    Or some prankster spoofing numbers to cause the faxback to prank call various numbers....

  • Toni (unregistered)

    That is the correct way to configure the phone. In many countries you have to configure the phone so that you can dial the emergency number without the use of some special prefix. The caller might not know about the prefix. In many countries it could be illegal to configure the phone otherwise.

    Of course then the outside line would be better if it would not start with a nine - instead like any number 1-8 is good :D. For example the emergency line in most European countries is 112 and then the nine is not a problem.

  • Anonymous Coward (unregistered)

    I totally made this mistake the first time I tried to dial India. I was a twit for not knowing how to properly dial internationally, and not noticing that I was dialing "911..." The 911 operator called my phone back asking if there was an emergency. I explained to her that me being a dumbass is no emergency.

  • tracerbullet (unregistered)

    Correction - India's international access code is "91" and New Delhi's state code is "11". Your explanation is still valid, however, since a New Delhi phone number would be of the form "9111....", so the faulty fax machine would still end up dialing "911".

  • Zeke (unregistered) in reply to Lorne Kates

    Well, that's easy to remember.

  • whocares (unregistered)

    WTF.ISD for India is 91. Storey is cooked up!?

  • Snowman25 (unregistered) in reply to Lorne Kates

    singing along 0118 999 881 995.. Dammit! 0118 999 881 999 14... DAMMIT! 0118 999 881 94.. ah, forget it..

  • Lucia (unregistered) in reply to 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] [/quote]

    It depends on whether there's anything more interesting to do, like reprogramming the PBX system to call your friends from work and then patch them back to you. On the other hand you may also be the killer. Those are some of the reasons for not dialing 911.

  • tony (unregistered) in reply to Lorne Kates

    Yay! IT Crowd reference!!!!!

  • jingo (unregistered)

    India's country code is 91. The explanation for what happened is close, but not quite right. We had a problem at our company with humans years ago. I suspect it has happened many many times over the years.

    In America, to get an international line you dial 011. Many people are used to ignoring leading zeroes. We would have people who assumed they needed to dial 9 to get out, then dial 11 to begin their international call, and got surprised by the results.

    FaxBack apparently also dropped the leading zero, so this would have happened with any international fax.

  • Kip (unregistered) in reply to Mcoder

    Probably it stored the number as a number, not as a string. So for any international number, when it converted "011" to a string of digits, the "011" became "11".

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