Maybe the wanted to listen to their iPlod
Cali cops' Clue caper: Apple technicans, in an iPhone repair lab, with the 1,600 silent 911 calls
For more than three months now, cops in Sacramento, California, have been baffled by a rash of false-alarm 911 emergency calls. Now the plod have manage to trace the calls back to the source – and it's one of Apple's US iPhone repair labs. The Sacramento County Sheriff and Elk Grove police departments say they have received …
COMMENTS
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Friday 23rd February 2018 20:42 GMT Shades
I once got a call on my mobile out of the blue from the local 999 operator asking me if I was okay. Obviously detecting the slight confusion at my end she asked me if I had a Nokia. Seemed a random thing to ask but as it happened I did have a Nokia (a 3310 to be precise). Apparently the 999 operators used to get a lot of random calls from Nokia phones as, even when locked, all you had to do was hold down the 9 key for a second and it would automatically dial 999 without even needing to press call.
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Friday 23rd February 2018 21:24 GMT Shadow Systems
Another reason to enjoy a flip phone...
You physicly can not dial the thing unless & until you flip it open, something extremely difficult to do with it still in one's pocket.
An old "candy bar" style phone I used to own used to do the butt dial Emergency call thing & it scared the hell out of me the first time it happened & the operator called me back to figure out WTF. I appollogized profusely & RTFM again to get the sequence for locking/unlocking the keypad so I couldn't do it again... Except that Emergency calls were the one thing it COULD do while locked.
Cue the prompt switch to a flip phone. No more butt dialed calls, no more Emergency operators calling back, & no more headaches. Woot!
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Friday 23rd February 2018 21:11 GMT Notas Badoff
You don't want to see us again
Had a manual phone long ago with some kind of "shoulder rest" plastic thingy attached to handset. It rather unbalanced the phone in its cradle. That base unit also had an emergency services dial button. Jiggle base, handset falls over, and easily hitting 'emergency' button.
'bout the third time the police came out for a look-see around the whole flat, they indicated they didn't want to see that phone again. Call to action? "You don't want to see us again, do you?"
Maybe just park a few several police cars and a swat unit around the repair center for days as needed for "quick response" to every incident logged? Getting shut down for a while each time will cause intense cooperation quickly.
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Friday 23rd February 2018 21:53 GMT Anonymous Coward
Had a call from the local police saying they had received a silent call from a neighbour. They said I was registered as a "key holder" and would I check everything was ok. I hadn't realised that someone had registered that information with them - although I was aware of the background to it. It wasn't the only time I would find myself in a position of first responder to a medical emergency there.
Went over - empty house apart from the dogs wandering about. I finally twigged that her son had a phone extension cable under his PC desk - which had a faulty junction box. The dogs snuffling about for dropped crumbs had rocked it back and forth causing a random "line break" number dial.
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Friday 23rd February 2018 22:31 GMT Anonymous Coward
Didn't Apple once upgrade IOS so that dialing any number used by emergency services in any country would connect to the local emergency services (sort of like the eay while in UK 999 is the official emergency number that 112 and 911 also connect) not realizing the the Vodafone voicemail number was the same as the emrgency number somewhere in eastern Europe or Asia so that anyone checking their voicemail was being connected to a 999 operator!
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Saturday 24th February 2018 08:56 GMT Adrian Harvey
I don’t know about that... I do know that 112 is part of the GSM standard and any GSM compliant phone can call that number and it will route to the local emergency services. Useful to know when you’re stuck in some strange country with a random emergency number. (I’m looking at you, Australia. With your 000 indeed.)
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Saturday 24th February 2018 09:14 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Hey Apple!
You install a fake femto cell in the chamber....
I'm kind of surprised that they don't do something like that already - having known defective devices trying to connect to a live public network doesn't sound like a great way for a repair centre to operate. It's not as if there isn't readily available communications test equipment that can emulate a mobile phone network for just this purpose.
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Saturday 24th February 2018 05:39 GMT Anonymous Coward
RE. Re. Batt Dial
Not saying who, but someone here discovered the hard way that on very old Galaxy phones, under certain conditions of low battery just before it died the touch screen went a bit sensitive and tried to dial the last number in its memory.
Guess what happens when this is the SOS number (ie emergency services/police)
Yup, you guessed it.
We were most puzzled why upon plugging it back into the mains and phone turning back on automagically the Police phoned us up on the same phone to see why we'd dialed 999.
Cue a very rapid firmware update, problem never came back!
This also happens on some 'phones if the SIM card goes bad, certain failure modes can cause the internals of the phone to act weird and one cause is putting a 3.3V SIM in a 5V phone.
It sometimes will work for a very short time but then stops updating/etc.
And due to excess power drain on bad microSD's this can also be a symptom other than battery lasting a matter of hours rather than days, controller on screen can go "Full Poltergeist" etc.
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Saturday 24th February 2018 12:48 GMT Anonymous Coward
Apple vs. Anyone Else
If this repeated dialing 911 accident had happened at (for example) 'Faruud's Fone Fixer' shop, then anyone present would have been lightly beaten-up by a shouty 'roid-rage SWAT Team and then Faruud would spend the next 8,000 years in State prison.
The apparently overly-gentle response to the Apple shop's endless mistakes is actually slightly disturbing.
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Sunday 25th February 2018 08:27 GMT Roq D. Kasba
Anyone remember 0990 premium numbers?
In the UK, 0990 was a common prefix for national numbers for a while, such as vehicle hire companies central call centres.
At the same time, pulse (rather than tone) dialling was still being phased out of common usage, but legacy phones still used it. 1 pulse for a 1, 2 for a 2, 10 for a zero. And some legacy phones were a bit crap.
And so so we come to the perfect storm that was my wife phoning a national van hire company and asking for a minibus, for tomorrow, to hold 12, with an a concerned 999 operator asking my confused wife to clearly state if she wanted an ambulance or not. The phone had malformed the leading zero of the 0990 number meaning the exchange "saw" 9990-xxxxxx, and connected the 999 to a valid number with the remaining pulses going into the void.
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Monday 26th February 2018 09:14 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Anyone remember 0990 premium numbers?
One of my customers suppliers has a phone number of 648999. With some slightly frail telephone wiring they very regularly got through to the emergency services.
Eventually BT (it was before openreach were a thing) replaced the incoming cable and the problem stopped.
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Monday 26th February 2018 15:09 GMT paulf
Re: Anyone remember 0990 premium numbers?
Yes, but it wasn't quite premium rate in the naughty sex chat line sense, although it was expensive to call (and still is).
0990 was BT's National-call product - a non-geographic number but charged as if a call to a national rated call. 0345 was the local call rated equivalent (Lo-call). 0990 became 08705 while 0345 became 08457.
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