Smartphone weird

Has anyone here had strange things on their Smartphone – like a phone calling another on what seems like a whim?

No, but this is an opportunity to tell my brother’s mobile horror story.

He had his iphone nicked in Barcelona, so he rang his phone company to report the theft and ask for a replacement SIM to be sent out there. He bought a new phone and got his SIM.

A week later he gets home to find a letter from his bank – his phone company O2 had been demanding an unusual payment so the bank refused.

He called O2. They denied he had reported the theft. They denied sending him a replacement SIM. Then when they realised he was calling them on the SIM they said they hadn’t sent, they claimed he had requested the SIM but hadn’t mentioned the theft. He asked them for the recording of the conversation. They said it had been deleted due to a glitch. They said they would take him to court. He said “go ahead, I’ll enjoy the publicity”.

Then a different person from O2 rang him, said that this happened “all the time” and that they’d cancel the debt… but because it was so large, the UK Board of O2 weren’t authorised to write it off, so they had to request an extraordinary general meeting of Telefonica to OK it.

From the moment his phone was stolen, the SIM was put in an auto-dialler connected to a PC which rang a premium-rate number, held for five minutes, then called another. Constantly, 24h a day for three days. Every single one of the numbers dialled was registered in Afghanistan or Iraq. It took 72h of this for O2 to notice anything “suspicious”.

Total bill: £44,000.

Which. O2. Tried. To. Charge. Him.

My phone suddenly wrote nonsense apps to random people, mapped out routes in remote areas on Google Maps, and didn’t react on my finger tapping after a bicycle tour in heavy rains. When the moisture was vaporised, it worked again. So, by far not as horrible as nemo’s story, but still a bit worrying.

like a phone calling another on what seems like a whim?

Yes, sort of. A cow-orker has my number. Every so on his phone calls me and I can hear whatever they’re on about.
After a while of me pointing this out, he told me he never calls me so deleted my number. I guess somebody else is getting spammed now.

He said “go ahead, I’ll enjoy the publicity”.

This is why I’m still using my old S9 with the lousy battery and burned in screen. It is running Android 8, so can make use of the Blackbox phone recorder app, which actually works. I’m later versions of Android, the bastards at Google seem to be going out of their way to make this sort of thing impossible (while, I note, requiring you give Chrome permission to access the camera and microphone just so it can see photos that you can taken).

Haven’t needed to rely upon this, but a different cow-orker who denied telling me to do something backed down when I said my phone records all of my conversations, should I go look up when the call took place to get the recording?

Sadly, a mixture of my personality (that is usually interpreted as “timid” because they’ve never met proper introverts before) and me being foreign means I do get a fair amount of people saying things and denying it, or my personal favourite “he doesn’t speak French so he didn’t understand”.
Yes, I record my calls. No, I don’t care about the legality. And yes, the moment I actually need to use a recording is the moment it justifies me making said recordings.

but still a bit worrying.

Not at all a surprise. Phone touch screens are capacitive, because it permits a much higher resolution than resistive screens.
The only problem is that the screen is unable to tell the difference between a raindrop and the lump of flesh that normally prods it.
Best thing to do is if you get stuck in rain, turn the phone off.

A customer of mine was suddenly hit by a large influx of incoming calls, almost all from mobiles, who claimed they had been called by the company and missed the call. We’re talking about thousands of callers over a few days, with only a couple of people dealing with incoming calls.

As the customer is a telecoms company it was simple enough to avoid this by setting a new number and asking genuine customers who called the old number to visit the website 9without naming it) to get the new number and call us on that. That was followed (on the old number) by an explanation that they hadn’t called anyone who wasn’t a current enquirer of existing customer and they were subject to a spamming/phishing call, looped for five minutes then dropping the call.

Some people still hung on for the entire length of the message. Sampling some of these calls it was obvious that some of these calls were some form of pocket dials where the phone had dialled back the last number that called. There was chatter in the background and no indication that the caller was aware they had made a call, so this is easily done.

Looking at the latest stats, they’re back up to around 1000 calls to the number a day again, so the phishing scam that is spoofing their main business number has restarted after a lull.

It’s not a smartphone, but have a read of this if you want someone else’s horror story (Chorus is the company that owns/installs the physical fibre, whereas One is the ISP that the customer has signed up with). You only need to read as far as the “answer” (yellow) post on the first page.

Not a horror story (yet), but my fibre is a work in progress as it is being rolled out across Brittany.

I wrote this on my blog:

It appears as if the price for having Orange hook up fibre to the house is fixed. And that price is €0 for having the cable go underground, or €149 for having it pass above ground.
In my case, I trust they will use some intelligence. I’ve just paced it. 130 paces. So say about 125 metres of digging. For free.
Or, you know, just sling it up on the two poles that the existing cable runs along. I (or they?) will need to trim back the trees for access, but that’s surely less trouble than all that digging.

How much of it do they actually need to “manually” dig? When they put mine in they just dug straight down at each end, then used a machine to dig the horizontal join between the two pits. It’s probably not too much trouble when you have a machine to do all the work.

Granted mine is only about 20 metres from the street and I don’t know how far the machine can go without needing another pit.

Across a tarmac driveway, along a narrow part of the driveway that is tarmac over stone paving, over a bridge (so reduced depth), across the road again, with a really long span and tree roots and alsorts. A machine might work but there’s limited access to either side of the driveway and it’s basically made of paved stones on top of schist. ¹

Or, string it across the two poles and job done. ;)

¹ One of the reasons I don’t have a septic tank, they’d literally have to dig holes and drop in charges to blow holes in the rock. The other reason is that it’s not possible given the land configuration to have it as far from water courses as the rules state. When the auditor first visited to tell us what needed done, he gave us his recommendation omitting the stream, the entire pond, and locating the tank in the neighbour’s field. Duh.

When they put mine in they just dug straight down at each end, then used a machine to dig the horizontal join between the two pits.

The fibre company did this near us a few years ago. It went through a gas main and a water main on the junction, which caused a large fleet of vehicles to turn up to fix the mess.

That’s horrendous. Either they were cutting a lot too deep, or both the gas main and the water main were a lot shallower than they should have been!

water main were a lot shallower than they should have been

Happens even nowadays. In 2011 I think it was, the newly laid water mains in Blair Atholl froze solid for weeks.

in Blair Atholl

Now there’s a name I know.

My father used to claim he was descended from the Atholl Murrays, but given he was prone to porkies the size of celestial bodies, I’m more likely descended from some random Murray they found down the back of a sofa playing with a sporran. ;)

When I was a kid I was reliably informed that one half of the family were the direct descendants of the Hungarian Royal Family exiled by the communists.

It turns out that was a misreading of a family tree by one amateur eighty years ago, gleefully passed on until modern technology rendered it impossible.

However, the other part of the family story dating back to 1180 and featuring the coat of arms and the family hall is true. So I’m less Hungarian than I thought but just as heraldic.

Sadly ¹ my family were not close, so I know I’m related to my mother, but much beyond that is either fuzzy or nonexistent.

Which is a shame, as I kind of wonder if my father’s side would qualify me for an Irish passport…

¹ Or maybe not given the ones on this side of the ocean were nuts and fond of bottles, and the ones on the other side of the ocean were… let’s just say I left my country while mom left her entire continent. I guess it’s an inherited gene. ;)

Ah, the “Nope” family.

Either they were cutting a lot too deep

What? A fibre company digging their trenches too deep? Oh…

It turns out that was a misreading of a family tree by one amateur eighty years ago

ROFL – there are a few of those in our family, too. So I’m probably not closely related to Barnes Wallis (mother’s side) – but this chap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Hourwich really was my great grandfather (father’s side).

“a man of charm and genuine brilliance” with a tendency to intentionally hold contrarian opinions

The resemblance is uncanny.

A fibre company digging their trenches too deep? Oh…

No way leave for the trench work on that bridge anyway. That could be very expensive.

“a man of charm and genuine brilliance” with a tendency to intentionally hold contrarian opinions

The resemblance is uncanny.

You mean we are all related?

Charm? Uh.
Brilliance? Um.
Contrary opinions? ¹ Well, okay, one out of three ain’t bad.

So I must be distantly related. As in “sentient lifeform” (except on Monday mornings).

¹ I don’t see them so much contrary as common sense, something so very lacking in the world today.

we are all related?

I hate to break it to you, my twelfth cousin thrice removed, but yes.

my twelfth cousin thrice removed

The common ancestors of my wife and me are probably a fair bit further back than yours & Rick’s, or than mine and that of either of you, but yes, we’re related too.

Say hello to LUCA.