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brave new world of cellular everything
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Date: Tue, 22 Nov 94 18:49:40 PST
From: RISKS Forum
RISKS-LIST: RISKS-FORUM Digest Tuesday 22 November 1994 Volume 16 : Issue 57
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Date: Wed, 16 Nov 94 16:52:30 EST From: rstanley@sybase.com (Robert Stanley) Subject: Cell-phone ergonomics side-effect
Yesterday evening I returned home from work and, as usual, checked the answering machine on my normal voice telephone. Much to my surprise, I heard a somewhat muffled background conversation that I soon identified as that afternoon's conference in the office. This filled the tape to the end, and had caused several later calls to be rejected.
[aside #1: I hate these damn micro-cassette systems that only allow ten or fifteen minutes of message time, but they have become ubiquitous!]
Two aspects of this message puzzled me: how had it found its way to my answering machine, and why was it so muffled? The office has just completed installing a high-tech AT&T digital phone system with all sorts of fancy features, but I know that the trunk-to-trunk transfer features have all been disabled for security reasons. It is therefore not possible for our conference call link to another office to have been forwarded to my home phone. The only possible way for my phone to have been included in the conference would have been for it to have initiated the call (and then worked its way through a set of control codes.)
[aside #2: my former answering machine, which used real C-90 cassettes, did have the unfortunate habit of occasionally calling back the last number to have dialed it! Another story, and one which can wait for a rainier day to tell.]
[aside #3: the idea of disabling trunk-to-trunk switching to prevent improper (read: malicious cracker) usage really demonstrates the lack of thought that goes into much of what today passes for the design process. Hey, just compile it and debug it, that way you'll be doing something...]
Investigation at the office yielded disbelief followed by stunned surprise. No one had forwarded the phone, and my home phone number was not programmed onto any button in the system. However, we all rush to the documentation to check into just how the remote monitor feature works, and try to recall whether any visible telltales had been lit to indicate monitoring.
Finally, light dawns. A colleague's tiny Nokia cell-phone in his shirt breast pocket. He had called me at home earlier, and the phone has a last number redial button. The phone, non-folding, slipped into his shirt pocket with the controls outermost, had somehow had that button tripped, and had happily held the line open to my answering machine. The muffled broadcast was entirely attributable to the small microphone and the cotton pocket between it and our conference table.
However, it is an extraordinarily sobering experience to hear a sensitive work discussion issuing hours later from the speaker of your home voice messaging system.
A number of risks here, but the predominant one seems to be the conflict between added function and reduced footprint of portable cell-phones leading to the creation of unergonomic control systems. This is exacerbated by the novel situations to which the diminished footprint can give rise. This is surely the first generation of cell-phones that are sufficiently small (a) to be droppable into a toilet, and (b) actually flushed out of reach...
Robert Stanley - robert.stanley@sybase.com
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End of RISKS-FORUM Digest 16.57
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