Camouflage

"Yossarian recognized the shot"

From Catch 22:

[Yossarian] heard a stealthy rustle of leaves on the other side of the sandbags and fired two quick rounds.

Somebody fired back at him once, and he recognized the shot.

"Dunbar?" he called.

That's the funny thing.

When I read the book, I assumed that this was intended as satire, but now I'm not so sure. If you get bombarded with emails and 'phone calls all day long, then soooner or later, you can guess roughly who is ringing* or who sent you an email/its contents without even looking at the number (which flashes up on our office 'phones) or the email sender. Or if you're over by the filing range, you can tell that it's your 'phone ringing, even though it is set to the same ring tone as everybody else's.

* In the admittedly very broad categories: spam, cold calling, important, nuisance, work-vs-family related; good news-vs-bad news etc. Or perhaps I'm imagining it..?

"Telephones banned in Germany by Frankfurt court"

From the BBC:

A court in Frankfurt has found that telephones are being used to arrange car-share agreements involving drivers lacking the necessary legal permits to operate under German law and has banned the use of the devices.

It has emerged that telecom companies were told last week that users of their "low-cost" tariffs could no longer take passengers and faced a fine if they continued.

But a spokesman for Deutsche Telekom said it had decided not to suspend telephone services, adding that the ban was not enforceable while an appeal process was ongoing.

"Germany is one of the largest markets for telephony in Europe," he said.

"We will continue to operate in Germany and will appeal the recent lawsuit filed by Taxi Deutschland in Frankfurt. You cannot put the brakes on progress. We will continue our operations, regardless of whether some users are offering or requesting ridesharing services throughout Germany."

A check of DT's customers confirms that drivers continue to offer pick-ups in Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt and Dusseldorf to people who contact them using the telephone.

Germany's Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière applauded the court's decision, pointing out that telephones are also often used to arrange other types of criminal activity, such as drug deals or shifting stolen goods.

"This is a big step forward to a crime-free Germany," he added. "If you have something to say, please communicate by open postcard, using clear hand writing to speed up the text-recognition process."

A missed opportunity...

From This Is Money:

Directory enquiry firm 118 118 has been fined £80,000 for failing to display its charges clearly in adverts.

The company was told to improve its pricing information after an investigation by regulator PhonepayPlus showed it was hard for customers to find information about charges...

Aaargh!

Why didn't the regulator impose a fine of £118,118? Natural justice and all that.

Any Telecoms "experts" out there?

Only having spotted "Regulators are to get more power to act against companies responsible, while cold callers will not be allowed to conceal their number - making reporting unwanted calls easier" in this BBC piece about Maria Miller's planned crackdown on "nuisance calls" I confess to not fully understanding how that would work.

A range of measures is being planned to tackle the issue of nuisance phone calls, the culture secretary has said.

Regulators are to get more power to act against companies responsible, while cold callers will not be allowed to conceal their number - making reporting unwanted calls easier.

A licensing system for call centres may also be introduced in the future.

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) document, Connectivity, Content and Consumers: Britain's digital platform for growth, says the calls "can be live marketing calls, silent calls, abandoned calls and recorded marketing message calls".

"More often than not it is perceived as a nuisance, but it can also cause anxiety, inconvenience and distress," the report says.

The measures being taken also include lowering the threshold for number of calls before enforcement action is taken and allowing Ofcom and the Information Commissioner's Office to more easily share information.

There will also be clarification of the process for opting out of receiving marketing calls and reporting unwanted calls. 

2592 applications per working day, that little rubber "approved" stamp must get red hot

and the operator suffer from chronic RSI ...  

The annual report  from the interception of communications commissioner Sir Paul Kennedy reveals that the number of official requests for the data tracking of individual's internet and phone use increased by 15% in the past year to 570,135 requests. 

Sir Paul discloses that nearly a thousand errors – 979 – were made during such interception operations during 2012, often involving monitoring data from the wrong telephone numbers, email addresses or over the wrong time period. In about 20% of cases the internet and phone companies handed over the wrong internet and phone records to the authorities.

"In the vast majority of these cases the mistake was realised, the public authority (and the communications service provider if applicable) reported the error to my team and the data that was acquired wrongly was destroyed as it had no relevance to the investigation," Sir Paul says in his report published on Thursday.

"Regretfully in six separate cases this year, the mistake was not realised and action was taken by the police forces/law enforcement agencies on the data received,"

"All of these cases were requests for internet data. Regrettably, five of these errors had very significant consequences for six members of the public who were wrongly detained/accused of crimes as a result of the errors".

Still, even without applying the "for the greater good" maxim, that 979 is a surprisingly small "error rate" and we can of course be sure that in each of the cases of the "unfortunate 5" having realised that mistakes had been made, all the data relating to the "detentions, accusations and charges" has been completely expunged from all records relating to them, and the unfortunate mistake has not and will never see them being wrongly failed by a CRB check, or the like, or being overlooked for a job because they admit on the application that "yes, I was arrested once, but it was all a mistake .."  Because as we know "nothing to hide, nothing to fear ..."

"The telephone didn't stop ringing all day"

"Why didn't you try picking it up occasionally?"

Telephone Tips #1 How to leave a message

It's quite simple, you say your name and then your own telephone number, loud and clear and slowly.

It you then want to prattle on brightly for several minutes, that's fine, the person listening to the message can ring you back as soon as he has got the general gist.

If you do the prattling brightly first and then mumble your telephone number right at the end, or even worse, don't mention it at all, that is about as much use as a missing sock.