Stuff and Nonsense

I received the following email from undoubtedly well-intentioned email contacts.

4 THINGS YOU PROBABLY NEVER KNEW YOUR MOBILE PHONE COULD DO
There are a few things that can be done in times of grave emergencies.
Your mobile phone can actually be a life saver or an emergency tool for survival.
Check out the things that you can do with it:
FIRST Emergency
The Emergency Number worldwide for Mobile is 112.
If you find yourself out of the coverage area of your mobile; network and there is an emergency, dial 112 and the mobile will search any existing network to establish the emergency number for you, and interestingly this number 112 can be dialled even if the key pad is locked. Try it out.
SECOND Have you locked your keys in the car?
Does your car have remote keyless entry?
This may come in handy someday.
Good reason to own a cell phone: If you lock your keys in the car and the spa re keys are at home, call someone at home on their mobile phone from your cell phone. Hold your cell phone about a foot from your car door and have the person at your home press the unlock button, holding it near the mobile phone on their end. Your car will unlock. Saves someone from having to drive your keys to you. Distance is no object. You could be hundreds of miles away, and if you can reach someone who has the other ‘remote’ for your car, you can unlock the doors (or the trunk).
Editor’s Note: It works fine! We tried it out and it unlocked our car over a mobile phone!’
THIRD Hidden Battery Power
Imagine your mobile battery is very low. To activate, press the keys *3370 #
Your mobile will restart with this reserve and the instrument will show a 50 % increase in battery.
This reserve will get charged when you charge your mobile next time.
FOURTH How to disable a STOLEN mobile phone?
To check your Mobile phone’s serial number, key in the following digits on your phone: * # 0 6 #
A 15 digit code will appear on the screen. This number is unique to your handset.
Write it down and keep it somewhere safe. When your phone gets stolen, you can phone your service provider and give them this code.
They will then be able to block your handset so even if the thief changes the SIM card, your phone will be totally useless.
You probably won’t get your phone back, but at least you know that whoever stole it can’t use/sell it either.
If everybody does this, there would be no point in people stealing mobile phones.
ATM – PIN Number Reversal – Good to Know
If you should ever be forced by a robber to withdraw money from an ATM machine, you can notify the police by entering your PIN # in reverse.
For example, if your pin number is 1234, then you would put in 4321.
The ATM system recognizes that your PIN number is backwards from the ATM card you placed in the machine.
The machine will still give you the money you requested, but unknown to the robber, the police will be immediately dispatched to the location.
This information was recently broadcast on CTV by Crime Stoppers however it is seldom used because people just don’t know about it.

The first three should be obviously bollocks to most people with enough IQ to actually use a mobile phone number but in case not, here is a link to some folks who did bother to research rather than mislead others into potentially dangerous beliefs.

On the crimestoppers mention, which has been subtly changed to be UK centric from a well known US hoax mail, the crime stoppers website contains a response about it.

The only one that is correct and useful is item 4. Everyone should record their IMEI number in case of phone theft. Calling your network to block your SIM will stop you getting call charges but blocking the handset itself makes it worthless to the thief. However, for an IMEI blocked by your network to become known to the police and all other networks takes up to 48 hours. If you simply goto Immobilise and register your details and your phones (you can do all the family’s phones and other property too and it’s FREE.) Then in the event of theft you can obtain the IMEI easily to report to your network. But you can also mark it as stolen on your account (in addition to calling the police of course) and this will mean that your details as the apparent owner and the fact that it is stolen will show up on the Police National Mobile Property Register INSTANTLY. Additionally, the phone will not be able to be traded in at most second hand stores because they use CheckMEND which is also notified instantly.

Please, do us all a favour folks and do not forward on warnings that you have not verified.

• Do you want a traveller to a foreign country to feel threatened and dialing some stupid number that they found out from you instead of finding out the REAL local emergency number before travel?
• Do you want a sick infant on holiday to die because the stupid ignorant unprepared parents assumed that what you forwarded was real instead of checking?
• Do you want to be responsible for the ATM holdup victim who gets stabbed because they entered their pin backwards 3 times and the assailant couldn’t get any money? They then bleed to death in the mistaken beliefe that the police or an ambulance is going to show up before they check out?

These are real situations with real dangers.

I’ve had email for 20 years just about and can honestly say that I have NEVER received an email like this one that was substantially real. These days, you can debunk these with 30 seconds effort on Google. If you can’t be arsed to do that, just keep them to yourselves.

Total time to do a little research and type the above? 15 minutes. Google found the crimestoppers and hoax debunk pages in a little under 1.3 seconds. You see? you could check before forwarding.

Declaration of Interest: I’m a director of Recipero Ltd that owns and runs Immobilise and CheckMEND and provides the National Mobile Property Register to the Police and other government agencies. This doesn’t colour my advice though, merely explains why I make it my job to know this stuff. Of course this blog and all the comments on it are my personal comments and views and not those of Recipero Ltd, as if you needed telling.

Alan Turing withoubt any doubt was a hero. Like many during a time of war he applied his unique talents to the benefit of the nation then and now. There can be no doubt that The Few that Churchill spoke of could count Turing and his bletchley park cohorts among their number.
There can be no more doubt that the way he was treated after the war for his homosexuality was despicable; no right minded person could think otherwise. But the laws of the time were exactly that. They were of their time. They were the laws of a society that hadn’t itself grown up. In the fifties particularly, Science itself still considered homosexuality a mental affliction. The Hobson’s choice of prison or chemical castration from which Turing was forced to choose after conviction are abhorrent to most of us now and rightly so.

And so it was that when I came across a petition on the number 10 website to have the Prime Minister apologise for Turing’s treatment at the hands of the state that I very nearly added my support. But then I stopped. Why should today’s goverment apologise for unjust laws two generations ago? It’s not the first time and I’m sure it won’t be the last but come on, really? What’s the point? It’s not like the pm is contemporary with the legislation or the events. We’re not talking missing weapons of mass destruction and illegal wars in the lifetime of the current government!

I just don’t understand what it is about society today that a portion must lobby the goverment of the day to apologise for the wrongs of previous incumbents. After all, goverments are a little like companies. There are 60 million shareholders and every few years we get to elect a whole new board of directors. We give them powers to make decisions and laws and we, the society of the moment abide by those laws for the most part because our democracy ensures that the law works for most people most of the time.

If you really want an apology for fifty year old injustices I suggest you lobby not today’s government but your own grandparents, and their peers who were the very society who, collectively and very likely out of apathy rather than malice allowed bad laws to last even beyond their generation. To be fair, the focus of the multitide in post-war Britain was unlikely to be laws relating to homosexuality so even “apathy” may be a bit strong. But whatever the justification, it certainly is not something that today’s politicians should be expected to apologise for.

The government today can only be accountable for things enacted in its name during its lifetime. Stop looking for someone to blame and recognise the past when you see it.

The local news outside broadcast director must have been beside himself with joy. “Great! We’re doing an article about the town councils putting millions of pounds into Icelandic banks. We’ll put handfuls of ten pound notes on statues and on grass and next to unfeasibly made-up ladies of a certain age wandering round Cheltenham. That will help our audience of village idiots get the point.”

Bloody fantastic. Illustrate the council “spreading OUR money around to minimise risk and maximise interest” by literally sprinkling money around and filming said money. I for one am grateful. There is absolutely no way in which I could possibly have grasped what on earth it was all about without this  hammed-up, ham fisted, banal visual feast.

Just when I thought it couldn’t get any better the final words of the reporter “…thrown away” or “…in the bin” – , I’m too stupid to recall exactly what was said – were played over, wait for it; A man throwing money into a bin!

And they say TV isn’t dumbing down.