Techie made a biblical boo-boo when trying to spread the word Greetings, gentle reader, and may peace be upon you, for yea verily it is once again Monday and unto Monday we render another instalment of Who, Me? in which Reg readers unburden themselves with confessions of technical mishap. This week's confessor we shall Regomize as "Gabriel". Gabriel was, lo these many years past, …
(Looks it up) Oh, *that* one?
Yeah, I'll never nor associate it with *that* scene in Hellraiser.
What's ironic is that it was originally meant to be just "F*** you" and the actor wanted to change it because he didn't like foul language...!
(I mean, if you've ever seen it, you'd wonder why it was the swearing that most bothered him!)
Aside from being a huge improvement- far more memorable- it's fair to say that made it far more unintentionally profane than the original ever would have been!
Our two weapons are fear and surprise...and ruthless efficiency....
Our *three* weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope....
Our *four*...no... *Amongst* our weapons....
Amongst our weaponry...are such elements as fear, surprise....
I'll come in again.
And the Lord spake, saying, ''First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin. Then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it.
The original is actually:
There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors.
(Leon Bambrick, riffing off Phil Karlton. There are some other good variants on that page. This is basically computer science's "The Aristocrats". Here's another: "There are only two jokes in computer science: the one about two hard problems and th{#`%${%&`+'${`%&NO CARRIER.")
In the present story, both cache coherence and cache invalidation are to blame, so your version still works.
Ezekiel has much more to offer (NSFW). He clearly knew how to get excellent magic mushrooms.
When the night shows
The message grows on telephones
All the strange things
They come and go as early warnings
Stranded starfish have no place to hide
Still waiting for the swollen Easter tide
There's no point in direction
We cannot even choose a side...
Lord! here comes the flood, we'll say goodbye, to flesh and blood!
How exactly did the congregation receive messages from the church's phone number? Presumably the calls originated from the service's computers and not from the church. Firstly those computers must be able to fake caller ID. Next that phone number must have come from somewhere - presumably you enter the number to impersonate when you set up the service. How carefully is that number authenticated? I would like to think at a minimum the service makes an automated call to the number it is about to impersonate with the message and the option to cancel. It would take a special type of genius to proceed without authentication.
You evidently have much more faith in caller ID than you should have. At the end of the day it's just an attribute. The story sounds like it's US based, and I'm not that aware of the technicalities of the caller ID over there, but in the UK any appropriately positioned telephony service can set their outgoing ID however they want. This isn't available to end customers and is regulated by the industry, but is not uncommon.
In the early days of VoIP it was even easier as the ID was set by the end-user device and there wasn't much validation in the system (there is now - most ITSPs will just strip that field unless it matches a predefined value)
In short, do not trust caller ID.
Things have been changing in the UK.
One of our providers allows any CLID.
Another, more recent, move from ISDN to SIP made us get approval from Ofcom for a Tupe 5 CLID, which allows you to send CLIDs not associated with the supplied service.
We are not doing anything dodgy.
We are hospitals and use multiple suppliers (and multisite VRFs) for resilience. In addition, we place outbound calls over the cheapest provider where possible.
And my phone is pestering me with messages from banks that I have no account with telling me to "verify my login details", the post office for parcels I haven't ordered, the tax office of whom I can tell whenever I want to the nearest cent where my liabilities stand, non-existent missed phone calls from numbers that differ from mine only by the last two digits, or numbers that cannot exist in the national numbering scheme, or private numbers that call me and just give a recorded message saying "Goodbye", and people still wonder why electronic fraud is an industry in the terms of billions of dollars.
If you build a system that can be manipulated, it will be manipulated more often for fraud than for valid reasons.
But no-one's doing anything dodgy, oh no.
It's generally available from VOIP systems which can probably impersonate any number they want, and even if they can't, they have permission to use your number so they can use it on as many outgoing lines as they want. Also, this story suggests it was probably a while ago since it was distributing identical audio messages over the phone which is not as common nowadays, meaning even fewer protections on what number you can use to identify yourself and fewer people who would notice.
...happened a decade or so ago in one unnamed EU country.
The actual editor in chief of the very serious conservative online paper was testing their SMS "breaking news" system for subscribers.
They thought it would be quite funny to use a test message along the lines of "The [Prime Minister's name] is an arsehole", as it was all just *internal* testing, right? Right? What could *ever* go wrong?
Obviously the quite inevitable happened, and the "internal" test message was sent out as breaking news to around 100,000 subscribers. Including the PM in person...
To be fair, the PM back then was indeed quite an arsehole, but nobody expected them to say it aloud!
We had a pretty good laugh all around the office, except for the culprits of course.
Posting as AC, obviously.
Does anyone remember President Ronald Reagan's "My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes." faux pas[1] in 1984?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_begin_bombing_in_five_minutes
Sadly, I'm old enough to remember it.
1. Or "foo paw" as they would write it today
As to anyone who thinks an unsolicited phone call is a good idea, let alone an automated one, I say this: what Hastur did to the call centre in Good Omens when he escaped from Crowley's answering machine was true and righteous altogether.
So that's all right, then.
Back in the late 1990s, back in the days before email software stopped you from being able to send executable attachments to each other, I sent a really good one to a Buddy of mine.
So he clicks on it and it exclaims through his computer speakers in a very loud voice "hey everyone, I'm watching porno!"
He held (and still does) a very senior position at the American Family Association who rightly rallies against the evils of porn and other bad things. Can't remember the exact words but he emailed back saying "you got me".
Still cracks me up.
I remember that .exe. It was sent to a colleague of mine at time when we were all working in a very large, noise-carrying open office. From memory the precise words his laptop shouted were "hey everybody I'm looking at gay porn".
It would have been slightly less awkward if not for the fact that he was the Head of IT at a time when you actually had to be a techie to get into that role.
Having lived either in or just outside Washington, DC, for all of Marion Barry's years as mayor, and most or all of his time on the city council, I will say that he was for a while a close competitor to Abraham Lincoln in the "but he didn't say it" competition. Of course, the quotations attributed wrongly to Lincoln tend to be pithy, and those attributed to Barry tend to be stupid.
Worst case, poor caching in the application program and he used the same filename for the audio file so the caching system just went "oh, I already have that file", no filesize, check sums, date/time stamp checking etc. System caching would have been more discriminating. I suppose it's possible that if they are doing multiple jobs at once, different numbers of computers might be being shifted in and out of a job pool depending on priorities of jobs and it saves passing the audio file around multiple times.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
