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Comment by appendixsuffix | Hacker News Reader

You are doing black propaganda my friend. Hacker News is not a place for your intentions!

Sorry you feel that way but I think it is a fascinating example of governments interference in the communication channels.

I wrote the political information to give a context. The information is factually correct, it's not my interpretation except defining the message as a propaganda message.

They did play a message from Ergodan when you call any number but only for clients of 2 mobile operators: Turkcell and Vodafone. http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/telefonla-konusmak-isteyenlere-er... Link in turkish but it confirms what this post says.

Implementations for something as "innovative" as this are bound to be spotty early on. Is there even pre-existing infrastructure/services/software support in typical networks for stunts like this or was this something they had to build?

Did they need to involve their network infra suppliers? For Turkcell that's fully outsourced to Ericsson; network hardware, services implementation, ops, etc etc; pretty much everything below the customer service/marketing level:

https://www.ericsson.com/en/press-releases/2016/11/turkcell-...

Which means that maybe someone at Ericsson in Sweden ended up implementing this crazy thing some time the past week or so. :/

... makes me think about that mandatory engineering ethics class a long time ago.

Interesting question. Some Turkish operators provide a premium service that lets users play a message or some music to their callers while their phone is ringing.

I would guess that the same technology was used.

That engineer would probably be Greek since Ericsson has outsourced a lot of the dev work on MSC/VLRs there. I remember working on a feature that allowed a user to copy the music they listened while waiting and play it when someone called them.

As for the ethical implication there's none. This exact functionality would be extremely helpful in case of an actual emergency.

It's rather funny how things turn out in life: a Greek playing Erdogan propaganda over the cell network for Turks.

It's called "early media" and it's something standard, sometimes used to announce that the call will be charged at a premium rate and giving the caller a chance to hand up before the call begins and they get charged.

I should have known, an organization as complex as 3GPP couldn't not already have invented this :)

Which is even more interesting, considering there are only 3 real real (not a MVNO) operators in Turkey and only one not playing this message is Turk Telekom.

A company that was founded by the government, even now partially owned by the government.

The biggest private shareholder of the Turk Telekom is the Saudi Arabian Oger Telecom.

Maybe they did not play ball because of the Qatar crisis?

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