An Astronaut Accidentally Called 911 from Space
newsweek.com
newsweek.com
I suppose it makes sense, but there is something jarring about someone in space having to dial 9 to get an outside line. I forget that, in some sense, the ISS is a workplace, and while the view is fantastic it still isn't immune from some of the banality plaguing the rest of humanity.
NASA was formed in the 60's, it makes me wonder what other ancient still-running tech they have there...
Mind you, NASA probably can't get rid of their older tech on the ground, since there's older missions (whether in space, or just still within the mission lifetime for logistical support if re-deployment was desired) that still rely on it.
But NASA is the #1 organization in the world for big-S Systems Engineering: they know how to do hybrid deployments, live migrations, etc. The existence of a legacy peer, to NASA, isn't a constraint on new builds of local components; it's rather a stable wire protocol to build compatible emulations of, and then extend with new features to produce a new wire protocol that new ground and remote hardware can speak.
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Regarding the dial-9 thing, though: the ISS probably has many good uses for the internal-by-default dialing scheme. I could imagine that they make all sorts of conference calls, for one thing.
This then begs the question, if an emergency happens in the ISS, do they call a number to Earth, and what is it?
After one bad rainstorm, our phone was unusable. If you picked up the handset you would just hear a bunch of clicks.
Then two police officers knocked on the door. They said someone had called 911 from my number, they called back and no one answered, so they were required to come out and investigate.
I told them no one had called 911 and we were fine. Then it dawned on me: the clicks!
I invited them in so they could listen to the phone, and explained how old rotary dial phones work: by opening and closing the circuit once to dial a 1, twice for 2, etc. And the phone system still supported rotary dial phones.
Sure enough, with random clicks all day, the phone circuit had just happened to detect nine clicks, pause, one click, pause, and one click.
> His comms slip-up set off a security alert at the Houston center, he explained, with emergency staff to check the room where the space station’s line connected to Earth.
Dialing 9 and "outside lines" implies there's some sort of PBX system, which makes sense. What I don't get though, is if the outside lines are in Houston, why do you have to dial the international access code 011 to call Houston? I thought maybe there was a country code allocated to the ISS, but according to a Reddit thread, they just use Houston numbers [1]. I think the first bit from the article is just a mistake (eg he wasn't calling a Houston number, just through Houston).
Aside, it's amazing how many (new) PBXs still use the "dial 9" requirement. If you dial a 10 digit number (in North America), it's obviously destined for an outside line. If you avoid assigning extensions that conflict with area codes, you can even use early dialing (where the call is placed as soon as a number pattern is recognized), but that's optional as the system will just wait a few seconds to see if you're dialing more digits or not. Already anyone with an extension that starts with the local area code probably already gets lots of misdialed calls since people forget to dial 9 all the time.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/56yxnd/til_t...
It's interesting how phone systems aren't built for this, and they do a "shortest match" algorithm, e.g. if you dial 555-4628 and there's extension 55, you'll get connected there.
I remember taking advantage of this for some free service: you could get 24 hours free trial every month if you get a token by SMS/phone call. So, I just entered an incrementing extra digit at the end of my phone number for the robot to call and read me my token, and that got me a few days of free "trial"...
9 - gets him out of the internal exchange 011 - gets him out of the USA xx - country code (probably 31 for the Netherlands) then whatever other numbers are required inside the Netherlands
That SHOULD be surprising, but the real surprise to me is that I had never thought about it being hard.
We live in age with enough wonders that I take them for granted. I cant decide if that is amazing or depressing.
Ham radio, on the other hand - now we would be talking significant fractions of c!
Edit: I see elsewhere in the thread that the ISS is using IP telephony over their geosynchronous satellite link. There's your latency.
I suspect that is because you mix up two different things: the wonders, and human nature. The wonders are amazing. That it is human nature to normalize to the point of taking them for granted might appear depressing. On the other hand, almost everything that we have normalized is mind-blowing and non-obvious when you think about it for long enough. So normalization is also a necessary coping mechanism to get stuff done.
But of course, this not being from space, it's not that news worthy :-)
She hastily apologized. Later she learned that "4000" was free, and my parents have used that phone number for 20 years now.
So the question is...do astronauts get 10 spam calls per day like the rest of us?
BTW, is the spamcall/robocall thing a US phenomenon? I mean, I haven't heard anyone talking about those except Americans. I only get regular human telemarketers every now and then, but I generally don't answer calls from unknown numbers anyway.
ME: Sorry, my phone seems to be redirecting my calls. I apologize for disruption. Please don't dispatch an officer to my home.
DISPATCHER: We are definitely sending over an officer.
ME: Please don't. I'm going to get in a lot of trouble.
DISPATCHER: ... Okay, now the officer is going to check your home and verify with each member of the family that everything is alright.
My parents were not pleased to be woken up by a police officer at 2AM to check if they were okay. I got in a lot of trouble. I then called my ISP and had them add the troubled phone number to a list of non-redirecting numbers.
I believe the cell number I was calling was issued before ISPs started redirecting numbers with 911 to emergency dispatch. The redirection of my call was probably a result of my ISP implementing the redirection.
Does that for a 10 digit phone number out of 10! all possibilities, 8! are gone ?
Can there only be 3588480(10! - 8!) safe phone numbers ever ?
It's totally possible it was a hiccup. I had been using the line for weeks with the same number, and then it suddenly started to reliably redirect to emergency dispatch.
I thought I had read previously that numbers containing 911 would redirect in the case that a potential victim has misdialed in a hurry. This incident was over a decade ago, so its possible that I misread an article or found a garbage source.
Basically, decades ago, 411 was the first "N11" to come into common use, for "local directory assistance"; and 611 was for "repair service". But all 8 were reserved ( https://www.nationalnanpa.com/number_resource_info/n11_codes... ), and there was no way they were going to rescind all the already-existing phone numbers with "11" in them, or even with "911", since they'd been in use forever.
Some random examples of real numbers with "911" in them: 800-345-1911 is the South Hackensack office of TransAxle; 800-349-1100 is (or was) Louisiana Health Monitoring.
You are correct, I should have said handset. I'm not sure if this is common, but with the involvement of cellphones in the house my family began referring to any handset in the house as "the landline."
Example: "Can you grab the landline in the kitchen, I'm on the cell."
I'm assuming the poster had a secret extension to the existing landline, not an entirely separate line.
I wouldn't. This is how the nerdier of my friends got their computers online in the 80's.
In early modem days, a lot of people bought modems without thinking the whole process through. Once they got it home, they realized that either the room with the computer didn't have a phone line, the phone jack was inconveniently located, or after spending $300 on a 150-300 baud modem, they didn't realize they'd have to spend another $200 on a phone line + $50/month for the jack + $xx for dialtone.
Splicing phone lines and fishing them through the walls with a coat hangar became an art. And if it wasn't practical in your house, you sometimes ran a phone line through the trees to your buddy's house.
It was all very educational.
(edit: Actually, this doesn't take account of multiple occurrences of 911 in the number, but it's a fairly close approximation.)
Please feel free to fact check me, though.
Only 555-0100 through 555-0199 are now specifically reserved for fictional use; the other numbers have been reserved for actual assignment
I still have rotary phones in my house. Powderpuff blue in the kitchen. Black in my office. Goldenrod in the bedroom.
The local telco doesn't support pulse dialing anymore, but there's a guy in Australia who make a little line-powered box that translates pulses into DTMF. It even does * and #, but I forget how.
Yes. But mostly on the office phone because it slides around if I dial the numbers oriented toward the left side.
Telcos used to intentionally give people low digits to keep dialing short. The abandoning of that notion is palpable when dialing rotary today.
I wonder which actually used NANPA number is the longest to dial rotary under the current scheme.
When they answered, I said something like. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to call, my phone screen stopped working and i was trying to reset it and .."
"Sir, you need to call your phone provider, not emergency services." click
If ‘9’ gets you an outside line, then you miss the ‘0’, the number seen by the telco starts ‘11...’
Maybe the pbx is programmed to recognise ‘911’ and dial that, without requiring an outside line?
I think this is often done as a safety feature, so somebody not knowing or forgetting the exit number can still dial 911 in an emergency and reach emergency services.
I've seen PBXs set up this way in past.
> operator: "911 what is your emergency?"
> "...........Hello, I need assistance??"
> operator "Sir, Sir. Do you need help?"
> "........... YES I am here, Who is this? ......."
> operator: "Sir, we began tracing your call and are on the way.... wait... Sir what is your current location"
> "uuuummmmmm.... well about 2000 km up..... Sorry dialed the wrong number..." hung up
> operator: ".....???"
isn't day dreaming fun? LOL
Most people overestimate how funny their comments are. scott_s said it best: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289
"Jaa, I vaant too laage pies vit pepperuuni. Let me give yoo die oobital parametaas."