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When I worked at the now defunct Nortel, I was asked to implement a feature that would allow a large bank to spoof it's telephone numbers in long distance telep
by mikekchar 11y ago
When I worked at the now defunct Nortel, I was asked to implement a feature that would allow a large bank to spoof it's telephone numbers in long distance telephone calls. I was told that the feature was necessary to make a $60 million sale.
I looked at the spec and, of course, the change they were requesting was disallowed. Even worse, there was an actual law specifically forbidding running equipment with that ability in the country where the request was being made. I refused to implement it.
The B level manager came to my lowly cubicle (I was still pretty young back then, so didn't actually hobnob with people in that stratosphere often). I was told that it would cause a lot of people a lot of trouble if I didn't do the work. And besides, we weren't running the equipment, so we weren't breaking the law. I refused again.
They never asked me again and I never knew if they found someone else to patch the code without my knowledge. I'm pretty sure they did. But how do you whistle-blow that? They just cut cut everyone who doesn't play ball out of the loop.
I can well imagine something like that happening here. It's pretty easy to find someone with kids, or someone who needs their job for keeping their work visa, or someone who just doesn't care. You can patch it in the load build in most large companies and nobody would ever know the difference.
- chmaynard 11y agoGreat story. Your refusal to do illegal, unethical work took courage. The B level manager should have gone to bat for you and put his job on the line, too.
- wolf550e 11y ago'mikekchar was working for a salary. The manager might have received a bonus for making 60 million sale.
- webXL 11y agoAny idea which bank it was? And what's the point of spoofing? It seems like a number of people who got fired could pool funds together for a wrongful termination lawsuit.
- mikekchar 11y agoSee the sibling post. Working a Nortel was an education for me. I demanded a move from that team to another team and landed in even a worse place. While there were some phenomenal people there and a few really good teams, that place was just rife with corruption from top to bottom. I eventually quit (my manager gave me the lowest possible rating in my review saying, "Ordinarily I would give someone who accomplished all these things a very good review, but I just don't like you" -- probably I had a case for constructive dismissal ;-) ). I spend 8 months writing free software and trying to figure out what I wanted in a job. It was actually an excellent thing for me in the end, so I don't really regret the time I spent at Nortel.
- ghshephard 11y agoIf you are referring to the Nortel Meridian One X11 platform, certainly as of X11 R24 (circa 2000/2001) you could spoof your ANI information on outbound calls if you had PRI cards installed in your cabinets. I was kind of amazed that you could just specify whatever information you wanted in the configuration, and that's what appeared on the caller ID of the person you were calling.
- mikekchar 11y agoBingo :-) It's the PRI code that does it. If it's any consolation, that code wasn't in the mainline as long as I was with PRI :-P It's actually even worse than you describe. It allows you to set the bit that says that the calling number has been validated by the network. The justification for the change was to allow the bank to set a single outgoing number on the PBX. It may very well be true that this is what they intended to do. It also allows you to avoid paying long distance fees by spoofing the outgoing number as a local number. Numbers that are already validated avoid the billing code. Edit: Just realized that I may be wrong. The code I work on was for the SL-100. I can't remember if Meridian shared that code or not. I think they did, but it's long enough ago that I just can't remember.