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"Here’s how it worked. Whenever a phone couldn’t establish a connection with another phone, instead of remaining silent, the calling tone would start ringing in
by ekanes 9y ago
"Here’s how it worked. Whenever a phone couldn’t establish a connection with another phone, instead of remaining silent, the calling tone would start ringing in the caller’s ear. Logically, the person placing the call believes that the phone on the other side is actually ringing but nobody is picking up.
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If you think that’s not that bad, imagine this: You’re driving through the middle of nowhere in Midwest Square State, U.S.A. Your car breaks down, your A/C is nonfunctional in the hot summer weather, and you call road assistance. The phone rings and rings, but nobody picks up. You call again. And again. It seems that everyone at road assistance must be out partying, or they just hate you. By the 27th call, you’d probably be mad enough to break the phone–all without realizing that your those rings were pure fiction, and you needed to move to find a better signal. And what if someone with you was injured, or a more serious emergency took place?"
- compsciphd 9y agoit has nothing to do with signal strength. the fact that they were able to inject a fake ring tone, means that you were connected to the tower just fine. the issue was that they couldn't connect the call to the other phone's telephone company and pretended it had reached it. i.e. if you call overseas, you don't hear our ringtone, you hear whatever their ringtone is.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago> the fact that they were able to inject a fake ring tone, means that you were connected to the tower just fine Do we know this? The tone could have been injected by the device.
- kalleboo 9y agoThe arstechnica story (linked in another comment) clarifies that the ring tone was injected in T-Mobile servers for calls that went over a SIP backbone. So yes we know it was not in the user terminal.
- HenryBemis 9y agoI cannot believe that T-Mobile would remote 'Celebrite'/jailbreak/root a device just to add the necessary files and remote-execute a process to play an mp3 while the Phone-app has taken control. When the Phone-app is running, it automatically thwarts any other sound-using app (such as Spotify, Music, Skype, games)
- solarkraft 9y agoCarriers have enormous control over devices. While we now know it didn't happen, they likely could have easily shipped a manipulated standard phone app since when a carrier gives out a device it is often running customized firmware with the carrier's logo on boot and preinstalled bloat ware like Spotify, Facebook or WPS Office (by my experience with branded os images for Sony Xperias).