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Phone glitch lets Kansas residents set off tornado alarms by misdialing
Sounds like fun, no? Find the super-secret phone number that triggers a citywide tornado alarm, dial it up, and watch as Hutchinson, Kansas goes berserk. That's essentially what happened this past week, when an AT&T "software glitch" caused the security systems surrounding the tornado lines to vanish. When the system operates correctly, these sensitive phone numbers can only receive calls from three specific phones; if and when those phones call, alarms are set off to warn residents of impending danger. Due to this here "glitch," all phone numbers were able to dial in, which led to a smattering of false alarms when locals misdialed and accidentally rang the tornado hotlines. Thankfully for everyone involved, the issues have since been fixed, but there's been no word on whether these folks were simply trying to guess Dorothy's unlisted digits.
Ericsson estimates mobile lines have hit 5 billion, gives shout out to China and India for the help
Ericsson -- one of the world's top-tier infrastructure suppliers for mobile networks -- has crunched some numbers recently, figuring the five billionth cellphone line came into existence last Wednesday, July 8, largely from major surges in uptake in emerging markets like China and India. Mobile broadband access (which we take to mean access to 3G speeds and beyond) still trails significantly at just 360 million in 2009, though they're predicting a cool 3.4 billion users by 2015. To put things in perspective, Ericsson points out that we were at 720 million mobile lines in 2000 (and about 2.7 billion in 2007), so that's some pretty spectacular growth over the decade -- particularly considering that we're coming up on the Earth's population now. Of course, we don't know what happens when the world finally has more mobile subscriptions than it has humans -- but need we remind you that 2012 is drawing near? Follow the break for the full press release.
