MoMusings

Bob Brotchie, 41 a clinical team leader for the East Anglian Ambulance NHS Trust, from Cambridge [UK] with over 13 years of experience as a paramedic has come up with a novel way of storing ‘emergency contact details’ on a mobile phone which he is proposing be adopted as a standard. He has started a nationwide campaign along with Falklands war hero Simon Weston in association with Vodafone’s annual Life Savers Awards.

He said he had been thinking about this problem [Emergency Contact Details] for some time before he hit on a possible solution. He said: “I was reflecting on some of the calls I’ve attended at the roadside where I had to look through the mobile phone contacts struggling for information on a shocked or injured person.”

So, What is ICE and how does is work?

By entering the acronym ICE - for In Case of Emergency into the phone book of your mobile phone, you can log the name and number of someone who should be contacted in an emergency, such as if you have been in an accident or you have collapsed, etc..

If you have multiple people that should be contacted then they can be entered as ICE1, ICE2, ICE3, etc.

Part of the problem with using a victims mobile phone is knowing who to contact:

“It’s difficult to know who to call. Someone might have “mum” in their phone book but that doesn’t mean they’d want them contacted in an emergency. Almost everyone carries a mobile phone now, and with ICE we’d know immediately who to contact and what number to ring. The person may even know of their medical history.”

The idea follows research carried out by Vodafone that shows more than 75 per cent of people carry no details of who they would like telephoned following a serious accident.

Why am I covering this?
Well, e-mails have been flooding across the internet about ‘ICE’, so much so that some started to treat it as some sort of chain e-mail. Even ‘snopes.com‘; which covers and often debunks such chain e-mails, hoaxes, scams, urban legends and their ilk have put up a page about it. Here’s the e-mail text that has been seen in millions of e-mails boxes so far:

East Anglian Ambulance Service have launched a national “In case of Emergency ( ICE )” campaign with the support of Falklands war hero Simon Weston and in association with Vodafone’s annual life savers award. The idea is that you store the word ” I C E ” in your mobile phone address book, and against it enter the number of the person you would want to be contacted “In Case of Emergency”. In an emergency situation ambulance and hospital staff will then be able to quickly find out who your next of kin are and be able to contact them. It’s so simple that everyone can do it. Please do. Please will you also forward this to everybody in your address book, it won’t take too many ‘forwards’ before everybody will know about this. It really could save your life. For more than one contact name ICE1, ICE2, ICE3 etc

The ‘forward this to everybody in your address book’ quote is typical of many scams, hoaxes and chain e-mails.

Do I think it is a good idea? Hell, yes…..however I do have some issues with it, as well as some suggestions to solve them:

Problems:

• Many of us secure our mobile, so that a PIN needs to be entered to unlock it. This will not enable ICE to be used.
• Mobiles may not be on our person or in our bags in an accident or may be damaged or destroyed, so this could also cause problems.

Solutions:

• Instead of relying on technology, place the ICE information on a piece of paper or thin card and place it in your wallet or purse instead.
• Just like your mother always said “let me know where you are going, and phone me when you get there”, let someone know if you are travelling and give them your planned route or travel details.

So although I think it is a good idea and have suggested some solutions to some of the issues I’ve spotted, do YOU think it is a good idea and will you use ICE from now on?

Links:
http://www.eastanglianambulance.com/content/news/newsdetail.asp?newsID=646104183
http://www.snopes.com/crime/prevent/icephone.asp

SPAM, we all hate it right? Offers of pills to make parts of your anatomy bigger, make you perform longer, keep you up, budget software [usually stolen], access to certain types of web sites [Adult], mortgage offers, cheap holidays and/or flights, cable, dsl, web space….the list is almost endless!…SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM…..

What is SPAM and how did it get used as a term for certain classes of e-mail? All is revealed below:

SPAM definition:

1. A meat product sold in tins (Spiced Pork And Ham, like luncheon meat).
2. Slang for Unsolicited Commercial E-mail aka UCE

Use of the term “spam” was adopted as a result of the Monty Python sketch in which the SPAM meat product was featured. In the Monty Python sketch, a group of Vikings sing a chorus of “spam, spam, spam” in an increasing crescendo, drowning out other conversation. Hence, the analogy applied because UCE was drowning out normal discourse on the Internet.

One of the increasingly common uses of botnets [networks of compromised computers] are as conduits to push SPAM through. This way the originator of the SPAM appears to be the system under control of the bot-herder [the controller of the botnet which tells the compromised computers what tasks to carry out], not the real sender which is either the bot-herder or those that have rented the use of the botnet, or have stumbled upon the installed proxy server function of the bot [backdoor aka remote access trojan].

So, now you know

I know that some of you out there actually buy things advertised in SPAM e-mails. How, do I know that ? See this article and the cutting from it below:

More than 10 per cent of email users buy goods advertised in spam messages, according to a survey from Radicati Group.
This is despite many of these attempted purchases failing to materialise. Another nine per cent said they had lost money due to email scams advertised in spam emails.

The study was commissioned by anti-spam vendor Mirapoint and surveyed about 800 email users.

An additional 39 per cent admitted to reading the messages and clicking on links embedded in the emails.

This is a well documented method for spammers to detect whether an email address is being used. Some 57 per cent of the latter group reported that they started receiving more spam as a result of clicking on the links.

Anti-SPAM Tips:

• Never buy anything from a SPAM e-mail, it will only make the problem worse.
• Never use the unsubscribe links offered in the e-mail, as all you are doing in most cases is proving that the e-mail address is valid and you will get even MORE SPAM.
• Use anti-SPAM filtering tools, such as Bayesian Filtering [built-in to Thunderbird], keyword or black-lists to automatically tag, filter and even kill SPAM e-mails sent to you.
• Use disposable e-mail addresses, such as Yahoo, Hotmail, Lycos, etc. when posting to newsgroups. Never use your personal e-mail address as you will start getting spam within hours of it appearing. Newsgroups and websites are ’spidered’ [searched] for e-mail addresses which are then added to the spammers lists.

Anti-SPAM Tools:

• Thunderbird - E-mail/News client with Bayesian Filtering. [Platform independent]
• POPFile - Bayesian Filtering program, can be used with most e-mail programs. [Platform independent]
• SpamPal - Anti-SPAM product which can be used with most e-mail programs. [windows only]

There are many others.

OK, own up how many of you out there are in the ‘more than 10 percent‘ that actually buy things advertised in SPAM, and what are you buying? Enquiring minds want to know!

Links:
1. Home page http://www.spam.com
2. Sketch script can be found here http://w3.informatik.gu.se/~dixi/spam.htm