Verizon connects man with dead wife

If I didn't know better I'd have thought this was from one of William Gibson's novels:

When Verizon upgraded Charles Whiting's telephone service, his wife's voice, saying, "Catherine Whiting," disappeared from his voicemail system.



She had died in 2005 and Whiting said he listened to her voice every day for comfort. He blamed Verizon for the loss, saying, "Now they took her voice away."

There's a whole novel waiting to be written based on that little story, Lost Voicemail of Man's Dead Wife Restored by Phone Company. It really is touching, and not just touching in a sci-fi and cyberpunk sort of way. That man took joy and happiness from being able to hear is dead wife's voice. Verizon accidentally took it away and they oh so nobly returned it...almost like bringing his wife back from the dead. Verizon says, "We have your dead wife on our computers. Would you like to talk to her?"

In other real-life cyberpunk tales, Wired's Threat Level blog has this cautionary tale, Industrial Control Systems Killed Once and Will Again, Experts Warn.

On June 10th, 1999 a 16-inch diameter steel pipeline operated by the now-defunct Olympic Pipeline Co. ruptured near Bellingham, Washington, flooding two local creeks with 237,000 gallons of gasoline. The gas ignited into a mile-and-a-half river of fire that claimed the lives of two 10-year-old boys and an 18-year-old man, and injured eight others.



Wednesday, computer-security experts who recently re-examined the Bellingham incident called its victims the first verified human causalities of a control-system computer incident.

Computers killed people!?

But the factor that intrigues Weiss and fellow researcher Marshall Abrams, a scientist at MITRE, is a still largely unexplained computer failure that began less than 30 minutes before the accident and paralyzed the central control room operating the pipeline, preventing workers from releasing pressure in the line before it hemorrhaged.

An unexplained computer failure? Malicious and/or stupid hackers could've done that. Perhaps hackers backed by a rival company. Perhaps hackers backed by a rival country. Perhaps they were both. Perhaps there's no difference. I'm just sayin'...