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- Bob Levey's Washington: 'HACKING' Monique Out Of Commission
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-
- The Washington Post 16.02.88
- By BOB LEVEY
-
-
- Thoughts while shaving . . . . Not to get too specific about this,
- but I've always thought the fun of making love was to go ahead and
- make it, not to listen to some stranger simulate it. But that was
- before Monique. As anyone with a car well knows, Monique is
- Washington's Voice of Recorded Sex. She has left pink business cards
- under every windshield wiper in town, inviting the finder to give
- her a ring on her 976 number. It will cost you $6 to hear Monique
- huff and puff and pretend to be going bananas from sexual excitement.
- That's a lot of dough to hear a lot of phony caterwauling, if you
- ask me.
- Still, Monique (or whoever she might really be) is raking it in.
- I'm told that her number is busy half the time. And I'd hate to tell
- you how many parents have called me to ask what they can do about
- the dollars 500 phone bills that their 15-year-old sons have run up,
- usually in the late afternoons on weekdays, before Mum or Dad are
- home from work.
- The answer, alas, is that there isn't an answer. Once the calls
- have been made, the money is owed.
- The phone company has been under a lot of pressure about 976 sex,
- and it thought it had found a compromise. For the last few months,
- the phone people have required 976 sex purveyors to run a warning
- just before Monique's act begins.
- The warning says that if you hang up right now, before the first
- 'Oooooh baby,' you won't be charged. But very often, the voice
- issuing the warning is muted. And if you aren't expecting the warning,
- it can whiz past you before you realize what the voice has said. That'll
- be dollars 6, pal.
- Isn't there a computer hacker somewhere who can reprogram phones to
- make them immune to the 976 exchange?
- Yes, it's legal (don't forget that, since deregulation, you own the
- phone).
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- Extract from: Corrupt Computing
-