SETI@Home or Twilight Zone

[JWMiddleton]

Something strange happened the other night that I would like to relate. I have two computers at my house working on SETI WU's. Each is connected to the phone line and dial AT&T to dump work periodically. They have been working fine according to the logs kept by SetiSpy.

The other night at about 11:30 PM we were visited my the Gwinnett County Police. They said that a computer from this house was dialing 911!:Q:Q:Q:Q I had been asleep for about an hour and was very groggy. I stumbled to each of the system and they both seemed fine. I turned off the "Auto Transmit" feature of SetiDriver for the next two nights and have not heard another word from the Police. Was this SETI or the Twilight Zone?

 

[Michael]

That was my computers responding to the surge you put out to shoot past me <grin>.

Michael

ps - do you use &quot;911&quot; as a pager code? It might have been one of your phones doing &quot;redial&quot; for some reason.

 

[mindless]

I had the same thing happen a while ago to me. I was out when they showed up, parents turned my systems off after unplugging my network cables thinking it was the phone lines (external modem). Came home and found out and looked for any trace at all of the virus and found nothing. The nice staff at Mcafee said it had probably removed all trace of itself already so I would not find anything. The strange thing was is I have Zonealarm installed and run &quot;High security&quot; so I dont know how I got it.

 

[JWMiddleton]

Michael: No, I don't have mine setup to page me. I looked to see if there was a 911 sequence in the number to the ISP, but there is not.

mindless: I wondered about a virus also. Since I don't run the virus scanner while s@h is running it would not have cleaned it up; thus, it should still be happening. Hmmm....

 

[JonB]

Some phone systems will fail over to 911 if nobody dials after a time. Its supposed to help someone who picks up the phone to call but falls and can't get up. Your modem may have only gotten partially on-line, but never dialed.

 

[Shasta]

I had a visit from the sheriff's dept. one evening...my modem had dialed 911. It was going bad, and was dialing out randomly. Lucky I didn't have calls to Tasmania or somewhere.