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From: mem@sii.UUCP (Mark Mallett)
Newsgroups: net.misc
Subject: Phone billing bug, revisited
Message-ID: <448@sii.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 2-Oct-86 09:58:04 EDT
Article-I.D.: sii.448
Posted: Thu Oct  2 09:58:04 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 4-Oct-86 09:24:21 EDT
Organization: Software Innovations, Nashua NH
Lines: 17

Well, folks, it has happened to me again.  For the second time in the
last couple of years I have been the victim of a bug in ATT phone billing.
You may recall my posting the first time it happened, a year or two ago.
It seems that it is possible to place a call right before midnight and
get charged for an extra 24 hours.  (It is quite a thrill to open up a
bill and see a $350 phone call in it.)

I suspect, as I did the first time, that someone is reading the date
before reading the time of day, and not bothering to see that they
make sense together.  I thought that everyone knew enough to verify
that synchronized variables are indeed in synch, especially when it
comes to reading date/time values.

Probably some big IBM billing computer somewhere.  I would hope that this
problem isn't in unix!!

-mm-