The Kuykendall family phone hack

[Magical Realist]

https://bizarreandgrotesque.com/2017/07/...hone-hack/

"In February 2007, three families, including the Kuykendall family, started receiving strange phone calls from an unknown source. It all started when Courtney Kuykendall’s phone started acting weird and sending text messages to her friends and family. It was odd, but didn’t seem too alarming at the time. The family chalked it up to interference or a glitch by the cell phone carrier.

Things took an alarming turn, however, when Courtney’s family received numerous threatening calls. These calls included death threats towards the lives of her family, pets and grandparents. Naturally concerned, the family alerted the authorities. The police listened to the calls and tried to determine where they were originating from.

It’s easy to think that this was a dark prank by someone with nothing better to do than to make threatening and harassing phone calls. When the trace came back, the phone calls seemed to originate from Courtney’s phone. Understandably, many people thought the whole situation was a hoax. But why would someone threaten his or her own family?

Even if it wasn’t Courtney, it could have been a simple case of Courtney’s phone data being intercepted, stolen and hacked. It’s possible that the online security of her phone was compromised, even on a home WiFi network. However, the creepy thing was, even after Courtney turned her phone off, the calls to her family kept coming.


It continued to escalate but now the phone calls and messages were also coming from other family members’ phones. These phones would also turn on all by themselves, and the ringtones and phone settings would consistently change.

In addition to threatening calls, the family started to suspect their everyday activities were being monitored through their phones. The mysterious caller would be able to identify the specific clothes they were wearing. They could also identify who was in the house and which family members were away.

The Kuykendalls took numerous security measures such as installing a home security system. Shortly after, they received a voice mail saying, “I know the security code.” They also turned off all the phones in the house. However, the mysterious caller was able to remotely power on the phones that had been turned off.

The police were involved numerous times. On one visit, they received a voice mail of the conversations of the house, including a recorded conversation with police.

You might be wondering why the Kuykendalls didn’t just replace the phones and change providers? They did so three times. Each time they would shortly receive a new message from the caller. The phone calls, messages and strange phone behavior continued every night for four months before it suddenly stopped. No one was ever caught.

Now it might have been some elaborate hoax created by the family; however, they weren’t the only ones. Two other families on the same street had similar stories. These families did know each other, but would all of them choose to make things up as a team? I don’t think so.

Phone companies insisted the stalking couldn’t be possible, while the local police were dumbfounded by the calls. They had no leads and had little idea how the caller could accomplish this. The police even investigated the family themselves. They had taken Courtney’s phone away from her, yet the calls continued.

So what could be a reasonable explanation? There is something called ‘spoofing’ which allows a hacker to manipulate or conceal the phone number when calling. It’s what may have enabled the caller to make the messages appear that they originated from Courtney’s phone.

Disturbingly enough, it is not that difficult to ‘spoof’ a phone. The only way to stop someone from doing this is to have up-to-date phone security software or use a VPN service to hide your IP Address. However, spoofing doesn’t allow someone to change the settings of the phone. To do this, the caller would have to have remotely hacked the phone. This is called ‘cloning’ and creates a virtual copy of the victim’s phone, giving the caller the same access to Courtney’s phone as she had.

But even spoofing and cloning a phone still wouldn’t allow someone to record conversations and turn the phone off. This would involve directly hacking the carrier to gain access to these conversations. Not an easy task! If this was a hack, it was highly elaborate for this to all happen in such a brief period. You must wonder why someone would want to do this to an every-day suburban family.

What do you think of these calls? Do you think it was an elaborate hoax by the families, or some malicious hacker? If it was a hacker, how do you think they did it? Tell us your thoughts in the comments section below."

[stryder]

"Phone cloning" was a known attack for mobile phones. If an attacker wanted to clone a phone, they would use their clone kit near the entrance of tunnels and capture a connection when people drove through. (Tunnels would break the signal and on reconnecting to the network it was possible to clone the handshake) I'm not entirely sure how it is now, it's been a few years since I've had any information the subject. (I did some research on it once)

They were likely targeted by someone that liked using them, perhaps they had their address and was able to redirect deliveries etc. It likely finished after the attacker was caught for something else or the attacker just moved on to use someone else.

[Zinjanthropos]

Not sure what to make of the suggestion that something paranormal/weird was happening. Not like hacking belongs entirely within in the realm of the living but I suppose one shouldn't under estimate the computer savvy of the spirit world. I would assume that whatever an alternative reality may be, must also be embracing modern technology, at least that's the impression I'm getting here. Then again an overactive imagination could probably yield the same results. And to think, there are people who say they are, or that there are, experts on this stuff.

[Carol]

I don't think a malignant entity would bother different families in a neighborhood, but something like catching people's numbers while they went through a tunnel sounds like a possibility.

On the other hand, I woman I have lunch with reported she couldn't sleep one night, and that she heard music. She thought maybe it was her husband's cell phone but when she checked that it wasn't his phone. Still looking for the source of music she realized it was a music box she had forgotten on a shelve for at least 30 years. At that point, it stopped playing but about 20 munites later it began playing again. After she told her strange story I asked her if she someone who crossed over and she mentioned two people.

I have had my strange experiences, and I am open minded and do not want to invite the abnormal into my life.

PS, But that bird that sat on the sidewalk and didn't attempt to fly away until I asked it if was okay, sure did seem to be a message from Karen who recently died.

[Zinjanthropos]

PS, But that bird that sat on the sidewalk and didn't attempt to fly away until I asked it if was okay, sure did seem to be a message from Karen who recently died.

Under normal conditions a wild bird has a flight zone, an allotment of space it allows a potentially dangerous creature to approach before flying away. I remember a time when I was using a small,spade shovel to dig a trench to lay a railway tie in as part of a driveway border. As I'm scraping away a robin decides to land in the small trench in front of me, so close that I could have kicked it. My digging was exposing worms, centipedes, etc which the bird calmly ate even while I kept trenching. 

My feeling was one of sadness for the bird because it obviously didn't recognize a potential life threatening situation, only food. It was missing the survival mechanism of flight to avoid risk and in all likelihood stood less of a chance for survival and passing on its genes. His death would actually benefit the robin population. I think Karen the bird was also in the same position, sorry.

It is only my contention, perhaps others share it as well, but there is nothing weird. Perhaps uncommon or rare but not without a logical explanation. Would it be weird to have a little green man emerge from an extraterrestrial spacecraft? Not for me it wouldn't. Or if a real honest to goodness apparition appeared, again no. If every mystery had a solution not like anything ever witnessed before, I still wouldn't consider it weird. If it is what it is then it's perfectly normal, no matter the situation.

[Carol]

Zinjanthropos, that is an interesting perspective. However, maybe too much like the bird that didn't fly away? When I was young I would have run up to greet little green men coming out of a spacecraft, but today I think I would observe them for awhile and be cautious about approaching them.

So how about the second message from Karen- This happened only one time in my all the years I have lived here. I got in the elevator and pushed the button for the floor I wanted and the elevator didn't do its normal thing, but the light dimmed and became normal several times. This happened a second time when I pushed the button again and I almost got off the elevator because the closest to normal that this could be is something was shorting out and I was in danger of getting stuck on the elevator. I pushed the button one more time and everything worked as normal.

Both the bird and the elevator message from Karen happened soon after her death and these things stopped happening after her funeral. As normal as they may be, that does not mean Karen was not using these things to communicate with me. Like the music box becoming active on its own, we can not be sure why these things happen, not even if we can explain what happened. The natural explanation can give us cause and effect information, but why at this time? Why in many years did the elevator dim on that day and only that day or the music box start playing? These normal things don't normally happen.

[Secular Sanity]

Zinjanthropos, that is an interesting perspective.  However, maybe too much like the bird that didn't fly away?  When I was young I would have run up to greet little green men coming out of a spacecraft, but today I think I would observe them for awhile and be cautious about approaching them.  

So how about the second message from Karen- This happened only one time in my all the years I have lived here.  I got in the elevator and pushed the button for the floor I wanted and the elevator didn't do its normal thing, but the light dimmed and became normal several times.  This happened a second time when I pushed the button again and  I almost got off the elevator because the closest to normal that this could be is something was shorting out and I was in danger of getting stuck on the elevator.   I pushed the button one more time and everything worked as normal.  

Both the bird and the elevator message from Karen happened soon after her death and these things stopped happening after her funeral.  As normal as they may be, that does not mean Karen was not using these things to communicate with me.   Like the music box becoming active on its own, we can not be sure why these things happen, not even if we can explain what happened.  The natural explanation can give us cause and effect information, but why at this time?  Why in many years did the elevator dim on that day and only that day or the music box start playing?  These normal things don't normally happen.

Apophenia makes unrelated things seem connected.

Our relentless detection of patterns is part of our larger search for meaning. Our greatest challenge may be learning to bear incoherence.

[Zinjanthropos]

Again IMHO, nothing is weird or strange. Everything that is sensed is natural and can be explained.

Why should a vision/apparition be something from another realm or a light in the sky proof of ET? These events, real or imagined are happening in our world. Therefore they are normal occurrences. If ghosts exist here then wonderful, bring it on.

[C C]

So how about the second message from Karen- This happened only one time in my all the years I have lived here. I got in the elevator and pushed the button for the floor I wanted and the elevator didn't do its normal thing, but the light dimmed and became normal several times. This happened a second time when I pushed the button again and I almost got off the elevator because the closest to normal that this could be is something was shorting out and I was in danger of getting stuck on the elevator. I pushed the button one more time and everything worked as normal.

Both the bird and the elevator message from Karen happened soon after her death and these things stopped happening after her funeral. As normal as they may be, that does not mean Karen was not using these things to communicate with me. Like the music box becoming active on its own, we can not be sure why these things happen, not even if we can explain what happened. The natural explanation can give us cause and effect information, but why at this time? Why in many years did the elevator dim on that day and only that day or the music box start playing? These normal things don't normally happen.

Probability dictates that unusual incidents will coincide as the world plays out, though "unusual" is something only a human might apprehend or attribute to such. But people don't anticipate clusters of coincidences happening to them specifically across intermittent periods -- we tend to anticipate those being watered-down among the whole population rather than converging upon one's self specifically and repeatedly.

In philosophy, supervenience is an ontological relation that is used to describe cases where (roughly speaking) the upper-level properties of a system are determined by its lower level properties. Some philosophers hold that the world is structured into a kind of hierarchy of properties, where the higher level properties supervene on the lower level properties. According to this type of view, social properties supervene on psychological properties, psychological properties supervene on biological properties, biological properties supervene on chemical properties, etc. That is, the chemical properties of the world determine a distribution of biological properties, those biological properties determine a distribution of psychological properties, and so forth. So, for example, mind-body supervenience holds that "every mental phenomenon must be grounded in, or anchored to, some underlying physical base (presumably a neural state). This means that mental states can occur only in systems that can have physical properties; namely physical systems."

It is useful to know both when supervenience does and does not apply. For example, the value of a piece of paper money does not supervene on the micro-features of the paper it's made out of, because the value of the money is not just determined by internal features of the paper, but also by a broader distribution of social facts and institutions. The paper alone does not determine the value of the money, so supervenience does not obtain between the value and the paper (though it does obtain between the value of the money and some larger part of the world which includes the relevant social institutions). Some philosophical problems can be stated in terms of questions about supervenience. For example: do mental properties supervene on neural properties? (externalists in the philosophy of mind say "no", internalists say "yes.") Do the aesthetic properties of an art object supervene on physical properties of that object?

Psychological properties could supervene upon functional properties, neural properties, electrochemical properties, etc (which of those would depend upon the type of physicalism one advocated). "Cryptic meanings" like a message from Karen would similarly have to supervene on events that were the result of the mechanistic relationships of natural things (they would be expected to have an explanation in the latter context, even if merely statistical or probabilistic).

If cryptic meanings are classified as "miracles", then by definition of the latter they're unreliable or anomalous (don't conform to law and predictability). So unlike psychological or phenomenal properties that are expected to reliably correlate to some kind of repeatable patterns in the brain, a cryptic meaning could supervene on almost anything. Though it would seem to require that "broader distribution" (complexity) of also supervening on certain psychological properties of your brain (not just the behavior of a bird or whatever vehicle of deliverance). So miracles wouldn't necessarily have an "anytime / anywhere" window, but be opportunistically contingent on concurrent or not too far apart in time occurrences (including a person receptive to the interpretation; i.e., why the adjectival "cryptic" is recruited as modifier of "meaning" to begin with). Or some other dependency.

Since a cryptic meaning is intended for a specific target or narrow audience, there's no conflict in it being denied by the larger population. Again, why would they be entertaining such a peculiar interpretation to begin with, since they're not part of the network of affairs it is supervening upon? Also, the "approval of the masses" is irrelevant to the personal value (much as your own private thoughts are irrelevant to the same; we only have access to what you publicly report, that's all we can care about).

But such would not entail Karen being in an afterlife, or a ghost, etc. For instance: By definition immaterial things lack spatiotemporal characteristics, and thereby would not be an external form of existence (bodies or appearances) dwelling in a location or place. It often seems that the only items that might qualify as immaterial are principles (especially generative principles in this case). They would be immutable apart from what they made possible or generate (their physical or "things outside themselves" counterparts which fall out of spatial relationships and sequential changes, and co-operate with others of their kind to engender a manifestation or world of such natural appearances). In which case, Karen would always have been a generative principle, with the arena of the world simply being where she manifested as a temporary, physical, changing thing that interacted with others. She might be variably realized as other beings in other natural places in terms of what abstract entities made possible.

Just as a parallel example of scientists / physicists eventually wandering into their own Platonic craziness of an abstract manner of existence, in the course of explaining the cosmos beyond its everyday appearances and tying-up the loose ends of overlapping models:

Natalie Wolchover: Researchers have worked out the math showing how the hologram arises in toy universes that possess a fisheye space-time geometry known as “anti-de Sitter” (AdS) space. In these warped worlds, spatial increments get shorter and shorter as you move out from the center. Eventually, the spatial dimension extending from the center shrinks to nothing, hitting a boundary. The existence of this boundary — which has one fewer spatial dimension than the interior space-time, or “bulk” — aids calculations by providing a rigid stage on which to model the entangled qubits that project the hologram within. “Inside the bulk, time starts bending and curving with the space in dramatic ways,” said Brian Swingle of Harvard and Brandeis universities. “We have an understanding of how to describe that in terms of the ‘sludge’ on the boundary,” he added, referring to the entangled qubits.

The states of the qubits evolve according to universal time as if executing steps in a computer code, giving rise to warped, relativistic time in the bulk of the AdS space. The only thing is, that’s not quite how it works in our universe.

Here, the space-time fabric has a “de Sitter” geometry, stretching as you look into the distance. The fabric stretches until the universe hits a very different sort of boundary from the one in AdS space: the end of time. At that point, in an event known as “heat death,” space-time will have stretched so much that everything in it will become causally disconnected from everything else, such that no signals can ever again travel between them. The familiar notion of time breaks down. From then on, nothing happens.

On the timeless boundary of our space-time bubble, the entanglements linking together qubits (and encoding the universe’s dynamical interior) would presumably remain intact, since these quantum correlations do not require that signals be sent back and forth. But the state of the qubits must be static and timeless. This line of reasoning suggests that somehow, just as the qubits on the boundary of AdS space give rise to an interior with one extra spatial dimension, qubits on the timeless boundary of de Sitter space must give rise to a universe with time — dynamical time, in particular. Researchers haven’t yet figured out how to do these calculations. “In de Sitter space,” Swingle said, “we don’t have a good idea for how to understand the emergence of time.”

One clue comes from theoretical insights arrived at by Don Page and William Wootters in the 1980s. Page, now at the University of Alberta, and Wootters, now at Williams, discovered that an entangled system that is globally static can contain a subsystem that appears to evolve from the point of view of an observer within it. Called a “history state,” the system consists of a subsystem entangled with what you might call a clock. The state of the subsystem differs depending on whether the clock is in a state where its hour hand points to one, two, three and so on. “But the whole state of system-plus-clock doesn’t change in time,” Swingle explained. “There is no time. It’s just the state — it doesn’t ever change.” In other words, time doesn’t exist globally, but an effective notion of time emerges for the subsystem. --Quantum Gravity’s Time Problem ... Quanta Magazine ... December 1, 2016

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[Carol]

Again IMHO, nothing is weird or strange. Everything that is sensed is natural and can be explained.

Why should a vision/apparition be something from another realm or a light in the sky proof of ET? These events, real or imagined are happening in our world. Therefore they are normal occurrences. If ghosts exist here then wonderful, bring it on.

"Normal" is a range like "average".  Statically things can fall out of the range of normal and average.  It is not "normal" for a bird to allow a human to get too close, and you gave an explanation of why a bird would behaving abnormally.  It is not a violation of what is normal that we are debating, but the reason for the abnormal behavior is what we are being debating. 

Paranormal phenomena is associated with energy just as everything we know to be normal is associated with energy.  The Kuykendall family phone hack seems to be done by a human, but it is not the first report of a person who has crossed over, communicating through a phone or electrical device. However, none of the reports of a possible paranormal phone call that I have heard about,  were evil.  So there is more to consider here than if people who have crossed over can communicate with us.  We must also ask if this is possible, how is it possible?

Empirical science requires material proof but when it comes to energy we may not know as much as we think we know.  As we couldn't see microbes until we had microscopes, we can not detect energy without a receiver and amplifier that is sensitive enough to detect something and amplify it enough for our crude senses to be aware of it.  Not being able to see germs led to disbelief and we can not be sure that our senses accurately perceive all there is.  A better place to start than being too sure of what of we know, is, "I don't know".  People can experience strange things and we don't always know why.

CC I am sorry but I don't understand anything said in your post. My failure to understand what was said in your post makes me think I do not belong in the forum. Like I do not belong in a country that speaks a language I do not understand.

Have you said it is possible for our consciousness to maintain an identify and ties to people and places after death, and to be entangled with them or it is impossible?