[vorlon24]

Here you go:

A familiar form of jape applied especially to newcomers in a social group is something known as a "fool's errand": a prank in which the victim is lured into attempting to complete a ridiculous task that to the uninitiated sounds just plausible enough to be valid.

The message quoted above might be considered a type of fool's errand, a joke created to see how many people are gullible enough to call friends and try opening their car doors with cell phones.

Many new cars now come equipped with "Remote Keyless Entry" (or "Keyless Remote" or "Keyless Entry" or "Remote Entry") systems (also known as RKE systems), a mechanism which allows automobile owners to lock and unlock their car doors remotely (from up to about 300 feet away) by pressing buttons on transmitting devices small enough to be carried on keychains.


But what if you accidentally lock your remote entry device in your car along with your keys? (A plausible scenario, as many people carry them together on the same keyring.) If you own a car equipped with a system such as OnStar you can contact an operator and have OnStar unlock your vehicle remotely through a signal sent via a cellular network, but otherwise you have to call a locksmith or get a friend or relative to bring an extra set of keys out to you.

Enter the idea of the poor man's OnStar. No need to pay for a fancy car-unlocking service: just use a cell phone to call someone who has access to your spare RKE device and tell him to point it at the phone and press the "UNLOCK" button. You simultaneously point the cell phone at your car door, and voilà — you're in! A nifty solution . . . at least it would be if it weren't completely implausible, the equivalent of a fool's errand for our modern technological age.

Relaying remote entry system signals via telephone might work if the signals were sound-based, but they're not. An RKE system transmits an encrypted data stream to a receiver inside the automobile via an RF (radio frequency) signal, a signal that can't be effectively relayed via cell phone. (In any event, RKE systems and cell phones typically operate on completely different frequencies; the former in the 300 MHz range and the latter in the 800 MHz range.)

We don't know whether whoever created this message was deliberately joking or earnestly mistaken, but the vision of stranded motorists vainly holding cell phones up to their cars in the hopes of unlocking them is an amusing one. One might as well suggest that a spare piano key could be used to gain entry to a locked automobile.