So Nynex, hardly the most popular local telephone company in America, knew it was in for a scrap when it recently unveiled a plan to deprive some Manhattanites of their treasured 212 area code--arguably the only local telephone code that is recognised from Tokyo to Tomsk.

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Kosovo still does not have an international telephone dialling code - and, unlike other Balkan countries, its citizens cannot travel visa-free to the European Union.

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It allows smartphone owners to make in-store purchases by typing in a telephone number and personal ID code at the cash register.

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Instead, the investigators said, the data was kept in a hashed form - in other words the telephone numbers were transformed into a short code and stored.

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The new console looks like it has been constructed from items out of a junk shop, including an old typewriter, a telephone, pressure gauges and a Morse code machine.

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"He said he was calling from Miranshah in North Waziristan and the telephone number used to make the call carried an area code common to the Waziristan tribal area and Bannu, the adjoining district in the North West Frontier Province, " the paper said.

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When I botched telephone number selection during setup, however, I had to call Companion tech support for a code to access the dialing screen and the correct numbers.

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