text: These have been trying times for Siri. 
   
   Not only has she been having to work overtime answering mundane questions posed by those with nothing better to think or do, she's even been helping Santa get off his large, lazy bottom and do his job. 
   
   It is, perhaps, unsurprising that she seems to have finally lost her temper. For, as 12-year-old Charlie Le Quesne picked up a demonstration iPhone 4S in a branch of Tesco in the UK, Siri finally let her frustrations out. (Yes, I know she puts on a man's voice in the U.K., but that's just because the Brits have, well, certain issues.) 
   
   What lurks within Siri's temperamental soul? (Credit: Screenshot by Lance Whitney/CNET) 
   
   According to the Sun, the conversation went like this. 
   
   Le Quesne to Siri: "How many people are there in the world?" 
   
   Siri to Le Quesne: "Shut the f*** up, you ugly t***." 
   
   You might imagine that young Le Quesne's mom, Kim, was somewhat taken aback to hear someone in authority talk like that. 
   
   She told the Sun (I know, I know): "I thought I must be hearing things. So we asked again and the same four-letter stuff blared out." 
   
   I am in at least two minds to reveal how it was that Siri might have suddenly turned Smutti. However, the staff at Tesco reportedly said that some amusing individual had entered this rather inelegant phrase as the user's name in the set-up instructions. 
   
   Oh, what have we started here? 
   
   Tesco, somewhat unused to this level of controversy in its pristine stores, told the Sun that the company had launched an investigation and had sent the phone back to Apple to be diagnosed. 
   
   Which leaves just one question dangling about one's lips: Where might the phone have been tampered with? Might it have been in the store itself? 
   
   Or might someone, somewhere along the manufacturing and delivery process, have decided that this was the way to make for a fun Christmas? ||||| When it comes to the iPhone 4S's voice-controlled personal assistant Siri, you'd better be careful what you ask for. 
   
   "I thought I must be hearing things," Le Quesne's mother told the Sun. But when they asked again "the same four-letter stuff blared out." 
   
   CNET's Chris Matyszczyk offered a tongue-in-cheek explanation for the outburst: that Siri had lost patience answering mundane questions and had "finally lost her temper." 
   
   According to the store's managers, however, Siri may have been tricked by a group of pranksters into thinking the rude phrase was in fact the name of its owner. Apparently, this can be done in the set-up instructions. Why Siri would answer the question of how many people are in the world with the phone owner's name, however, is another question. 
   
   Of course we already knew that Siri has a somewhat dark sense of humor. S*** That Siri Says is a whole blog devoted to the A.I.'s amusing answers to straight-forward questions and straight answers to strange questions. When one iPhone owner told Siri, "I need to bury a body," she responded with a list of possibilities that included reservoirs, metal foundries, mines, dumps and swamps. While Siri's answers might verge on snarky at times (try asking it to marry you), they stay clear of R-rated territory. Ask it to "talk dirty to me," and Siri replies, "Humus. Compost. Pumice. Silt. Gravel." 
   
   In addition, it was discovered that Siri showed an apparent preference for pro-life pregnancy centers over clinics that provided abortions. Although at the time an Apple spokesperson told The New York Times, "These are not intentional omissions meant to offend anyone. It simply means that as we bring Siri from beta to a final product, we find places where we can do better, and we will in the coming weeks." 
   
   To find out more about how Siri composes its answers, check out SmartPlanet's step-by-step explanation here. ||||| This Article has a component height of 0. The sidebar size is none.
target: – An eager 12-year-old experienced the techno-shock of a lifetime when Apple's Siri voice system told him to "shut the f*** up" the other day. His question: "How many people are there in the world?" The boy, Charlie Le Quesne, had grabbed a demo iPhone while shopping with his mom in Coventry, England. The phone even cursed him a second time when he posed the question again, the Huffington Post reports via the Sun. "I thought I must be hearing things," his mother said. Why the bad attitude? Maybe Siri "finally lost her temper," muses Chris Matyszczyk on CNET. A more likely explanation was offered by store managers: that a prankster had tricked the phone into thinking the insult was the user's name. Siri has been known to sport a dry sense of humor, however. One user who told it "I need to hide a body" was given a list of grisly locales, including reservoirs, swamps, and metal foundries, TheVerge reports. (See Apple's response to Siri's "blind spot" on abortion queries.)