[HN Gopher] I made 50k calls to explore the telephone network
___________________________________________________________________
I made 50k calls to explore the telephone network
Author : ValtteriL
Score : 276 points
Date : 2021-06-23 09:04 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (shufflingbytes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (shufflingbytes.com)
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| I am pretty sure I recognize the hold music. I believe it is from
| uberconference.com. You likely found one of their teleconference
| lines. Each paid UC user gets their own local number. When a
| conference is active, dialing it will connect you immediately to
| the conference. (Of course, the host can chose to require a PIN,
| but I never had any unknown drop ins.) It is SO much better than
| Zoom's system.
| hdmoore wrote:
| I am the author of WarVOX (a mostly dead project these days).
| Some useful links:
|
| - WarVOX 2.0 Presentation:
| https://speakerdeck.com/hdm/derbycon-2011-acoustic-intrusion... -
| WarVOX Source: https://github.com/rapid7/warvox
|
| The US legal restrictions on wardialing are complicated and
| changes to the law made it difficult to continue the project.
|
| For fans of ToneLoc, I implemented the data format and
| visualization with my latest project (Rumble Network Discovery):
| - https://www.rumble.run/blog/subnet-grid-report/
| david_shaw wrote:
| Thank you for your contributions to WarVOX, and to so many
| other projects that advanced the security community.
|
| I never would have guessed that in 2021 we'd have headlines
| about IRC drama and wardialing! Maybe history _does_ repeat
| itself :)
| hdmoore wrote:
| No kidding and thank you!
| user3939382 wrote:
| Wow ToneLoc... that really takes me back. It's so fascinating
| to remember something for the first time in over 20 years.
| lormayna wrote:
| In one of my previous job, I created a fax spamming machine with
| the same principle: a SIP trunk and an Asterisk machine that
| bruteforce numeration blocks. After few months we collected an
| interesting database of fax numbers
| criddell wrote:
| What were you trying to do?
| andrewtbham wrote:
| Regarding: "Maple confirmation message for Clevercrossing."
|
| It sounds like they are saying "Global Crossing" which was a
| telecom company
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Crossing
| tdjsnelling wrote:
| I'm also fairly sure it says 'mobile' not 'maple'
| ubrpwnzr wrote:
| This is wonderful, any thoughts on about doing this in another
| country?
| ipunchghosts wrote:
| Maple confirmation message for Clever crossing
| fowl2 wrote:
| Mobile confirmation message for GlobalCrossing
| scrumper wrote:
| Yes this, it's Global Crossing which is a telecoms
| infrastructure company operating big sea cables and the like.
| choeger wrote:
| Yeah, that's an interesting find. Some clandestine operation,
| maybe?
| waltwalther wrote:
| Maple confirmation message for Clevercrossing sounds a lot like
| "Mobile confirmation message for global crossing..."
| freedrock87 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Crossing
| urbandw311er wrote:
| > Maple confirmation message for Clevercrossing
|
| I think this one actually says "Mobile confirmation message for
| Global Crossing". It's a slightly nasal Brit accent so I can see
| why it might have been a bit harder to decipher.
| jcuenod wrote:
| When 55150 are unanswered, the title begins to feel clickbaity.
| balancemayvary wrote:
| Having read the whole thing, I wholeheartedly disagree. I went
| in expecting something vaguely phreaky, and I was not
| disappointed.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Circa 1998 I dialed a random sample of toll-free numbers in the
| US and found that 20% of them were numeric pagers. So you could
| write a script that does something like ATDT
| 1800*******PPP[victim]
|
| where * are random digits. If you did it 100 times, the victim
| would get about 20 calls from very confused big shots who had no
| idea who was calling them. You could make 5000 of those calls a
| day so it would be quite a hassle.
| withinboredom wrote:
| This reminds me of listing a free TV on Craigslist and using a
| "victims" phone number.
| mikeodds wrote:
| I would like to know more about the zombie apocalypse number
| fogihujy wrote:
| Sounds like some PR stunt for a video game or something.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| I remember 2600 doing this a few years ago. They claimed that
| they found a number that was "weird" which encouraged
| listeners to try it out. Turns out the rabbit hole was run by
| them :)
| criddell wrote:
| Or maybe just part of a game. We recently played an at-home
| escape room game and one of the clues was a phone number. We
| dialed it and it was a recording giving information about the
| next part of the game.
| vr000m wrote:
| This was set up in 2019, the team having some fun! Thanks for
| finding us.
| Hitton wrote:
| >How I tried to avoid scaring people with ghost calls in the
| middle of the night. (...) You get a call, which you pick up, but
| the caller remains silent. After a while, the caller hangs up.
| This alone can feel threatening to some people.
|
| And the author's solution is... to delete call recordings. What
| about just playing prerecorded message explaining it? I can't
| help but question intelligence of the author.
| williesleg wrote:
| That's illegal please arrest her.
| [deleted]
| mercora wrote:
| i was told once some of the emergency lines on elevators in
| Germany could be called into once you uncovered their number and
| expected to read about something similar here but no. Still quite
| interesting of course.
|
| i wonder if these machine-machine range numbers might only accept
| calls from other machines in that range...
| ashleyn wrote:
| The elevator call boxes are surprisingly easy to "hack"
| considering they have virtually no security whatsoever and the
| industry doesn't appear to have practices that combat social
| engineering.
|
| https://hackaday.com/2019/08/10/those-elevator-emergency-cal...
| wasmitnetzen wrote:
| Coincidentally, the author works at an elevator company as a
| Product Security Engineer according to their LinkedIn
| profile.
| ok123456 wrote:
| As a pre-teen in the early 90s, I spent hundreds of hours
| wardialing most of the free-to-dial exchanges. I was lucky enough
| to have a US Robotics modem that reported the extended result
| status codes to detect voice, continuous tone, and fax lines.
|
| The results were typically for every exchange that 1% of the
| numbers were modems, 1% were fax machines, 70% were non-intercept
| recordings or humans, 0.3% were continuous tones and test
| numbers, and the rest were primarily unallocated or just did not
| complete.
| imroot wrote:
| I did the same thing -- wardialed the free-to-dial extensions
| in the small town that I grew up in.
|
| The next day, someone from the gas company knocked on my
| parents door because apparently my war-dialer (who worked
| during the day when I was at school) knocked offline their
| monitoring system.
|
| Now-a-days, I'm sure I'd be hauled off to jail instead of a
| polite request to keep the 13 year old away from the phones for
| a bit.
| ok123456 wrote:
| At one point, I got a knock on the door from some city
| detective because I dialed someone who, I guess, was the
| victim of some abuse and used *57, the code for initiating a
| trace and reporting it to an already assigned investigator.
|
| The optimal solution, I mean other than knocking off
| completely, would have been to use a reverse directory to
| blacklist all the residential subscribers.
| mindcrime wrote:
| Interesting historical tidbit... "back in the day" the
| phone company often located "interesting" numbers (modem
| numbers, test numbers, etc.) within a given exchange in the
| npa-xxx-99zz block, or maybe npa-xxx-9zzz. So a friend and
| I started war-dialing that block in our local hick town,
| and found some test loops, ANAC numbers, modem numbers for
| the switch that served our town, etc, etc. Fun stuff. Then
| one day right after one of our sessions, we got a call -
| from the phone company, basically telling us to knock it
| off before we got into big trouble. I don't remember the
| exact wording, but that was the gist of it. They knew who
| we were and where I lived, so that "put the fear of god
| into us"... briefly.
|
| Then we discovered that you could beige-box the line
| connected to a COCOT[1] sitting at a remote convenience
| store out in the middle of nowhere at 2:00am and connect a
| modem to that. One cheapo refurbished "brick" of a "laptop"
| later, and we'd go out late Sat. night / early Sunday
| morning and run our scans and login sessions to their
| switch from this remote payphone. What was nice was this
| particular phone's demarc box was the kind that had an
| RJ-11 connector in it, so we didn't even need alligator
| clips. We just plugged a long telephone extension cord in,
| parked my car about 50 feet away and sat in there, huddled
| around the "laptop" and went to work. Good times.
|
| And then sometime in the late 90's we all realized that we
| were old enough to be tried as adults if we got caught, and
| that the authorities were starting to take this stuff more
| seriously and that getting busted could have real
| consequences like not getting hired for jobs, not getting
| into college, or even jail time. I mean, Operation
| Sundevil[2] had happened almost 10 years earlier, but we
| assumed that our risk was limited living in the hick town
| we lived in, with Barney Fife cops and low-tech telco
| employees, etc. But at some point we all walked away from
| that stuff, deeming the risk of continuing to play in that
| world to be too high.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COCOT
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sundevil
| ok123456 wrote:
| The 99xx numbers were all payphones where I lived. All
| the exciting test numbers were the 00xx numbers.
| mindcrime wrote:
| On that note... am I the only one who thinks that it's
| something of a shame that payphones aren't really a thing
| anymore?
| bredren wrote:
| I also ran a war dialer I had downloaded off of a BBS. I woke
| up a lot of people. After some testing, I ran it only once
| overnight.
|
| The next day we received at least three calls from people who
| were upset about being woken up. I placed the calls from our
| family phone number, so my mom answered them.
|
| She mentioned these callers but I think she assumed they were
| confused or something. I did not explain my "experiment" and
| never got in trouble. But I did not war dial again.
|
| It ran all night so I collected a fair amount of data but did
| absolutely nothing with it. I think I thought I would find
| some secret line to the White House.
|
| Society got its revenge though. Due to spam and robocalls,
| all unknown calls go to silent for me now, I leave my
| voicemail "full" and POTS is rarely useful.
| ok123456 wrote:
| You had to set your line not to send caller-id data or use
| *82 on every call. That would stop ordinary people calling
| you back to complain.
| schoen wrote:
| Traditional wardialing was almost always looking for modems, but
| it sounds like the particular number ranges that this researcher
| selected didn't contain any modems at all?
|
| I'm sure there are still plenty of modems connected to landlines,
| not just for ISPs still offering dialup service, but also for
| SCADA systems and stuff.
| drblah wrote:
| As "rescently" as 2014 I as involved with an old computer,
| controlling a pre-processing stage for a high volume composite
| casting factory. It turned out the computer had a modem and was
| connected with its own phone line. It also had Norton pcAnyware
| for remote operation.
|
| The computer had been running since at least 1992. No one
| remembered ever getting remote support, so I left it
| disconnected just for good measure. If anyone had actually
| wanted, I think you could have done a decent amount of damage
| using that. Especially since no one knew how and what the
| software on the computer did anymore. :)
| fogihujy wrote:
| The landline network in Finland is currently in the process of
| being taken down. I suspect the amount of modems connected is
| minimal.
| pomian wrote:
| That sounds like a terrible idea. Taking apart a useful
| infrastructure, with unlimited potential for adoption, for
| purposes we don't know about yet. They took apart most of the
| rail network across Canada, especially the smaller rural
| links. And sold the land. Imagine trying to recreate an
| efficient communications system in the future, and trying to
| purchase right of ways to interconnect all the villages and
| towns across a 5000km wide country.
| fogihujy wrote:
| The guys, who removed the telephone poles and the wires in
| these parts, mentioned they paid the local power utility
| around 40EUR per year for each single pole shared with
| power lines.
|
| Mind you, we're talking (mostly) disused old copper wires,
| with signal quality too poor to deliver more than a few
| mbps over ADSL, and most of the country is covered by a
| very well-built 4G network delivering 10+ mbps pretty much
| everywhere.
|
| I agree it's sad to see working infrastructure being taken
| down, but everything was privatized in the 90's/00's and
| the new network owners have no incentive to keep paying for
| its upkeep.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| What good do some relatively poor quality phone lines do
| when we have much better coaxial and fiber around?
| slumdev wrote:
| A fax machine uses a modem of sorts, just with one specific
| protocol and purpose.
|
| I can't find anything about how WarVOX differentiates modems
| from fax machines, but I wouldn't write them off right away.
| api wrote:
| I'm surprised they found no modems. I don't see any listed. I'm
| sure there are still modems on the telco system for things like
| maintenance lines. I've seen them before in data centers to get
| into the networking hardware if everything else is down, for
| SCADA systems, to support really old credit card terminals, etc.
| mindcrime wrote:
| I think some of those "off brand" ATM machines you find in like
| convenience stores and stuff, use dial-up comms as well. So
| somewhere, out there, there are modems waiting to receive those
| calls...
| bambam24 wrote:
| Horrible act, If in US he would probably get arrested
| spullara wrote:
| I might have written a wardialer and called all my local numbers
| right after watching the theatrical release of WarGames.
| user3939382 wrote:
| That reminds me of this talk I heard a while back (I think this
| is it: https://youtu.be/Hk-21p2m8YY)
|
| The guys working on nmap scanned the entire Internet. That set
| off some serious alarms because on the target side, it looked
| like they were aware of the existence of the relationship between
| IPs/assets that were classified. If memory serves some dudes in
| black suits showed up at their door lol
| Matumio wrote:
| I heard a similar story at a university I once worked. They did
| some kind of one-off portscan in the early internet days (with
| blessing of the local providers whose range was scanned). Some
| local companies got really angry because they spent a lot of
| time investigating the source.
| zaarn wrote:
| I don't think the MiB showed up but they got some very
| aggressive mail from people who got scanned.
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| https://youtu.be/Hk-21p2m8YY?t=478
| bruce343434 wrote:
| Why does audio sound so bad over the phone? Why can we have 1Mbps
| broadband over these lines but not pristine audio?
| mindcrime wrote:
| Are you talking about a landline phone or a cell phone? There
| are pretty big differences between the two, traditionally. More
| concretely, cell phones generally have shitty sounding audio
| largely due to the compression and other manipulation of the
| signal that happens in during the overall process.
| vel0city wrote:
| Landline phones have largely been compressed data since the
| 70s, and we're still using the same compression algorithms on
| most phone networks to this day. ~~Most cell phones will use
| the exact same audio codecs as most landlines and this has
| been true for decades.~~ EDIT: Actually this isn't exactly
| true. Most "landlines" will use G.711 while most GSM cell
| phones will use AMR. Either way, both are pretty highly
| compressed audio sources but AMR lets you drag the quality
| even lower.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.711
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Multi-
| Rate_audio_code...
|
| Its been a long time since most landline phones were actually
| complete circuits from point A to B. Those old mechanical
| switches were crazy expensive to operate.
| mindcrime wrote:
| _Either way, both are pretty highly compressed audio
| sources but AMR lets you drag the quality even lower._
|
| That may be what I'm thinking of. And IIRC, regarding land-
| line phones, the issue of compression varied depending on
| whether you were placing a local call or a long-distance
| call, and varied depending on the long-distance carrier.
| But, to be fair, I haven't thought about most of this
| stuff, or studied these issues, in about 20 years, since I
| last worked for a company that did telephony work. So quite
| possibly my memory is wrong, or my knowledge is just
| outdated now.
| account42 wrote:
| > Ensured that any recording of private individuals did not end
| up outside the EU, being saved by third parties, or used to train
| machine learning models
|
| is incompatible with
|
| > To avoid listening to all recordings myself, used Google Cloud
| Speech-to-Text to transcribe the recordings
| matthewmacleod wrote:
| This is not true. Google Cloud's speech-to-text service allows
| users to select the region used to process data, and allows
| users to pay a higher rate in order to opt out of their data
| being logged.
| ezekg wrote:
| But Google's speech-to-text is the epitome of machine
| learning.
| matthewmacleod wrote:
| Yes, but if you are paying them extra to specifically opt
| out of users' data being used for that purpose, it's
| extraordinarily unlikely that they are doing so anyway.
| ChrisKnott wrote:
| But it's unlikely to train on user inputs/outputs, because
| they wouldn't know if they were correct
| tinus_hn wrote:
| They could keep the recordings and have someone verify
| whether the output is correct.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Data that customers are sending to an ML speech-to-text
| API seems like exactly the sort of data that one would
| want to save for training future models. Maybe I'm too
| cynical, but I have no confidence that Google throws away
| any data that they can get their hands on.
| matthewmacleod wrote:
| I mean you can just read their description:
|
| _By default, Speech-to-Text does not log customer audio
| data or transcripts. To help Speech-to-Text to better
| suit your needs, you can opt into the data logging
| program. The data logging program allows Google to
| improve the quality of Speech-to-Text through using
| customer data to refine its speech recognition service.
| As a benefit for opting in, you gain access to discounted
| pricing._
| eloff wrote:
| Why is the only factual answer in this thread downvoted?
|
| People love to hate on Google here apparently,
| inconvenient facts to the contrary aside.
| bingidingi wrote:
| I wouldn't be so quick to take their own description as
| fact.
| eloff wrote:
| If you can't trust anything or anyone in life, that's a
| hard way to live.
|
| Yeah, they could by lying - but they'd be opening
| themselves up to lawsuits for questionable gain. It would
| be a dumb risk/reward calculation. That's not to say
| companies (or people) don't do dumb things, but let's
| give them the benefit of the doubt until we have reason
| to believe otherwise.
| bingidingi wrote:
| I didn't say anyone or anything, in this case we're
| talking about a company that data mines as one of their
| primary business models that has been caught lying about
| the extent of data collection multiple times. They've
| also been sued successfully multiple times and have
| settled cases out of court (i.e., paid settlements
| privately).
|
| I'm not sure what happened, but there used to be a time
| where not trusting a company like Google would be the
| smart stance to take. How could anyone with that much
| power possibly be trustworthy?
| ezekg wrote:
| The tides have shifted, it seems. People now default to
| trusting big tech, trusting big govt, trusting big
| pharma. It was a lot of work, years of propaganda, but
| they did it!
| eloff wrote:
| If you don't trust them to abide by their contracts and
| agreements, don't use their services. That seems like a
| minimum requirement to do business with any party.
|
| No point complaining that other people are willing to do
| business with them.
| jacquesm wrote:
| There is this thing called unsupervised learning. It's
| quite possible to use this data for further fine tuning
| of models if the confidence outputs of the current models
| are high enough that the data is properly labeled, even
| if that labeling was done automatically. This is a quick
| way to bootstrap a small set of labelled data into a
| larger one. Whenever errors are detected later on you can
| correct for those and then retrain.
| [deleted]
| nojokes wrote:
| Avatar describes Moomin characters. These characters were first
| introduced by Swedish-speaking Finnish illustrator Tove Jansson.
| I find them very Nordic. But the characters were also adopted by
| a Dutch-Japanese animation production and they spoke Japanese. I
| found it also kind of fitting and natural.
| RIMR wrote:
| >As there are no Shodan-like search engines for the telephone
| network, I needed to do the exploration myself.
|
| in the 2000's there was a massive telephone search engine hosted
| at bellsmind.net. You could find brief descriptions of hundreds
| of thousands of phone numbers. You could just run down a list of
| 800 numbers and call the ones that looked interesting. Some
| presented you with a new dialtone. Some played weird little
| jingles. Some lead you to a real person. A few were set up by
| phone hobbyists and let you play games.
|
| At some point the law caught up with BellsMind and the database
| was taken down. The whole site is gone now - even the blog.
|
| You can see remnants of that database here (just skip through
| time to see new stuff - the rest is _mostly_ broken):
| https://web.archive.org/web/20041015131435/http://bellsmind....
|
| EDIT: This is the page for "The 944 Project", which was a crawl
| of the entire 800-944-XXXX space. Easily the best list at the
| time. Some stuff might still be there.
| https://web.archive.org/web/20050125030027/http://bellsmind....
| sgallant wrote:
| Unrelated to the post, but the thumbnail that loads at the top of
| this page is very large (and slow to load).
| https://shufflingbytes.com/images/avatar.png
| Syzygies wrote:
| Dunno what I said the last time a call violated the do-not-call
| list and woke me. They actually called back later to tell me how
| shook up they were, and that they'd been discussing my response
| with their lawyers.
|
| I don't see a difference between kidnapping one person for a
| week, and taking ten seconds away from 56,874 people. I'd support
| similar penalties.
|
| I decided to fix this problem.
|
| Phone.com is aimed at small businesses; if you have three
| extensions in your house they default to ringing separately like
| cubicles. However, any HN reader will have no trouble customizing
| their service.
|
| I have one service spanning homes on both coasts. The phone
| number I give out has a white list, or answers with a recorded
| message to press 7. Apparently this is enough to evade all
| robocalls. Successful callers ring the extensions where I'm
| scheduled to be, and the Phone.com app on my cell phone.
|
| My cell phone is otherwise set to "Do Not Disturb" so it only
| rings if you're in that address book. The Phone.com app is a bit
| clumsy (it doesn't track switching to AirPods once the call
| starts, for example) but for answering calls it works.
|
| Some legitimate businesses robodial numbers before putting on a
| human. They don't get through. Life goes on. They should know
| better than to appear to be a robocall.
| rightbyte wrote:
| So a captcha for phones? Like "press 7 to reach me". Great idea
| acctually.
| irobeth wrote:
| I have this set up at twilio with a simple Studio workflow
| and so far it defeats 100% of automated dialers:
|
| A lot of auto-dialers wait to hear a human, so to trigger
| anything listening for a response, the challenge goes "Can
| you hear me? This number is protected by Samaritan Call
| Protection" (shout-out to Person of Interest)
|
| Then about a second later, it follows "Press 5 to be
| connected."
|
| Things that dial 5 get a ring-through to my cell, things that
| don't get blackholed.
| sva_ wrote:
| >There was a single response that was present in 1074 answered
| calls (91% of all interesting answers) and that waits for the
| caller to interact with itself. It says "Tervetuloa palveluun"
| (Welcome to the service) followed by repeating "Anna tunnusluku"
| (Please give access code). The machine does not give any hint of
| what kind of service it is.
|
| I wonder whats that about.
| FascistDonut wrote:
| My first thought (influenced heavily by Hollywood) was that it
| was some kind of assassin or other criminal service. You call
| in, give the correct pass phrase and someone tells you where to
| get your vacuum repaired locally (if you know what I mean).
| jonathantf2 wrote:
| Sounds like a dial-in meetings system maybe?
| tyingq wrote:
| It appears to be a service offered by http://elisa.fi
|
| The excerpt from the manual[1], translated to English.
| Call the number __________________________ You will hear
| the bulletin "Welcome to the service" You will hear the
| message "Enter the passcode"
|
| http://esco.elisa.fi/rest/esco/blob/yritysten-asiakastuki/Va...
| aaron695 wrote:
| Back in the day, you'd have to ring up or write (using stamps)
| to get the user manuals. Or dumpster dive, which the one time
| we tried it kinda sucked since we expected manuals but got all
| the pass-codes instead which ended the game.
|
| Google "Tervetuloa palveluun" "Anna tunnusluku" see where it
| leads. You'll need Google translate as you get into it.
| voiper1 wrote:
| Quite possibly calling cards or conference lines. Recording
| voice prompts is "hard" so many just try to make due with the
| included prompts in asterix/freeswitch.
| jdalgetty wrote:
| Many years ago I did something similar with a piece of software
| called ToneLoc. I called every number in my my city. The results
| back then were much more interesting as there were so many more
| modems and dial in networks.
| ananonymoususer wrote:
| According to his data, no modems were present. It could be that
| he classified modems as facsimile, but he doesn't say.
| doctorshady wrote:
| There's people who do this sort of thing in the US network
| regularly: https://www.twitter.com/shadytel
|
| Some of what can be expected to be found in telco test ranges:
| https://pastebin.com/7KAuZmQq
| VeninVidiaVicii wrote:
| That's a huge amount of people who didn't answer. Phones are
| basically worthless to get ahold of people -- I called about 40
| students last spring for interviews and got only one answer,
| myself.
| lorlou wrote:
| Calling people is just rude. "Drop everything you are doing and
| pay attention to me". No thanks, text me instead and I'll look
| at it when I want.
| npteljes wrote:
| I feel the same way. I feel like I'm expected to be a
| business during opening hours. Also sucks that many people
| don't leave a text message after they call unanswered. Did
| someone die, did something good happen, was it a pocket dial?
| Call back and find out!
| gravypod wrote:
| Did you first leave a voicemail, text, or email as well? Most
| of my time I am busy. Either sleeping, working, relaxing (TV,
| games, friends), and only a small small fraction of my time am
| I doing nothing to such a degree that if pick up an unknown
| number call. Especially in 2020s due to spam callers.
|
| I've noticed some people saying "kids don't pick up phones
| anymore" and really, no, we don't. There's more efficient and
| reliable communication modes available. If I could pay for a
| sperate set of phone numbers that were text-only, I would have
| that instead.
| mindcrime wrote:
| _I 've noticed some people saying "kids don't pick up phones
| anymore" and really, no, we don't._
|
| Kids? Hell, I'm 47 and that's my policy as well. I basically
| don't answer unsolicited phone calls unless it's my dad or
| one of a very small number of close friends or family
| members. And honestly, even that's not guarantee that I will
| pick up at times.
| erdo wrote:
| Same (44) phone calls are for recruiters and marketing
| spam, so if I'm not currently looking for a job, the phone
| doesn't get answered
| burnished wrote:
| Spam calls have made the telephone part of my mobile computing
| platform pretty much worthless, and it makes me dread
| interviewing and needing to pick up every incoming call. I wish
| we could all get on the same page and just switch completely to
| text or email and arrange calls in that fashion.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| I use my iPhone's voicemail transcription to screen most of
| my calls
| macintux wrote:
| That seems to be part of the problem with political polling
| lately: practically no one answers the phone (and of course not
| many of those who do are willing to participate).
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| Spam calls have ruined phone service. I don't answer calls that
| I don't recognize, sorry you'll have to leave a message.
| bombcar wrote:
| Note that he intentionally picked numbers that were unlikely to
| be personal phone numbers.
| petercooper wrote:
| The "exception" music example isn't really an exception. It's
| Passages by Kenny G which is about as hold music as it gets, it's
| just heavily modulated.
| ashleyn wrote:
| The "unknown machine" sounds like dtmf tones + pulse tones. It's
| anyone's guess what the actual meaning of the numbers are, but
| the tone+pulse encoding suggests a super legacy, perhaps
| proprietary automated system that you'd call up to get the status
| of something - maybe factory machinery or a power plant, but
| really it's anyone's guess. Pulse dialing was still somewhat
| common until the mid 80s so this system is potentially upwards of
| 40 years old.
| teeray wrote:
| It reminded me of alarm central station protocols. The earliest
| (e.g. 3/1 and 4/2) use pulse, and the later ones (Contact ID,
| SIA) use DTMF [0]. These systems are still installed and relied
| upon by alarms today. It does seem the industry is finally
| coming around to LTE, since a copper pair is basically a
| fiction we present to alarms at this point.
|
| [0] https://www.emergency24.com/cp/formats.aspx has a cursory
| overview of many protocols
| roliver wrote:
| Could it be an auto-answer from a Telex machine?
|
| https://youtu.be/lCZmVXGyVQQ?t=15
|
| I have no idea what they sound like on a telephone line though.
| GrumpyNl wrote:
| Sounds like broken audio file on the other end.
| mindcrime wrote:
| See also, /r/weirdnumbers and, if you're into that sort of thing
| (that is, exploring the phone network), /r/phreaking
|
| Old-skool phreaking[0] (eg, using blue boxes and red boxes) is
| mostly dead (at least in the US and most "first world" countries.
| _Maybe_ there is some vestige of in-band signaling left somewhere
| else) but there is still some fun to be had exploring phones and
| phone networks.
|
| Modern day phreaking is more about GSM sniffing[1], messing with
| the SS7 network[2][3][4], using SCTP[5]/SIGTRAN stuff[6], etc.
| etc. But, at least for the land-line / PSTN network, even some of
| the old "colored boxes"[7] still do useful things. You can always
| beige-box a landline phone, violet-boxes should still work, I
| think a gold-box would still work, etc.
|
| If you want to dig deeper into how the PSTN works, a good, fun
| book is _Understanding Telephone Electronics_ [8] by Carr,
| Winder, and Bigelow. Another interesting one is _Digital
| Telephony_ [9] by Bellamy. Another "oldie but goodie" is _Voice
| and Data Communications Handbook_ [10] by Bates and Gregory.
|
| Also, don't ask me how or why I know any of this stuff... :-)
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phreaking
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzyuioto4y8
|
| [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JCusqL-Gdk
|
| [3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wu_pO5Z7Pk
|
| [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_System_No._7
|
| [5]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_Control_Transmission_Pr...
|
| [6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIGTRAN
|
| [7]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phreaking_box
|
| [8]: https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Telephone-
| Electronics-J...
|
| [9]: https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Telephony-
| Telecommunications-...
|
| [10]: https://www.amazon.com/Voice-Communications-Handbook-
| McGraw-...
| alcover wrote:
| > don't ask me how or why I know any of this stuff...
|
| I think I know. You were a _Ghost in the Wire_ !
| mindcrime wrote:
| Funny you would bring that up. So, all joking aside... my
| introduction to the world of phreaking / hacking was
| primarily reading _Cyberpunk_ by John Markoff and Katie
| Haffner about 1995 or so. I was immediately in awe of Kevin
| Mitnick and his cadre of phreaker friends, and those were the
| guys /gals me and my little circle of phreaker friends most
| wanted to emulate. KM was one of my heroes back in those days
| (and truth be told, I guess he still is to a degree).
|
| What is interesting is that it was only later that I came to
| know that that book was very controversial, is of doubtful
| veracity in parts, and may portray KM in a somewhat
| inaccurate light. Nonetheless, it launched me on my path to a
| (short and inauspicious) "career" as a phone phreak. But I've
| remained fascinated with Kevin's story all the way to the
| current day, and actually just finished reading _The
| Cyberthief and the Samurai_ and a couple of other books about
| his story, which I had not read before.
| therealcamino wrote:
| The author says that lots of measures were taken not to wake
| people up in the middle of the night, but that despite those
| efforts 3 people were. Wouldn't the most obvious method have been
| not to dial numbers at night local time?
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Its very unlikely they didn't think of that. Not all humans
| attached to phone numbers reside in the physical area of the
| area code.
| mudita wrote:
| "WarVOX spent 60 seconds on every call, whether it was
| answered or not. This resulted in a wardialing speed of 1
| call/minute. For 56874 calls, this means roughly 40 days
| calling day and night."
|
| Seems like he did actually call at night times.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| I think given their efforts to avoid calling people at
| their local night, it's safe to assume "day and night"
| refers to the caller's local night.
| burnished wrote:
| my reading was that OP took efforts not to call people
| but still rang at all hours. I think your reading and
| assumption are mistaken.
| Pick-A-Hill2019 wrote:
| 56784 (calls) / 40 (days) = ~1422, round down to 1400 for
| 'easy math'
|
| 1400 / 24 (hours per day) = ~58 per hour (round up to 60)
|
| 60 / 60 (seconds) = 1 per minute so nope, he was
| hammering at it 24/7 (unless my maths is totally wrong
| which is always possible).
| mkr-hn wrote:
| It's entirely possible.
| wang_li wrote:
| > The author says that lots of measures were taken not to wake
| people up in the middle of the night, but that despite those
| efforts 3 people were.
|
| It's pretty presumptuous to assume calling in the middle of the
| night is a problem as opposed to calling when people are
| asleep. Which could be any hour of the day.
|
| >Wouldn't the most obvious method have been not to dial numbers
| at night local time?
|
| There's a super obvious method to avoid all the issues. Don't
| robocall people at all. This person placed about 20k phone
| calls between 10pm and 6am. Whether someone answered or not, a
| ringing phone waking a person a significant intrusion. They
| also called people and recorded them without their consent.
|
| Here's an easy rule of thumb: in the absence of explicit
| informed consent don't experiment with other people's stuff.
| It's amazing that there are adults who don't understand this.
|
| Also, a brief search on the internet suggests Finland is a two
| party consent state for recording phone calls.
| swashboon wrote:
| not all people only sleep at night.
| nemetroid wrote:
| True, but the author admits to waking people in the middle of
| the night.
| dahfizz wrote:
| In the middle of the receiver's night. It is impossible to
| know with 100% certainty the local time of the person just
| by their phone number.
| edoceo wrote:
| Why not simply call and ask what time it is?
| halikular wrote:
| Because it will take much longer if you restrict calling time
| to the day.
| kzrdude wrote:
| He should have done it. He could have reserved just 8 hours
| for "night" to do the minimum, so he'd only use 50% more time
| then (still have 16 hours per day to make calls).
| geoduck14 wrote:
| Oh hey! I have experience with this! I used to analyze data for
| a call center. We had a law that prevented us from calling
| people at night.
|
| This is hard because of the following reasons: Zip codes and
| time zones don't align well (looking at you, West Florida!)
|
| Area codes and zip codes don't align well
|
| Area codes and time zones don't align well
|
| People move!
| jrnichols wrote:
| I have a north Texas area code but live on the west coast
| again, and the number of idiot robo-dialers I get calling me
| early in the morning is frustrating.
|
| My phone is now on Do Not Disturb most of the time because of
| these. Even with the do not call list, Hiya, and Nomorobo.
| wackro wrote:
| There is only one time zone in finland
| flatline wrote:
| But that Finnish phone number could belong to someone in
| England.
| dagw wrote:
| Who was vacationing in Thailand.
| PostThisTooFast wrote:
| But took a day trip to Australia.
| [deleted]
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Area codes mean little in the mobile phone era. Just tells
| you where a person lived when they were a teenager or
| otherwise first got their own phone.
| fps_doug wrote:
| Not in Germany. The mobile network has distinct numbers.
| You can have a land line number mapped to a cellphone, but
| it's rare these days, don't know anybody who does this. It
| was popular back when calling cellphones was more expensive
| than land lines.
| PinguTS wrote:
| "Area" codes in German cellphones were never the area but
| the cellphone provider. But that became none sense, when
| you could move your number to any other cellphone
| provider like I did. I own the same cell phone number
| since 1998 and was with almost any of the cellphone
| providers (except QUAM and E-Plus).
|
| Actual area codes in Germany are always area codes. I
| doesn't matter if they are mapped to the cellphone or to
| SIP. When you make an address change, then your area code
| changes. Happened to my area code. But moved it to a
| friends house in the same area, so that I can keep it
| (illegally). Because I "own" that number as well since
| about 1998.
| wolrah wrote:
| You can't just port the number to a VoIP provider and
| keep it regardless of location?
|
| I work for a VoIP provider so when I got rid of my
| secondary phone I just ported it to my system and now I
| can do whatever I want with it.
|
| A bunch of my clients have numbers from all over the
| state or even the country that route in to their one
| actual office.
|
| It seems really stupid for that to be legally prohibited.
| PinguTS wrote:
| Yes, according to the rules of Bundesnetzagentur, the SIP
| provider needs to give you a new phone number from the
| within the new area, when you give them the new address.
| Also for SIP providers the rule is, the area code is only
| for the customers in which area they are.
| phreeza wrote:
| I moved away from Germany and I still have a German
| landline number via SIP. Are you saying this is illegal?
| PinguTS wrote:
| If you inform your SIP provider about your new address,
| then they need to give you a new number. If you number
| has the "area" code specially for SIP, then it is not a
| problem. But if you have an actual area code, then this
| is not allowed according to the rules of
| Bundesnetzagentur.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Country codes still matter, for the most part.
|
| In the EU pretty much every nation has their own country
| code. Which means 555-555-5555 will map differently
| depending on the nation you are in.
| jasonjayr wrote:
| Oh, and don't forget, phones lines can be forwarded elsewhere
| as well. (hopefully the law's text said "area code time
| zone", and had some wording against tomfoolery like making a
| forwarding service that sent calls wherever)
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| irrational wrote:
| People move is a big one. Since smartphones became popular,
| I've noticed that people tend to keep the same phone number
| from where they got their first phone number. So I will
| receive calls from all over the place, except they really are
| all local calls from people that now live in my town. So when
| I see that a call is from Wisconsin, that is meaningless
| since it could be from someone living down the street.
| spinax wrote:
| When I left a previous state, I paid to port the local area
| code number away from (major cell carrier) over to Google
| Voice (I've had this number some 20 years now). Many of the
| folks I work with (tech sector) have cell numbers from
| different states, having moved into this state only for
| work and some day plan to leave/return to their original
| home.
| MivLives wrote:
| And now I know that if I get a call from my numbers zipcode
| and I don't have them added it's a robocall!
| bigwavedave wrote:
| Yeah, I've moved a couple of times and still have the phone
| number I got in the second state I lived in. The nice thing
| is that, for the most part, the only people calling me from
| that state's area code are robocallers who are spoofing
| what they hope is my local area code. I very rarely answer
| unknown numbers anyway, but seeing these kinds of area
| codes on my caller ID almost guarantee it's a spam call.
| karmakaze wrote:
| How many hours off can you be with area codes or zip codes? I
| would have thought that might be about an hour not really
| more than that.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| There is no difference between mobile and land line numbers
| in North America. There's no national "mobile only" prefix
| (like in many EU countries), and no "your number changes if
| you move to a new location": phone numbers are owned by
| carriers, and you get whatever number your local carrier
| branch was allocated (which will have the local area code).
| That's it, the idea that "area codes" are actually location
| indicators is basically an anachronism from the land line
| days.
|
| If someone has a mobile phone, which is everyone, and that
| phone has a Toronto number because they bought the phone
| plan when they lived in Toronto, then they move to
| Vancouver, they get to keep their number as long as they
| stay with their carrier. If you then look at that number
| and go "the area code is Toronto, 8am is an acceptable time
| to call that number", now you're calling someone at 5am.
|
| Area codes in North America, by and large, _only_ tells you
| which city the carrier 's branch was located when the phone
| plan got set up. Canada and the US are huge countries made
| of mostly empty space with pockets of life spaced far, far
| apart, and people move from pocket to pocket _all the
| time_.
| syrrim wrote:
| >phone numbers are owned by carriers
|
| >they get to keep their number as long as they stay with
| their carrier.
|
| You can move phone numbers between carriers.
| vel0city wrote:
| I was about to say, since 2003 in the US wireless number
| portability is _required_. You as a consumer have a
| _right_ to port your number from one carrier to another,
| they 're only supposed to be able to charge fees related
| to their costs which is usually $0.
|
| https://www.fcc.gov/general/wireless-local-number-
| portabilit...
| sunshineforever wrote:
| Now with services such as TextNow, when you sign up for
| the number they simply let you choose whatever area code
| you'd like.
| ohyeshedid wrote:
| FWIW, Cell carriers will do this as well. They don't
| require you to take a local number when signing up for
| service.
| h2odragon wrote:
| > To avoid listening to all recordings myself, used Google Cloud
| Speech-to-Text to transcribe the recordings, and then used the
| transcriptions
|
| ... That's a lot of trust to place in google. Do all this work to
| gather data, then throw it away and analyze what google did to
| the data instead.
| JCBird1012 wrote:
| To be fair, most of the original recordings (with caveats
| listed there) were linked at the bottom, so I presume that the
| author still has them around - that's hardly "throwing" them
| away.
|
| I don't think the goal of using Google speech-to-text was to
| solely use the transcriptions for the rest of the project, but
| you've gotta find some way to sift through those recordings and
| pull out the interesting bits. I think that was the right
| choice providing additional context and picking out the good
| stuff. Imagine having to listen to ~28 hours of recordings (60
| sec * 1724 answered calls) when there's a service that can
| easily turn those recordings into a more easily consumable
| format, and then you can go back and listen to the neat stuff.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Excellent points. Still, it puts a lot of trust in the
| service, the analysis is of their results not the original
| data.
|
| Furthermore, it _feels_ like cheating, dammit. We dialed half
| of an area code in a full a week back when, and didn 't even
| have the luxury of _recording equipment_.
| iamgopal wrote:
| The amount of way google could have data, this is just peanuts.
| turminal wrote:
| All your data are belong to us!
| [deleted]
| mercora wrote:
| is "illegal termination" when you funnel calls via VoIP to some
| local mobile network operators using sim cards usually provided
| to customers? like lets say to avoid billing it like a call into
| another network?
| Scoundreller wrote:
| That's one example, yes.
|
| In some places that may be illegal, in other places, just a
| breach of contract. Lots of interesting contraptions on
| AliExpress with 64 SIMs in it.
|
| Other times, international traffic is supposed to pay more than
| domestic traffic (governments use it as a source of revenue),
| but it works on the honour system at some telecoms.
|
| Or someone is letting your traffic appear as coming from a
| telecom's no-cost peer, even though you're not their peer and
| are supposed to be buying termination.
|
| In these cases, you're unlikely to get working callerID because
| that would make it too easy to trace the true origination.
| buzer wrote:
| > I was very surprised to hear this bizarre message about the end
| of the world and a zombie apocalypse when listening to the
| recordings.
|
| So that's the reason someone called, we thought zombie apocalypse
| had already started...is what I would like to say, but reality is
| a bit more boring. It's one of our test numbers that we used for
| integration testing one of our call center integrations for our
| WebRTC monitoring platform (https://www.callstats.io) and someone
| decided to have a bit of fun with call flow :)
|
| If you had pressed 1, you would have got a message about choosing
| to be rescued and that the agents take long tea breaks.
|
| (disclaimer: I work at 8x8 on the callstats product)
| adflux wrote:
| This is perfect
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| really?
| wpietri wrote:
| The author also posted an interesting bit on setting up a
| VOIP/SIP honeypot: https://shufflingbytes.com/posts/sip-honeypot/
|
| Turns out is a ton of automated activity looking to make money
| via poorly secured phone systems.
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