[HN Gopher] Installing a payphone in my house
___________________________________________________________________
Installing a payphone in my house
Author : itsjloh
Score : 985 points
Date : 2022-06-02 10:20 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (bert.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (bert.org)
| mwexler wrote:
| Nicely written. Humour comes in swift and silently, and makes
| this a really enjoyable read. I was looking for more info about
| how to beat the quarter-checker, but even without that, worth the
| time.
| usr1106 wrote:
| In the 1990s credit cards were pretty uncommon in Europe. Most
| shops that a student would shop at did not accept any.
|
| When I visited the US I was shocked that you could do all kind of
| business by just telling or typing in the number on the phone. I
| soon learned that cheaper businesses (e.g international calls at
| discount rates) did not accept my foreign card. However, more
| expensive businesses (like AT&T to stay at the same example) just
| accepted the number, no questions asked. CVV wasn't in use. A
| concept that exceeded my imagination, credit card numbers are not
| that secret, everone working at a checkout could collect them.
| When reading this I guess they would have also accepted phantasy
| numbers with a matching checksum.
|
| My conclusion back then was: For those operating at comfortable
| margins some loss by fraud is just priced in. Those offering
| cheap prices don't have the luxury to do so, so they reject
| everything that is not easy to verify, like e.g. foreign cards.
| Mobil1 wrote:
| I found that if you had 2 adjacent pay phones you could make free
| calls by inverting the 2 handsets and placing the call on one
| phone, but putting your money in the other so the sound of the
| money dropping would make the operator think that you had paid
| for your call. Your money would be returned to you when you hung
| up the second phone.
| jjeaff wrote:
| Was it literally just the sound of money dropping that
| validated the call? Presumably this was before automatic
| switching and a live operator had to connect you?
| Animats wrote:
| Automatic switching came decades before automated _billing_.
| See "Operator Assisted Toll Dialing" (1949).[1] The
| operators are tone-dialing calls, but the billing system is
| entirely paper based.
|
| Billing automation came in the 1960s, but didn't involve
| computers yet. Special purpose hardware, paper tape, and
| punched cards were involved.
|
| [1] https://vimeo.com/390769230
| brk wrote:
| No, there were tones that the phone sent for each coin value.
| IIRC they were fairly brief and somewhat "blippy", unlike the
| flat DTMF tones. Back in the day you could build a Red Box
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_box_(phreaking)) that
| would simulate these tones.
| nahmean wrote:
| At one point it was. You could even record the sound on a
| handheld recorder and play it back. But it hasn't worked in a
| long while. Pay phones mitigated this in a low tech way - by
| software muting the handset.
|
| Edit: oh yeah, and after that, you'd just call the operator
| and tell them the keys were sticky and to dial the number for
| you, then you'd "insert the coins" by playing the tones.
|
| Well, or you just third party billed the call to someone you
| didn't know. That worked too.
| Slartie wrote:
| > Pay phones mitigated this in a low tech way - by software
| muting the handset.
|
| So does this mean that there was a dedicated second
| microphone hidden somewhere within the payphone body, that
| would continue to record the sound the coins made?
| baobrien wrote:
| In early 3-slot North American payphones, there literally
| was a bell that the coins struck and a transducer inside
| the payphone body.
| genewitch wrote:
| The coins weren't recorded, it was just a short tone that
| indicated 5C/. A quarter was five quick tones. A dime
| two.
|
| I used to mess with the proctor test set (dialing 117 in
| the US at least on GTE) and only ever convinced it I
| inserted a nickel even with many tries using a digital
| recorder or a computer speaker.
| kfrzcode wrote:
| "bobwehadthebabyitsaboy"
| jjulius wrote:
| Oh hey, nostalgia.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| After this mitigation was put into place enterprising
| phreaks would take a lighter to the microphone part of the
| handset, twist it open, cut the yellow wire, and redbox
| away.
| dhosek wrote:
| It was automated. The coin drop sound (or at least what was
| generated for the wire by the phone) was what drove the
| switch. All signals on POTS lines were sounds (thus the tones
| for pressing buttons or the numbers of clicks from dial
| phones).
| CaliforniaKarl wrote:
| In the beginning, it was a real bell! One bell for 5C/,
| rung twice for 10C/, and a separate gong sound for 25C/.
| wolfgang42 wrote:
| There's a ( _very_ old, by now) Henry Morgan sketch I
| remember about an expensive long distance call: after an
| interminable series of dings and bongs, the operator
| admits that she lost count and has to return the coins so
| he can try again.
|
| (Once they straighten out the funds, there's a series of
| about six different operators needed to get the call
| across the country; all talking to, over, and past each
| other. "Hello, Hyannis, this is Truro. I have a call for
| Los Angeles! Westwood 5689." -- "Hello Wellfleet, this is
| Hyannis. I have a call for Los Angeles. Westwood 5689."
| -- "Hello Boston, this is Wellfleet. I have a call for
| Los Angeles, Westwood 5698." -- "No, Westwood 56 _89_."
| -- "Who was that, Wellfleet?" -- "That was Truro,
| Boston." -- "No, _I'm_ Truro. That was Hyannis."
| Meanwhile, the caller: "Are we still in Massachusetts??")
| lstamour wrote:
| Track 11 at https://archive.org/details/lp_the-best-of-
| henry-morgan-exce...
|
| Quite funny! :)
| wolfgang42 wrote:
| Thanks! I tried finding a link, but your search-fu is
| apparently better than mine :-)
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| In my country it was 2200hz for a nickle, two for a dime,
| three for a quarter, and anything bigger just didn't fit
| hibbelig wrote:
| I once made a call from a pay phone and after I was done it
| rang. I picked up. A very nice lady told me I had not paid
| enough and whether I could please put in another quarter or
| whatever. That was an interesting experience.
|
| In my mind I thought that pay phones were fully automated,
| especially the count the money part.
| avg_dev wrote:
| You can't leave us in suspense, we need to know whether you
| coughed up the dough or not.
| hibbelig wrote:
| :-) Of course I did.
| theginger wrote:
| Someone across the street could have been messing with you.
| This sounds like it was from a time where you could ask to
| borrow a bars phone to make a free local call and it could
| be worth someone's while crossing the street to collect a
| quarter.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| lmfao that's hilarious, you just redboxed a phone with another
| adjacent phone
| mattlondon wrote:
| I remember doing something similar to get ISP access in the early
| 90s. Like AOL various ISPs would be bundled into CDs/floppies and
| offer a free trial.
|
| One of them did not validate the card number, so you could just
| type in 000000000000 or whatever and your free trial was enabled
| for a month or whatever and then be auto cancelled when they
| tried to bill for your first month after the trial. In the UK
| though local calls were not free and charged by the minute.
|
| I think that ISP also bundled a <1.0 version of Netscape's
| Mozilla (0.8?) on their disk which was nice as otherwise I only
| had mosaic.
|
| Good times.
|
| Edit: I think the version of netscape/Mozilla was this one - I
| distinctly remember the "M" logo that would rotate as pages
| loaded slowly on a 14.4 modem:
| https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/uploaded/old-software/web-br....
|
| Curious that it was called "mosaic netscape" - I don't remember
| that.
| brk wrote:
| When the first Palm VII's came out
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_VII) I wanted to see how
| responsive the wireless connectivity was before buying one. The
| local Staples store had a functional demo unit, but it had no
| subscription. So I tried signing up with random info, when it
| got to entering a card number, I entered 4111 1111 1111 1111,
| which passes the basic validation checks for a visa (and is
| obviously easy to remember). The device activated immediately
| and I was able to try some live data transfers. It worked for
| about 3 days (I went back to check it out of curiosity).
|
| Presumably the activation of service happened locally in the
| device, or with minimal cross-checking with the backend billing
| service.
|
| A few months later I tried it on another unit and the number no
| longer worked for activation :)
| RektBoy wrote:
| What do you do for living now? B & E ?
| bmitc wrote:
| That's a really awesome story with a great opening, middle, and
| especially the end, if one ignores the adolescent fraud. I think
| it really highlights the simple joy that technology that
| literally just works can bring. I'm around the same age as the
| author, a little younger in fact, but there's just something
| about today's Internet and a lot of the overwhelming amount of
| technology that just isn't fun or memorable. From game consoles
| to land lines to various other things, there were pieces of
| technology that just worked and worked well. Of course, there was
| technology that didn't work well, but I think part of the tragedy
| is that a lot of technology that worked well has been replaced by
| "better" technology that doesn't work well.
| soheil wrote:
| > "better" technology that doesn't work well
|
| That's a very crude way of saying it and I 100% agree. The
| digital revolution promised to make analog world more precise,
| but we ended up having so much complexity as a result and the
| benefits gained by precision at low level is replaced by ever
| increasing chaos at high level. We seem to think having many
| things rendered simultaneously and faster are inherently so
| good not just for things like games that we built frameworks
| like React that run big parts of the web.
|
| It's as if we decided increasing entropy isn't so bad after
| all.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Survivorship bias I think is at play here (especially with our
| own memories being infallible). I also remember a TON of shit
| being a pain in the ass and not working well at all.
| unityByFreedom wrote:
| > That's a really awesome story with a great opening, middle,
| and especially the end, if one ignores the adolescent fraud.
|
| That admission was the best part! Everyone here was not goody
| two shoes in their teens. Accepting this reality can release
| people from expectations of perfection. Perhaps ironically,
| kids' behavior can improve when they feel their imperfections
| are airable.
| stevenjgarner wrote:
| Going through the grueling immigration process, Homeland
| Security eventually sits across the table from you, looks you
| in the eye, and asks "have you ever committed a crime for
| which you have not been convicted?"
| JackFr wrote:
| In the grand scheme of things, what he did is hardly the end
| of the world.
|
| And yet, it still doesn't sit quite right with me. I suppose
| its because there doesn't seem to be the slightest hint in
| the writing that credit card fraud is wrong, or that it's
| even something you shouldn't do. I looked for it.
|
| And to add to that, what he did wasn't 'a hack', it wasn't
| particularly clever. It was just theft of services and a lot
| of lying because he didn't have something he wanted.
|
| I think if he would describe it as a youthful indiscretion or
| something similar it would go a long way.
| more_corn wrote:
| Sure, but imagine a kid 16, reading 2600, figuring things
| out. Trying to get access to the best tool for figuring
| things out. I think a lot of people transgressed at that
| age. I, for one, benefitted from being granted a bit of
| leeway. My transgressions actually taught me to not WANT to
| break the law which I think is better than just not
| breaking the law because that's what's expected and one has
| never considered the alternative.
| crmd wrote:
| In the hacker ethos, gaining access to systems is in no way
| unethical or deserving of remorse. The hack in this case
| was (1) exploiting the ISP's delayed batch processing of
| credit card orders, and (2) circumventing their deny list
| of callback phone numbers.
|
| For the same reason you'll rarely see urbex photographers
| expressing remorse for trespassing. Getting onto skyscraper
| roofs and into steam tunnels is just what you do.
|
| Related - I went to college in the late 90s, at the end of
| this era, where there was a constant game of cat and mouse
| between the University unix and network admins and the
| hacker kids. Yes it was technically felonies all night
| long, but there was legitimate mutual respect for technical
| skills on both sides and following the unwritten rules of
| not causing data loss or disrupting services. This is how I
| learned the skills to start my career, and probably how
| they learned themselves back when they were students. For
| them to rat out a student was kind of unsportsmanlike. It
| would be admitting they weren't good at their jobs.
|
| I'm told this hacker culture no longer exists at my Uni. If
| you get caught escalating privileges on a computer you'd be
| facing expulsion and referral to the police.
| kshacker wrote:
| > I'm told this hacker culture no longer exists at my
| Uni. If you get caught escalating privileges on a
| computer you'd be facing expulsion and referral to the
| police.
|
| it has a reason. We did not have our life story at our
| fingertips in those days. Even if the university
| computers may not have sensitive information but they
| could be hijacked to be part of bot net or just mint
| bitcoins. They stakes are much higher. I am not at a uni
| so don't know the reality but I can understand if they
| are doing it.
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| I wrote my first ever (and last) virus for the
| Archimedes...
|
| Some history: Waaay back in the mists of time (1988) I was
| a 1st-year undergrad in Physics. Together with a couple of
| friends, I wrote a virus, just to see if we could (having
| read through the Advanced User Guide and the Econet System
| User Guide), then let it loose on just one of the networked
| archimedes machines in the year-1 lab.
|
| I guess I should say that the virus was completely
| harmless, it just prepended 'Copyright (c) 1988 The Virus'
| to the start of directory listings. It was written for
| Acorn Archimedes (the lab hadn't got onto PC's by this
| time, and the Acorn range had loads of ports, which physics
| labs like :-) It spread like wildfire. People would come
| in, log into the network, and become infected because the
| last person to use their current computer was infected. It
| would then infect their account, so wherever they logged on
| in future would also infect the computer they were using
| then. A couple of hours later, and most of the lab was
| infected.
|
| You have to remember that viruses in those days weren't
| really networked. They came on floppy disks for Atari ST's
| and Amiga's. I witnessed people logging onto the same
| computer "to see if they were infected too". Of course, the
| act of logging in would infect them... Of course
| "authority" was not amused. Actually they were seriously
| unamused, not that they caught us. They shut down the
| year-1,2,3 network and disinfected all the accounts on the
| network server by hand. Ouch.
|
| There were basically 3 ways the virus could be activated: -
| Typing any 'star' command (eg: "* .", which gave you a
| directory listing. Sneaky, I thought, since the virus
| announced itself when you did a '* .' When you thought
| you'd beaten it, you'd do a '* .' to see if it was still
| there :-) - The events (keypress, network, disk etc.) all
| activated the virus if inactive, and also re-enabled the
| interrupts, if they had been disabled - The interrupts
| (NMI,VBI,..) all activated the virus if inactive, and also
| re-enabled the events, if they had been deactivated.
|
| On activation, the virus would replicate itself to the
| current mass-storage media. This was to cause problems
| because we hadn't really counted on just how effective this
| would be. Within a few days of the virus being cleansed
| (and everyone settling back to normal), it suddenly made a
| re-appearance again, racing through the network once more
| within an hour or two. Someone had put the virus onto their
| floppy disk (by typing *. on the floppy when saving their
| work, rather than the network) and had then brought the
| disk back into college and re-infected the network.
|
| If we thought authority was unamused last time, this time
| they held a meeting for the entire department, and calmly
| said the culprit when found would be expelled. Excrement
| and fans came to mind. Of course, they thought we'd just
| re-released it, but in fact it was just too successful for
| comfort...
|
| Since we had "shot our bolt", owning up didn't seem like a
| good idea. The only solution we came up with was to write
| another (silent, this time :-) virus which would disable
| any copy of the old one, whilst hiding itself from the
| users. We built in a time-to-die of a couple of months, let
| it go, and prayed...
|
| We had actually built in a kill-switch to the original
| virus, which would disable and remove it - we didn't want
| to be infected ourselves (at the start). Of course, it
| became a matter of self-preservation to be infected later
| on in the saga - 3 accounts unaccountably (pun intended :-)
| uninfected... It wasn't too hard to destroy the original by
| having the new virus "press" the key combination that
| deleted the old one.
|
| So, everyone was happy. Infected with the counter-virus for
| a while, but happy. "Authority" thought they'd laid down
| the law, and been taken seriously (oh if they knew...) and
| we'd not been expelled. Everyone else lost their infections
| within a few months ... Anyway. I've never written anything
| remotely like a virus since [grin]
| _notathrowaway wrote:
| >Everyone here was not goody two shoes in their teens.
|
| That's called projection.
| languageserver wrote:
| I am not sure credit card fraud is innocent pranks or
| misbehavior... I can tell you with certainty that most
| teenagers have never committed that sort of crimes tbh.
| cortesoft wrote:
| All credit card fraud is not created equal. He didn't steal
| any physical goods, nor did he steal anyone's credit card.
| He stole some hours of internet connection, which probably
| didn't cost the ISP that much. Not saying it is totally
| fine, but it really isn't that bad.
| Jerrrry wrote:
| Always-online teenagers are a different demographic than
| your "average" teenager.
|
| the highs of an exploit working or a bypass make drugs look
| like candy.
| williamcotton wrote:
| If we're talking about the AOHell era of the mid 90s then I
| have anecdotal evidence that the majority of kids I knew
| were committing some kind of wire fraud in exchange for
| internet access!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOHell
| samstave wrote:
| Credit card fraud was really common in the 80 among
| "hacker" types.
|
| I knew of several in Lake Tahoe that were high-school kids
| at the time in the late 80s - someohow managed to get
| credit cards and would order deliveries to "vacation homes"
| in lake tahoe where they knew the owners lived in the bay
| area and wouldnt be at the house - and would have things
| dropped off to the vacant houses to go get them.
|
| Also, in 1980 - we had a payphone inside our home in Tahoe.
| I didnt know this was an odd thing to have until much
| later.
| watwut wrote:
| Late 1980 was when criminality was going up and right
| before its peak. It is quite lower now ... and people who
| were teenagers in late 1980 are almost 60 now.
| samstave wrote:
| Im 47. Started Highschool in 1989
| chowchowchow wrote:
| Check your math on that one. More like 50 +/- a few
| years.
| kingkawn wrote:
| Here's your merit badge for pedantry
| samtheDamned wrote:
| You'd be surprised..
| toss1 wrote:
| Said the one who clearly missed out....
| stavros wrote:
| Not for lack of trying.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Very true. The old-fashioned telephone handset was a
| masterpiece of human engineering. I bet with state-of-the-art
| mic and speakers, it would still be way better than a
| smartphone for actual phone calls.
|
| Of course, I have to admit that my Bluetooth headset is pretty
| good, and a first-class gaming headset would be even better.
| stavros wrote:
| I converted an old rotary phone into a mobile phone
| (https://www.stavros.io/posts/irotary-saga/), and the quality
| is much better than a mobile. Even just the sidetone makes it
| SO much better to talk on.
|
| I have no idea why modern mobile phones have no (or very low
| volume?) sidetone. It makes the UX orders of magnitude
| better.
| alamortsubite wrote:
| Nice work! Maybe I missed this, but have you considered
| simulating a dial tone?
| stavros wrote:
| I haven't, I think it would be a fair bit of work, given
| that the modem is what outputs the sound.
| alamortsubite wrote:
| I haven't worked with the Arduino. Would it be difficult
| to incorporate an SPDT relay to switch the sound source
| between it and the modem?
| stavros wrote:
| Hmm, probably not, actually, that's a good idea. It was
| one of my first projects, so I didn't really know what I
| was doing, which limited how much I could do.
| alamortsubite wrote:
| It's a great project! Thanks for sharing it.
|
| If the relay works you could also simulate the pulse
| dialing signals with clicking audio on the dial return.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| Yes, sidetone (hearing your own voice through the handset)
| makes all the difference! I'm not exactly sure why, but I
| find it so much easier to talk on the phone when there's a
| sidetone. In general, for me, talking on the phone is like
| talking into the void, and sidetone at least gives me the
| assurance that, yes, it's still working. Like the little
| inset video feed of yourself when you're on a Skype call.
| stavros wrote:
| Yeah, exactly. Plus, I've found I'm much louder when
| there's no sidetone, which is very tiring.
| bombcar wrote:
| The low latency with a completely analog phone call is
| amazing. We forget it but it was really really low.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| If I remember correctly, in many cases, latency was lower
| than in-person talk, because of the speed of sound.
| bombcar wrote:
| Yeah, effectively you're both whispering directly into
| each other's ear, which, even if possible in-person is a
| bit uncomfortable.
| franga2000 wrote:
| The mic and speaker in the 90s Iskra payphones are far
| superior in sound quality to anything you'd find in a cheap
| phone these days. I hooked one up to Discord last month for
| an art instalation and could not believe my ears when it
| sounded way better than the 3 other people in the call using
| flagship smartphones.
| WalterBright wrote:
| One thing has not improved one iota in the 30 years I've
| had a cell phone - the voice quality.
| eddieroger wrote:
| You're calling the wrong people, or people on the wrong
| networks. I am on Verizon, and certainly if I call
| another Verizon customer (and I'm pretty sure if I call
| another carrier), it sounds as clear as if we were in the
| same room, as good as FaceTime audio or any other high
| fidelity voice system. You may just not realize it until
| you call someone else and compare, or hear someone move
| from their car's older Bluetooth system to cellular when
| they get out of the car (or headphones, etc), but voice
| quality has definitely improved to the point of not
| needing to improve further.
| genewitch wrote:
| I'm not sure this is true universally. I just spoke to a
| friend for the first time since I got a phone that does
| "HD" calling, and although I've been speaking to them for
| 25 years on the phone, I didn't recognize their voice. I
| feel like POTS and edge->3g calling made me miss out on a
| lot of detail and intonation. I'm just glad I get to
| experience this call quality with non-technically
| inclined friends before I go completely deaf.
|
| I use a lot of voip services and there's something to be
| said for the phone companies actually making a
| competitive product, here.
|
| I suppose one could argue that "HD calling" is
| technically just VoIP as well.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| VoIP systems negotiate codec choice on call initiation,
| generally using a "best common denominator" rule. Even
| when only companded PCM is available (PCM-a, PCM-u),
| 64kbps will be used since it's the universal norm on the
| TDM (conventional) telephone newtwork. Unfortunately, as
| a capacity measure GSM specifies very low bitrates for
| voice connections, as low as 5kbps in the worst case and
| 10-20kbps typical. This requires the use of high-
| efficiency vocoders like CELP variants that are
| sufficient for intelligible speech but, well, only for
| that purpose.
|
| "HD voice" is exactly VoIP and with few exceptions is
| only transported over SIP or a SIP-like protocol using
| the existing RTP negotiation mechanism, which usually
| ends up selecting 64kbps companded PCM (same as a
| landline phone). Increasing use of VoLTE, which is
| essentially an optimized form of SIP designed to
| "combine" session control features with LTE for lower
| overhead, has made this pretty common as HD voice support
| is standard from VoLTE vendors. There was such a thing as
| HD Voice over 3G using a similar mechanism that leveraged
| HSPDA but it was never very common, at least in the US.
|
| VoLTE will quickly become the only way to make cellular
| phone calls in the US which we can expect to make HD
| Voice pretty universal. Right now it can be spotty when
| calling between networks, depending on how their peering
| is set up.
| criddell wrote:
| The bitrate can be way higher, but the latency is often
| much worse these days. It's high enough on most calls
| that I just don't like talking on the phone anymore and I
| think it's because of the latency.
| stackbutterflow wrote:
| At some point we may need a new name for that rectangle
| shaped thing that we use for everything but hardly for
| calling people anymore.
|
| Maybe smartbrick?
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| A mobile, which it already is in much of the world. Or a
| handy if you're german.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| PocketPC.
| Animats wrote:
| With the 1950s mic and speakers, it was substantially better
| than a smartphone.
|
| The Western Electric model 1500 [1], from 1963, is generally
| considered the best analog phone [1]. This was rented, not
| sold, so it is extremely reliable and rugged.
|
| Best audio quality was with ISDN phones. Digital end to end,
| synchronized at the bit level, no noise, no dropouts.
|
| [1] http://www.telephonearchive.com/phones/we/we1500.html
| Aloha wrote:
| I'm not sure why you picked a 1500 as the best sounding,
| the 500, 1500 and 2500 all used the same network, receiver,
| and transmitter elements - I've used all three, they
| perform identically, the 1500 set is actually incredibly
| rare - touch tone was just not common until the 2500 was
| out.
|
| The best speakerphone ever made (even better than modern
| ones) is a 4A Speakerphone.
|
| Also in my opinion, an AE 80 with a non cohered up carbon
| mic will outperform a 500/1500/2500 on a short loop (sub
| 15kf), and can be tuned to outperform on a long. The self
| compensating network in the WE set is better however.
|
| That all said, a modern Northern Telecom or Aastra analog
| phone will consistently outperform a 500 set, because of
| the electret mic in them. Carbon mics have benefits as an
| amplifier, but transistors rendered them obsolete in most
| cases.
| E39M5S62 wrote:
| You know your phones.
| [deleted]
| thlr wrote:
| I believe the reason technology could spark so much joy for a
| young mind back a few dozen years back is more that it was much
| simpler rather than "it just worked".
|
| It was simple and therefore easier to tamper and play with.
| Also, because it was so simple, more knowledge and
| understanding of the underlying mechanisms was required to use
| the technology. In the early years of the internet, simply
| operating a computer and exploring the web was an adventure in
| itself!
|
| Now, things have gotten plenty complicated and that complexity
| brings bugs and makes the technology impenetrable to the common
| folk even with an educated mind - you need to be an expert now.
| If it's too complex, you can't play with it, and if you can't
| play with it, you don't learn and you don't have fun.
|
| I feel that your conclusion, 'it just worked', is more a
| consequence of the increase in complexity rather than a root
| cause in itself.
| wildmanx wrote:
| > but there's just something about today's Internet and a lot
| of the overwhelming amount of technology that just isn't fun or
| memorable.
|
| That's right -- modern age stuff isn't as _hackable_.
| Especially not at the hardware level. You get an Alexa or a
| mobile phone or a camera, it's all just a chip on a PCB in a
| plastic case, not intended to be fiddled with by anybody (not
| the owner, not some repair show, literally _nobody_) just to be
| thrown away after a year or two and replaced by a new one.
|
| It's all very sad. There is still some software component to
| things that's hackable, but even that's harder to do. In the
| past you turned on your C64 and could start write away code,
| average Joe Teenager needs to install some IDE and pull in
| hundreds of NPM dependencies from shady places just to show a
| hello world. Unless daddy/mommy gave them a Linux box, then the
| story is different.
| bluGill wrote:
| In the past you couldn't upgrade the memory in your C64, now
| you can open the case on any desktop and put in different
| RAM. Laptops are sometimes upgradable as well. The raspberry
| pi even comes as a bare board for hacking on.
|
| The kinds of hacking you can do today are different, but
| things are just as hackable if you want. If you don't want to
| hack, just get things done, then today things are much
| better, computers mostly just work for people who need to get
| things done.
| duckmysick wrote:
| > In the past you turned on your C64 and could start write
| away code, average Joe Teenager needs to install some IDE and
| pull in hundreds of NPM dependencies from shady places just
| to show a hello world.
|
| Or he could open a console in his web browser.
| hyperdimension wrote:
| What about the kids in school districts that issue locked-
| down Chromebooks? They probably can't even do that!
|
| I, for one, learned how to bcdedit my way into booting from
| a .vhd on my school-issued laptop. And how to SSH tunnel on
| port 443 to get past the proxy. How LSPs worked on Windows.
| Messing around _is_ how kids get their start in computers,
| and I couldn 't agree with the parent comment more.
| pwg wrote:
| Or average Joe Teenager installs a Linux distribution,
| which then provides bash, perl, awk, Python, C, C++, often
| Tcl/Tk, etc. and usually includes one or more editors for
| creating source files. All without "pull[ing] in hundreds
| of NPM dependencies from shady places"
| the_arun wrote:
| Today, we take internet for granted!
| rconti wrote:
| I have a lot of the same nostalgia, but so much of this story
| is that necessity is the mother of invention.
|
| The author:
|
| 1. Had more time than he knew what to do with.
|
| 2. Didn't have money
|
| 3. Had authority figures getting in the way of what he wanted
| to do.
|
| A decade later, kids were 'hacking' their parents' wifi access
| points by logging in as admin/password to bypass "go to bed and
| stop using the internet" restrictions, but the author was not,
| because he likely had more money, less time, and most
| importantly, no authority to bypass :)
| eternityforest wrote:
| I think the technology itself is 100x better in just about
| every way(Except for pure novelty, smartphones largely killed
| true gadgets)
|
| The lack of fun, to me, is mostly because of how everything
| changed around it.
|
| I can make a basic website now, no problem, everything is
| easier than it was aside from the fact we pretty much have to
| have HTTPS.
|
| But, nobody will read it, because it will be lost in a sea of
| clickbait. I will have a hard time writing it, because _I_ will
| be distracted by the sea of clickbait, and worst of all, I 'll
| have a hard time finding things to write about.
|
| And of course, the very fact it all does work so incredibly
| well, with a Sci-fi level of polish, means... it's no longer
| new. Most of it is being a cruise ship tourist, not an Arctic
| explorer.
|
| Because the internet is dead without the offline stuff that
| gives it meaning.
|
| It's like, binoculars and a field notes book with nobody to spy
| on, the perfect party where nobody shows up, or a spreadsheet
| showing all the customers someone doesn't have.
|
| I think it's just like the idea of set and setting.
|
| The internet/tech/coding/etc is the drug, and we lost all the
| cultural context, so now it's less "A beer at the bonfire with
| friends" and more "I had a bottle of wine alone because I don't
| know what else to do with myself".
| runjake wrote:
| For those of us who still embrace RSS and try to avoid the
| clickbait and social media, please create a basic website.
| The more of those basic sites we have, the more people will
| avoid social media to some extent.
| entropie wrote:
| Well not sure.
|
| My GFs blog is like in its 6th year now and every year its
| more visitors. Its not that much in internet terms (we are at
| ~700 visitors a day) but its serious content (dogs and
| science around dogs). No clickbaits, no cookies, no nothing.
| 300bps wrote:
| _because I will be distracted by the sea of clickbait_
|
| Welcome to the 21st century! One of the 20th century's main
| themes was humans having to learn how to live in a world of
| infinite sugar, fat and salt.
|
| Here in the 21st century, we have to learn how to live in a
| world of infinite information.
|
| What will you do with your attention today? Will you consume
| the mental equivalent of broccoli or snickers bars?
| somesomething wrote:
| damn... this hit harder than it should. Sometimes I need to
| hear the obvious.
| asveikau wrote:
| I like the metaphor too but also so much of society
| hasn't figured out the sugar thing either.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Not just infinite information but "legitimate" information
| that directly conflicts with other interpretations of the
| same thing.
|
| You can now basically find "facts" that support any
| assertion you wish to make. You can even live in a comfy
| echo chamber where everybody else agrees with your "facts."
| It doesn't even matter if your "facts" are actually correct
| because there is a huge body of "evidence" on the internet
| to fully back you up. It starts to make you question if
| there is even an objective truth to things.
|
| It's one reason I get so nervous about labeling things as
| "misinformation". Because often times "misinformation"
| simply means "something I disagree with" and todays
| "misinformation" will eventually become "information"
|
| We are entering into a post-truth era.
| smiddereens wrote:
| karmelapple wrote:
| Does anyone remember a red phone book marketed as the "talking
| phone book?"
|
| In my town in the 1990s, it had the unique feature of a free
| local number you could dial and use to play games, get movie
| showtimes, find out the time, and more. It was almost like audio-
| only webpages you pulled up with a four digit code after
| initially dialing a regular phone number. I would spend lots of
| time on there, typing in random codes to see if I could find an
| Easter egg. And I did.
|
| I found a code - I think it may have been 9876 - that opened up a
| service where you could leave a short message that the next
| person could hear. Frequently it was nothing much, but sometimes
| it was ... pretty strange, sometimes pretty entertaining.
|
| Did anyone else stumble upon this strange corner of phone
| service, where you left a recording for strangers, and listened
| to what they left?
| aksss wrote:
| No, God only knows what that service was intended for. :D
|
| I do remember our town had a local number, 8463, that we could
| call to get current time and temperature played back to us.
| willcodeforfoo wrote:
| I don't remember the leave-a-message one, but I do remember the
| dial in service. One day I went down to the local library and
| found an old phone book from the 90s and sure enough, it had
| all the codes. Here are some photos from the Toledo, OH
| Ameritech 1996-7 phone book if anyone else is curious:
|
| https://cdn.remarkedusercontent.com/file/remarked-prod/1/mar...
| https://cdn.remarkedusercontent.com/file/remarked-prod/1/mar...
| https://cdn.remarkedusercontent.com/file/remarked-prod/1/mar...
| https://cdn.remarkedusercontent.com/file/remarked-prod/1/mar...
| https://cdn.remarkedusercontent.com/file/remarked-prod/1/mar...
| https://cdn.remarkedusercontent.com/file/remarked-prod/1/mar...
| post_break wrote:
| Funny seeing Jerry Anderson, only to google him and see he
| stepped down 4 years ago. I wonder if our number was in that
| book.
| hk1337 wrote:
| > Next, I used a stud finder to detect a stud on the wall
|
| Naturally, I imagine he used the stud finder on himself a few
| times when his wife was in the room.
| xeromal wrote:
| Random, but this reminded me of the mid 2000s when you could text
| google for info. GOOGL was the SMS code I believe. I miss it
| still. You could send them a query and they would respond with
| directions, phone numbers, and other kinds of results. You could
| also call Goog-411 or some variant to get similar info.
| pinko wrote:
| I just removed GOOG-411 from my address book the other day.
| RIP.
| eternityforest wrote:
| It is really cool that there's still some fun to be had with
| something as simple as POTS, and that this person's experiences,
| which are a part of hacker history, are preserved and published.
| Great article!
| 2b3a51 wrote:
| _I explained what it was and we took turns listening to the dial
| tone. I put some quarters in and called my cell phone to show her
| how it worked._
|
| Nostalgia: Early 1960s near Liverpool UK. Being taken up the
| street to the phone booth to learn how to make a phone call
| (coins, dial number, press A button, talk, hang up, press B
| button to claim any leftover coins). Big thing when you are 6
| years old.
| franga2000 wrote:
| Just last month I got the opportunity to assist with an art
| installation that involved a phonebooth, which meant I got to
| take one home and poke around its insides. It was some of the
| most delightfully 90s tech I've seen in a while - 2-layer PCBs,
| all through-hole components, only a few well-known ICs... I ended
| up carefully removing all the "brains" and hooking up the insides
| to a raspberry pi, which could join a Discord channel or answer
| an incoming call when you picked up the phone.
|
| Standing next to the phone talking to friends was strangely fun
| and nostalgic experience, despite the fact I had only used a
| payphone once in my life. I got a cellphone very quickly (perks
| of having a tech journalist in the family), so by the time I was
| old enough to be able to buy a phone card with my own money I no
| longer needed it. During the pandemic, all of the remaining
| phonebooths in the country were quietly shut down and dismantled.
|
| I know it's completely irrational, but I'm still sad that I had
| to eventually return the one I worked on and that in the many
| years the system was still operational it never occurred to me to
| buy a card and call someone from a phone booth just for the fun
| of it.
|
| P.S.: If anyone from Slovenia or other ex-Yu countries has any
| ideas how I could get my hands on one of those Iskra payphones,
| drop me an email (address in bio). I have so many ideas for
| projects involving them, but it seems that I'm a bit too late to
| stand behind the Telekom dumpster and snag a few before they're
| scrapped.
| aksss wrote:
| I worked at a telco a little over ten years ago when they took
| out all the pay phones in our city. In the garage there were
| these enormous bins full of them, staged for some unknown fate.
| A couple colleagues and I had gone down to take a look at the
| spectacle and inquired if we could take one, and they were
| like, "sure!". We climbed in an grabbed ourselves some
| payphones. Still have one in my garage - I think it's cool as
| shit.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Seems weird, to me, that you would need a card. Every phone
| booth I've used took dimes, then quarters.
|
| Some, near the end, could take a credit card or a telco card.
|
| I presume you could buy the cards back in the day, anywhere and
| easily?
| squarefoot wrote:
| At least over here in the EU coins were later substituted by
| magnetic phone cards; iirc in the late 80s, presumably as a
| measure against vandalism and theft. When phone booths were
| later decommissioned, all those cards became collectibles and
| still have a market online.
| franga2000 wrote:
| For at least the last 25 years of operation, all of our phone
| booths only took smartcards that you could buy in basically
| any store or news stand.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Interesting.
|
| Seems the same elsewhere, too, as per other replies.
|
| I recall our phones, as I said, having a card slot and coin
| slot at the end.
|
| I wonder if they retrofitted, with the goal of getting
| people used to cards, before removing the change slot
| entirely. This logic seems typical here.
|
| But then the smartphone explosion happened, so just decided
| to never buy new payphones with slots only.
|
| EG, rather than phase out for card only, they'd have years
| of spare parts and phones, as they slowly removed booths.
| andylynch wrote:
| Not sure where GP was, but in NZ which I think was fairly
| typical, pay phone cards were introduced in 1989 - you could
| buy them at nearly any corner shop. I think the big
| advantages were coin collectors no longer being necessary
| (they were a huge overhead!), and vandalism to steal the
| coins being no more.
| pvitz wrote:
| In Austria at least, this was quite common. I remember that
| the phone booth in our school only accepted a phone card and
| almost every pupil had one for emergency cases. You could buy
| them easily in magazine shops.
| sangnoir wrote:
| Vy any chance, did you write about the project somewhere? I
| have a similar project on the back burner, but with a rotary-
| dial handset, and I doubt a pi could provide enough juice to
| ring.
| franga2000 wrote:
| I plan to write a blog post about it soon(tm), but my
| schedule is absolutely packed this month, so probably not for
| a while. Here's a placeholder link:
| https://m.frangez.me/PhoneBooth
|
| I'm using two of those 2EUR sound cards from China to drive
| the handset and ringer speakers and both work quite well. I
| would probably need to add a small amplifier if I wanted the
| ringer to be heard from the street through the metal
| enclosure and plexiglass booth, but that wasn't a requirement
| for this project.
| CapitalistCartr wrote:
| In North America, ringing takes about 100 volts, but any
| control will do. Link the control circuit to an ice cube
| relay, then have that control the higher voltage.
| cachvico wrote:
| How come the ISP didn't blacklist his address?
| CaliforniaKarl wrote:
| I think the ISP didn't ask for an address. Back then I doubt
| credit card companies were doing address verification, at least
| for lower-value purchases. (The infrastructure probably didn't
| exist.)
| thematrixturtle wrote:
| This is a different era of ISP. He was not signing up to have
| fiber installed to his house or whatever (which was not a thing
| back then), he was signing up to be able to call out to an
| ISP's server with his modem and get on the Internet from there.
| So the only thing the ISP knew about him was a username,
| password and fake billing details, and since the ISP was
| presumably not a telco, they could also not tell where the call
| was coming from.
| newman314 wrote:
| I want to do this but with a real British phone booth.
| parenthesis wrote:
| Here in the UK, you see them in people's gardens sometimes:
|
| https://www.google.com/maps/@55.9164681,-3.1675508,3a,15y,27...
| bpye wrote:
| Well it looks like you can buy them
| https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/403689859315
| wrboyce wrote:
| It's worth noting a K6 weighs in at about 1,250kg so "collect
| in person" is easier said than done!
|
| Personally I'd go with a specialist/approved company such as
| x2connect.
| zamadatix wrote:
| > > Have you ever used a payphone and thought to yourself, "That
| would be a great novelty idea for the pool room, family room, or
| office. What a conversation piece".
|
| > Why yes, payphone.com, yes I have.
|
| This had me rolling but it's also a great example of knowing your
| niche target audience.
| chrissnell wrote:
| I did this back in the early 2000s, when Asterisk first became
| really popular. My plan was to create an Asterisk PBX in my house
| and hook the payphone to that and be able to use it to receive
| and make VoIP calls. Unfortunately, the project never got off the
| ground because I bought a phone 1) without any keys to the locks
| and 2) without the proper software and interface cables to be
| able to program it. I ended up selling it again on eBay for what
| I paid for it.
| slk500 wrote:
| great, sweet story
| oxguy3 wrote:
| I did really enjoy this post, but is it just a tiny bit weird how
| casual he is about repeatedly committing fraud? Not asking for
| some grand apology (lord knows the crap I did as a kid), but the
| post is written like defrauding an ISP is just a normal and fine
| thing to do. Am I off base here?
| 3np wrote:
| There is a statute of limitations at play here I assume.
| dQw4w9WgXcQ wrote:
| You must be Gen-Z or younger. Small-time "fraud" antics like
| this were part of the hacker ethos throughout the 80s and 90s,
| some highlights being the Anarchist Cookbook, Matthew Broderick
| changing school records in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and Kevin
| Mitnick as one of the notable poster children of the new era of
| cyber enforcement crackdowns. Even the word "hacker" meant
| something a lot different than today where kids now say that
| someone "hacked" their Instagram.
| Agamus wrote:
| ^ This is accurate. And when I saw the William Poundstone
| "Big Secrets" reference, I knew I was home. For anyone who
| hasn't played in that series, do yourself the favor!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Secrets
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| Suzie changing Dustin's grades in a direct lift from
| Wargames, right there in the current series of Stranger
| Things.
| hnbad wrote:
| Outside of movies these antics were confined to a specific
| (wealthy, male, usually white) demographic, though. Likewise
| a lot of 80s movies happily depict "funny" antics that would
| even at the time have been considered sexual assault or rape
| if the perps weren't wealthy white college "boys".
|
| Sure, culture has become more sensitive to these things
| overall and criminal prosecution of credit card fraud and
| computer crimes has become a lot more effective but there's a
| tangible difference between generating fake credit card
| numbers and masking your identity to defraud ISPs and hacking
| the Pentagon to access government secrets (namely, the latter
| fits into the hacker ethos of "liberating information" and
| rejecting authority whereas the former just provides personal
| gain). Changing your school records as a student is a
| childish version of the latter (as the intent is not to
| create false credentials for monetary gain but to defy the
| authority of teachers by subverting their means of
| "punishment").
| guerrilla wrote:
| > Outside of movies these antics were confined to a
| specific (wealthy, male, usually white) demographic,
| though.
|
| Um no, definitely not.
|
| > Sure, culture has become more sensitive to these things
| overall
|
| Decades of fearmongering in media, omnipresent surveillance
| and the buying off of all competent hackers did a good job
| of that.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Careful now, you're disturbing the revisionist history,
| wealthy/white/male narrative. Could be trouble.
|
| You might get tweeted to insolvency, or even swatted to
| death!
| guerrilla wrote:
| Don't do this.
| kurisufag wrote:
| >Outside of movies these antics were confined to a specific
| (wealthy, male, usually white)
|
| this could not possibly be further from the truth -- the
| early hacking/phreaking scene was quite possibly one of the
| most diverse in tech history, mostly because it was
| actually meritocratic
|
| even the population of kids that hung out on IRC during
| early web2.0 DDoSing each other and trading 0days had a
| disproportionate amount of minority individuals, and large
| portions of them graduated to today's cybsec industry
| yew wrote:
| Fandom types and 80s hackers have that in common - mostly
| white neckbeards roleplaying diversity and thinking it's
| for real. (Most of the people who called themselves
| "anarchists" back then too. Feels like political spaces
| have seen a bit more improvement though.)
| dhosek wrote:
| Not to mention Matthew Broderick changing school records in
| Wargames (before almost starting World War III). He was doing
| a lot of changing school records back in the 80s.
| drc500free wrote:
| There is extremely low risk of colliding with a real number,
| and people didn't feel guilty about using services that had
| nearly zero marginal cost. Phreaking or fake-cc-number fraud
| was considered pretty victimless, and if there was a victim it
| was a baby bell that had just been busted up for being a
| massive monopoly.
| currency wrote:
| Hacking systems was just something a lot of computer users did.
| Often interest in hacking and interest in computers were
| strongly related.
|
| Check out any history of phreaking [0]
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_box
| kfrzcode wrote:
| You are on "Hacker"News...
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| It's approximately equivalent to admitting you've pirated
| movies.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| You're not off base for _now_. You are for _then_. Those were
| different times.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| It was, for a time. Much better times than now, that's for
| sure.
| bluedino wrote:
| It seems like for a while there we all did shit like that. Or
| at least said we did.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| What you ever see 'hackers'?
|
| The 90s were cavalier. We're talking over 20 years ago,
| different time.
|
| The big difference was that people were... for lack of a better
| designation, intensely naive back then. There just wasn't a lot
| of understanding around consequences.
| pigtailgirl wrote:
| -- 1997 - 11 years old - figured out the username password &
| dial up numbers for everyone in our small town are based on
| the mailing address - once the bandwidth limit was reached on
| the account - id just switch to someone elses - at the time i
| justified it as 'borrowing their internet' - in retrospect it
| was wrong - oh well --
| riffraff wrote:
| I don't think that people were more naive, they were just
| young.
|
| I am pretty sure kids today are also doing some different
| mildly illegal stuff with technology, but we'll have to wait
| 20 years to find out about it.
| trevyn wrote:
| Photoshopping printed documents (school enrollment records,
| event tickets, covid stuff, etc.) was definitely weirdly
| popular among a certain demographic.
|
| Also scamming product returns, food delivery refunds, stuff
| like this.
|
| Curious what other things people have run across.
| serf wrote:
| > What you ever see 'hackers'?
|
| to be fair that movie follows a group of teenagers showcasing
| illegal activities that finally culminate into their federal
| arrest.
|
| yeah, they're later exonerated because 'Movie-FBI' has a
| heart and a sense of justice, but that's probably not the
| best movie to try to pull criminality psych from.
|
| my guess : Eric Corley injected a lot of his own personal
| ethos into that movie. He was apparently an unpaid
| consultant.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| It's what people had to model their own behaviour on in a
| time where most depictions weren't exactly positive I
| guess?
|
| I'm purely speaking retrospectively here
| [deleted]
| makeitdouble wrote:
| The credit card fraud is to me the worst, as any random number
| might actually match an existing one, and back in the days I
| wouldn't expect much scrutiny from the card processor. That's
| then up to the poor soul who's number was used to go through
| paperwork purgatory to dispute the charge.
|
| Orherwise ISPs are the poster child of monopoly giants that had
| to be broken down kicking and screaming, but kept screwing the
| customer over and over because there is litteraly nothing that
| we can do about it (voting won't help). They can burn in hell I
| wouldn't care.
| cbhl wrote:
| IIRC in the 90s online credit card processing was a minutes-
| long affair since it would require dialing into the bank's
| computer system, or possibly calling a human banker to check
| the authorization. IIRC it wasn't uncommon to just do it
| offline with physical pieces of paper in the mail. Towards
| the late 90s they got better at rejecting CCs if you did
| authorize online (especially after PayPal gave away a lot of
| $5 prepaid ones).
|
| ISPs were also pretty liberal with free trials (AOL CDs
| galore) since it was mostly customer acquisition cost (it
| wasn't yet established that you had to have an Internet
| connection like you did a landline and Cable TV) and the
| marginal cost was low (ideally, the cost of peering -- the
| ISP basically had some routers and modem banks between an
| internet exchange and a phone exchange; and the user paid any
| applicable long distance charges to call the ISP). Whereas
| now you'd preauthorize the card at signup time to catch this
| sort of fraud beforehand.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| Back then it was a giant pain in the ass.
|
| These days isn't it a lot easier to deal with that? You
| basically just get on the phone with equifax/transunion and
| upload some documents.
|
| Guess that trial and error had to start somewhere.
|
| Also I really wonder what the mathematical chances are that
| the card actually matched with someone back then. Like
| obviously a collision risk here but how large?
| makeitdouble wrote:
| There's 12 random numbers, and I assume banks reject some
| numbers based on obviousness (e.g. all 0, all 1s, 1234, all
| 3 groups are identical etc.) so I'd assume there's actually
| less probability space than what we'd expect.
|
| Even if it's still a pretty huge space.
| nickles wrote:
| Credit card numbers aren't entirely random
|
| [0] https://medium.com/@ma.juber/mathematics-behind-
| credit-debit...
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Sorry I think I'm missing it, does that page explain
| somewhere how the 12 digits that are not set by the
| MII/IIN and check digit rules are not random ?
| hnbad wrote:
| It says the first six digits are the IIN (and the first
| one of those is the MII).
|
| So if you have fourteen digits, one of which is a check
| digit and up to six of which are non-random, that leaves
| only seven truly random digits per issuer, i.e. a pool of
| 10'000'000 (10^7) numbers rather than the
| 1'000'000'000'000 (10^12) possible numbers claimed
| elsewhere.
|
| Of course the actual pool is different as the number of
| fixed digits seems to vary per issuer and for some it
| seems to be only one.
| suyula wrote:
| If every human being alive today (~8 billion) had a valid
| Visa card (14 digits not counting the beginning 4 and the
| check digit), there would be a 0.008% chance of a collision.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| I kinda agree with the low probability, but you also
| ignored the article (he's faking mastercard), and I see 12
| digits not 14.
|
| Also, not every valid number will be used (e.g. all 0s
| won't be an option), and every number don't need to be
| valid at the same time. If I renew 25 cards, their numbers
| are burned with no reuse.
|
| That's a long way to say, I'm not a fan in general of
| throwing in naive probability calculations and calling it a
| day.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Correction, there's actually only 7 digits at most of
| randomness
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31605950
| quesera wrote:
| There are generally 9 "random" digits in a 16-digit
| Visa/MC card number.
|
| The BIN/IIN is traditionally the first 6 digits. Extended
| BINs can be 8-11 digits, which is like subnetting -- the
| BIN sponsor can delegate assignment control of an
| extended BIN range to another entity. So in some cases,
| there can be as few as 4 "random" digits in the full card
| number (PAN).
|
| E.g.: BIN "random" Check
| 411111 111111111 1 ExtendedBIN "random" Check
| 41111111111 1111 1
|
| If you were sweeping a PAN range for live numbers, you'd
| start with a known-valid BIN, probably 6 or 8 digits.
| Then randomly choose the next 9 (or 7) digits, and then
| calculate the check digit.
|
| We can't know the likelihood of hitting a valid number
| without knowing the count of assigned PANs in that BIN,
| but clearly the capacity would be 1 billion (or 10
| million) possibilities.
| toast0 wrote:
| Dial-up ISPs were the poster child of anarchistic markets. If
| you could get a data T1 and a PRI T1 and some modems, you
| could run an ISP. When your PRI fills up, get another. When
| your data fills up, get another. Etc. A lot of those were
| pretty small operations (which is why the author had to get
| friends to call in).
|
| There were a pretty good number of nationwide ISPs to choose
| from too, if you wanted something less fly by night. A whole
| heck of a lot of consolidation happened since then of course.
| But even the winners of dial-up pretty much lost to cable and
| baby bells. It was easy to setup a dial-up ISP, but it's darn
| hard to setup a broadband ISP, so we're stuck unless you can
| convince the FCC that the 1996 Telecom Act applies (might
| need some court work as well) and we can get mandatory line
| sharing back.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Yeah this also struck me as quite strange. Not that he did it,
| but that he was so cavalier about it, even after all this time.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I pictured him being 14 through all that and that made it a wee
| bit better.
| mherdeg wrote:
| This is more or less the tone of 2600 magazine though -- people
| very cheerfully admit to stuff which, yes, is totally unwise to
| write down that you have done.
|
| The weird thing is we have had the CFAA hanging over us as some
| kind of Sword of Damocles for decades and we just collectively
| ignored it. Honestly everyone was even pretty cavalier about
| this stuff during and after the Mitnick prosecution...
|
| In the 2000s when I talked to people who do urban exploration
| there was at least an understanding that you should not be
| taking photos in sensitive locations -- "please don't make a
| felony diary".
| donkarma wrote:
| don't be a snake
| driverdan wrote:
| As others pointed out a lot of us did that kind of stuff. I
| signed up for AOL at least a hundred times using fake credit
| card and bank account numbers. After that I picked a random
| person out of the phone book and signed up for a local ISP that
| mailed the bill, no credit card required. That worked for
| something like 6 months before they cancelled the account.
|
| You have to remember how expensive this stuff was in the 80's
| and 90's, how low risk this type of fraud was, and how us teens
| didn't really think about it. ISPs billed by the hour,
| something a teen could not afford.
| alex_young wrote:
| I don't know if I enjoyed the idea or the writing more, but I'm
| very happy I read this. Thank you.
| [deleted]
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| Back when I was a kid I had alot of fun using methods to get free
| phone calls on these things. Like, beyond just red-boxing or
| whatever (Past that time).
|
| In Japan, they would just accept DTMF tones from anything that
| would generate them. There was all these people using hacked
| cards that they installed countermeasures against which were
| hilarious because people using these hacked yakuza cards would
| keep one foot in the doorway in case the fabled alarm would go
| off, i knew a guy who did this thinking naaah it would never
| happen to me. NOPE happens to him, he had to squeeze himself out
| of that phone booth and run after a red light started flashing
| and the door slammed shut on his shoe... Literally just playing
| the DTMF tones into the handset would have gotten past that on
| every 'grey phone' out there (The ones that advertise ISDN
| connectivity). Wouldn't be surprised if that still works if they
| still have those phones anywhere.
|
| The other way I did it in another country was a telephone company
| test line (toll free!) which would give you 30 seconds of silence
| then a dial tone (presumably 'remote'). From this dial tone you
| could call anywhere in the world. We got some list that
| phonelosers used to make and called places like the president of
| Kenya.
|
| This guy mentions using a payphone which accepts incoming calls
| to get the internet as a kid in the 90s. Those which still rang
| on incoming were mostly gone by my time but a few were still
| configured to act like that. Was fun to sit down the road with a
| cellphone and watch people be scared to pick up the line after
| watching it ring for a few seconds.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _phonelosers_
|
| Wow, there's a name I haven't heard or thought about in
| years... I wonder if RBCP's writings are still floating around
| somewhere. Even the fictional ones ( _especially_ the fictional
| ones, I guess) are amazing.
| meep0l wrote:
| Could you elaborate on the "fabled alarm?"
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| Yeah a red light would flash over the booth and the door
| would shut closed, hence having to put your foot in there.
| Alot of people buying and using these cards were like
| 'bullshit!' but this guy who told me about this figured to
| err on the side of caution anyways and ended up having to
| comically escape the situation with all these people looking
| at him.
|
| This was like 5 years before my own time in Japan but pretty
| hilarious nonetheless
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| I'm not saying you're wrong but a) this sounds like a
| massive safety issue and b) this sounds like exactly the
| sort of thing I'd say to anyone trying to get a dodgy phone
| card from me, "yeah you need to wedge your foot in the door
| in case it detects the card is hooky, and tries to lock you
| in" just so I could stand there and laugh at their
| contortions trying to keep one foot outside while they use
| the phone.
| patio11 wrote:
| _NOPE happens to him, he had to squeeze himself out of that
| phone booth and run after a red light started flashing and the
| door slammed shut on his shoe.._
|
| This did not happen.
|
| Almost no Japanese public telephones even in 2022 have a) doors
| which lock or b) motors/servos to operate the door. The
| exception on motors is a specialty item "automatic door
| (electric type)" which is sold primarily as an accessibility
| aid for people who cannot operate unpowered doors. The door, in
| all cases, is for caller privacy, not for preserving the
| integrity of telephone billing.
|
| I feel _extremely_ confident in this, and confident that you
| would get an immediate on-the-record denial from NTT if you
| asked. One reason among many: if the phone booth was physically
| capable of locking people inside that would endanger human life
| in a natural disaster, and the first rule of engineering in
| Japan is that one's system must function during natural
| disasters.
|
| On this I will see "I once talked to a Japanese woman" and
| raise you "I have written the acceptance testing protocols
| required by that 'rule' for a firm which produced publicly-
| deployable hardware artifacts." plus "I have two working
| eyeballs and can confirm the absence of a motor in almost all
| telephone deployments."
|
| (Apologies for someone-is-wrong-on-the-Internet here but we
| were _extremely serious_ about rule #1.)
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| Were you an employee of NTT?
|
| Why didn't you install DTMF filters on the phones lol I was
| calling like new zealand and shit.
|
| And I'm talking like, 20 years ago plus here... It could be
| bullshit for sure, I'm relating someone else's story.
| jamesy0ung wrote:
| > In Japan, they would just accept DTMF tones from anything
| that would generate them. There was all these people using
| hacked cards that they installed countermeasures against which
| were hilarious because people using these hacked yakuza cards
| would keep one foot in the doorway in case the fabled alarm
| would go off, i knew a guy who did this thinking naaah it would
| never happen to me. NOPE happens to him, he had to squeeze
| himself out of that phone booth and run after a red light
| started flashing and the door slammed shut on his shoe...
| Literally just playing the DTMF tones into the handset would
| have gotten past that on every 'grey phone' out there (The ones
| that advertise ISDN connectivity). Wouldn't be surprised if
| that still works if they still have those phones anywhere.
|
| How did this work? Did it literally lock you inside and how did
| you exit?
| jrockway wrote:
| Apparently GlaDOS was the president of NTT at the time. She
| really wanted a deadly neurotoxin emitter on every handset,
| but it was deemed too costly.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| I elaborated on this on another reply.
|
| It's something that happened in the late 90s, some time after
| I was in Japan myself. I trust the source, his Japanese wife
| corroborated it somewhat embarrassed.
| hnbad wrote:
| I feel an incredible disconnect with people like this who
| casually tell public stories about their youthful credit card
| fraud and other computer crimes (cf. every single story in
| _Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution_ ).
|
| I understand the anti-capitalist (or at least anti-corporate) and
| anti-authority attitudes of hacker culture but these stories are
| not told by anarchist cyberpunks "sticking it to the man" but
| almost invariably by sheltered (usually WASP) yuppies working for
| billion dollar companies or in this case, Slack.
|
| These aren't so much stories about clever hacks and youthful
| rebellion but of a youth isolated from consequences for criminal
| offenses that would otherwise have been sufficient to give them a
| career-ending criminal record.
| Maursault wrote:
| My freshman year of HS, I bought a DTMF dialer from Radio Shack.
| This was a small handheld device with a shallow coupler on the
| back, and buttons matching those on a DTMF telephone, and
| pressing them produced the same tones as a telephone. The dialer
| had a memory function.
|
| One day I noticed the tones produced by putting a quarter in a
| pay phone to tell the backend switch a quarter had been inserted.
| It was, like, beep beep beep beep beep, really fast. Dimes and
| nickels made the same tones, but they were shorter, less beeps.
|
| Something sounded familiar about these tones, and through trial
| and error, I realized these tones were made from the DTMF tones
| of either the asterisk key or the octothorpe key (I can't now
| remember which, and btw, it is not a hash symbol, it is an
| octothorpe). By putting enough presses of the right key into the
| memory of the Radio Shack dialer, I could fool payphones into
| thinking I had deposited quarters. I had turned my off the shelf
| Radio Shack DTMF dialer into a Red Box, without actually doing
| anything to the hardware or electronics. And it was a lot more
| svelte than the original Woz Red Boxes, about the size of a flip
| phone when closed.
|
| At first, this worked at every payphone, always, any kind of
| call, local or long distance. I spent a lot of time at the
| airport and hotel pay phone banks calling a gf long distance. But
| eventually, my DTMF dialer stopped fooling the switch, so I could
| no longer make free local calls. But with long distance calls,
| I'd usually get an operator once the spoofed coin inserts failed,
| but they would always still fool the operator, who I think
| assumed line interference prevented (what I assume were) the new
| digital switches from recognizing coin insert tones. Then that
| stopped working; somehow the operators knew what I was doing and
| would accurately describe my spoof to me.
|
| So it no longer worked with ordinary common pay phones. But I
| found a pay phone installation that was not ordinary, I believe
| it was called a "Smart Payphone," but it was not smart in the way
| we think of smart phones today; it just had some extra
| electronics and a small 3 line LCD panel which told you how long
| your call lasted. I could continue to make local and long
| distance calls from only these types of pay phones for a few more
| years until every place I knew there had been one had been
| uninstalled.
|
| It only occurred to me later that I was not stealing from AT&T or
| some local Bell affiliate. I had been stealing from whomever
| owned the pay phone, who still had to pay for those long distance
| calls I made. I have carried the guilt and shame of my juvenile
| crimes ever since. Not kidding. That was all very, very wrong.
| spicyramen_ wrote:
| Awesome, I used to work with Mitel PBX which have a feature
| called DISA which allows you to call a number and place calls
| from there. The number you call will give you dial tone and you
| could place calls anywhere I looked up the list of customers with
| Visa find the main number and try the first 20-100 numbers which
| was normally the range used (sold DIDs by Telco) during my
| installation I gave myself access to those via 1800 numbers so it
| was pretty much able to call LD/cell phone which used to be
| expensive before
| bluedino wrote:
| Looking at that pay phone makes me think of those ancient phones
| your had to hand crank. Looking real old now.
| bambax wrote:
| Excellent story, writing, and end. It's absurd to install a
| payphone in one's house, and yet after reading this, it feels
| completely necessary.
| tempestn wrote:
| Fun story, and that list of door games was a blast from the past.
| I especially recall some fun times playing Planets: TEOS, trying
| to whittle down the runaway leader while he was away on
| vacation...
| indus wrote:
| You are on my leaderboard for the best writing for this year.
|
| Thank you for rekindling some memories.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Best article I've seen here in a while. I really miss payphones
| for some reason. Loved that he's teaching his daughter.
|
| > My daughter is 5 - I don't want her dialing 911.
|
| Five year old girls calling 911 has saved a lot of lives. I just
| listened to a whole podcast series about that.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| If I had a landline in my house and went through all the
| trouble to install an obvious phone like a payphone (well,
| obvious to older people), I'd definitely want it to be able to
| call out to 911. When calling from a landline, you're 100% sure
| that EMS has your correct address (well, assuming that you set
| up your address correctly when you ordered your ISP service).
| cbhl wrote:
| I feel like the logical next step is for the author to discover
| PBX, such as Asterisk or something built on top of it. Then they
| can call between the two in-house phones and also dial out to the
| real phone line in an emergency.
|
| Just need an old PC, a compatible dial-up modem with voice, and a
| card with a few FXO ports to go to the payphone and child's
| phone...
| kalleboo wrote:
| You can also get used Cisco VoIP ATAs for cheap from eBay (mine
| was $20) with 2 lines that can be programmed for internal calls
| and incoming/outgoing SIP, that's what I did to play around
| with old modems and also set up 2 old-style phones to play
| phone with my kids.
| CaliforniaKarl wrote:
| It would be cool! You'd need FXS ports, though (those are the
| ones which provide the line/ring voltage). You'd also need to
| research how the payphone indicated coin insertion
| (bell/2bell/bong or something else), and how to tell the
| payphone to either return the coins or drop them into the box
| (in some cases it's an MF signal, in others it's polarity
| reversal of the phone line).
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| The PacBell branding suggests this unit hasn't been
| converted, but most popular payphone model have a COCOT
| conversion kit available. COCOTs or customer-owned-coin-
| operated-telephones perform the charging internally and don't
| require exchange support, so they're a lot simpler to get
| working. The conversion kits are pretty readily available
| because a good majority of payphones out in the world today,
| even operated by the incumbent telco, are actually COCOTs
| since they've become cheaper and easier to manage over time.
| Plus a lot of payphones aren't managed by the telco anymore
| but instead by a separate private company like PTS, which
| runs all COCOTs with an arrangement where they "dial in" to a
| management system regularly for configuration and reports.
|
| General rule of thumb is that any payphone that accepts
| credit cards is actually a COCOT, any payphone not branded by
| the ILEC is a COCOT, and a lot of the rest are COCOTs too
| depending on the telco. "Genuine" exchange-controlled
| payphones (that signal coin drops back to the exchange) have
| become rare.
|
| I'm pretty surprised he went with the Viking box actually
| because it costs more than an inexpensive FXS ATA, and a lot
| more than getting an ATA used. It's simpler to set up, but on
| the other hand some ATAs have internal logic to connect their
| two lines that you can enable so they behave as standalone
| devices. I think this is typical on the older Ciscos.
| mrweasel wrote:
| There is an older project where the author hooks up a payphone
| to a PBX: https://github.com/jcs/payphone
| bjarneh wrote:
| Ok, I need one of those. Very funny and well written piece...
|
| > I'm not quite ready to reap what I sow.
| sambalbadjak wrote:
| I enjoyed reading that!
| barbs wrote:
| I always found it interesting that payphones could receive calls
| in America. Australian payphones can't receive calls (at least,
| not to my knowledge), and it always seemed like it would be ripe
| for abuse if they could.
| [deleted]
| retrac wrote:
| It made sense originally. Most people did not originally have
| telephones at home. It skewed towards businesses, and then
| public venues like hotels. Almost immediately, a secondary
| business started up around each telephone. A grocery store, for
| example, might let customers place outgoing calls for a small
| fee, and reserve slots for incoming calls, and take messages. A
| single phone might be installed on the ground floor of an
| apartment building, and one of the retirees became the building
| phone operator.
|
| As you might imagine, a lot of free outgoing calls were snuck
| in. Just pick it up when the clerk isn't looking. And no one
| wants to sit around all day guarding the phone, anyway. And so
| payphones. In those environments, you'd want them to be able to
| receive calls at a pre-arranged time, as well as place them.
| And it just kinda carried forward. But many regions in North
| America did start prohibiting incoming calls on payphones
| eventually. You couldn't do that in the 90s where I grew up in
| Canada.
| pisspiss wrote:
| alanh wrote:
| > My daughter is 5 - I don't want her dialing 911.
|
| Well... hmm. I taught my daughter how and when to do that by that
| age. You never know. That could end up saving a life. She knows
| not to do it frivolously. This does not seem too advanced a
| concept for a kindergartner.
|
| That said, intercom-like internal system Bertrand built seems to
| be much cooler than having the real phone.
| IncRnd wrote:
| > My daughter is 5 - I don't want her dialing 911.
|
| Yes, that was really weird to have as the very first item. As a
| parent I taught my child, when she was young, to know my phone
| number, to dial 911, and to recognize a police officer and
| other service people.
| riffraff wrote:
| This was a fantastic read and the end just put a smile on my face
| thanks for sharing.
| esses wrote:
| Payphone.com is wondering why sales are through the roof!
| Ayesh wrote:
| Wow this brings back memories. I stayed at a high school hostel,
| and and remember calling the high school sweethearts after 9pm,
| when they had super cheap fares. 9 minutes for an equivalent of
| $0.02.
|
| There was only one phone, so the rest of the kids were in a queue
| waiting to call theirs. You'll get an earful if you were the one
| to fill the coin storage (the phone company only comes once a
| month or so to collect the money) or jam a coin.
| jaywalk wrote:
| This is really cool, but I was hoping he had gone all the way
| with the setup and had a simulated CO backend that actually
| validated that coins were inserted to make a call.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| They should keep at least a few pay phones. Works great when your
| phone battery dies. I think I have used one as recent as 2010s.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| The last time I tried to use a payphone was 2007. I literally
| could not figure the damn thing out. FWIW, it was immediately
| after landing in a foreign country and my language/reading
| skills were not up to par and it was a credit card based thing.
|
| After that, I switched to just getting a temporary SIM at the
| airport.
| markstos wrote:
| I had that same clear landline phone. Maybe from Radio Shack.
| superdug wrote:
| Back in my day this was all called phreaking [
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phreaking ]
|
| I had the pleasure of knowing a guy who knew a guy when I was in
| school. Basically there was a prefix 786 that you could (within
| the area code of course) dial the prefix for the callback 971 and
| the last 4 digits of the host (thankfully the number of the pay
| phone is right there on the pay phone) and then hang up twice the
| phone would ring until you picked the phone up.
|
| Fast forward to another thing of the past, the mall! The mall had
| BANKS of pay-hones just sitting around. So a group of friends and
| I got to all of the banks and decided to make all the phones
| ring. We walked around the mall forever as people just looked at
| the ringing phones and carried on about their lives.
|
| After doing it for about an hour security caught on and I got
| banned from the mall, I think for the fourth or fifth time.
|
| It was a beautiful site to see. Two dozen or so payphones just
| ringing and people completely perplexed as to why.
| z82s3 wrote:
| I enjoyed learning about BBS door games.
| marzetti wrote:
| Thanks for this article and the comments. Reminds me of a trick
| we kids did in the early 60s (yeah, sorry) with the British
| 'phone box' pay phones. We called it 'tapping the phone', but it
| wasn't spy style listening. Passed from kid to kid the amazing
| trick was you could dial the number by tapping the handset (10
| taps for zero, 9 taps for 9, ..) and the phone would ring the
| number but you didn't then have to 'press button A' to speak..
| you simply made the call, spoke normally, hung up, and pressed
| button B to get your money back! Sadly, I never tried
| international calls... When we moved to New Zealand around '63-4,
| I discovered the phone dial was reversed, in the UK it was 1-9,0,
| in NZ it was 9-1,0. (So emergency calls were 111 not 999 as in
| the UK.) The trick still worked but, except for 0, you had to
| '10s complement' the taps. Maybe because of that none of the kids
| I knew at the time in NZ appeared to know the trick...
| blangk wrote:
| We used to get the money back with a pretty reliable mechanical
| method, stuffing a flattened MacDonald's straw into the machine
| above the spare change slot and jiggling in and out. You needed
| a coin for the call but could return and re use it each time or
| even for the same call.
| myrryr wrote:
| This is because the NZ answer was to use a regular land line,
| and dial extra numbers on the end, the exchange would work, but
| their billing system would throw out the call, giving it to you
| for free.
| bjelkeman-again wrote:
| In Sweden, at the high school I went to, we had pay phones
| which would behave as if you had inserted a coin if you zapped
| it with static electricity. We used this for a while to make
| prank calls to other countries. Typically to random numbers we
| just tried, sometimes in the middle of the night in the other
| country.
| slyall wrote:
| A friend of mine had a system for getting free calls from New
| Zealand payphones.
|
| He installed a small switch between the payphone and the line
| before it went into the ground. He then exploited the lack of
| coordination between the phone and the exchange.
|
| * First he would pick up the phone and start dialing 0800
| (equivalent of 1-800), the phone would see this was a free
| number and ignore what was being entered next.
|
| * Then he would briefly interrupt the line. The phone wouldn't
| notice but the exchange would think the call had ended.
|
| * Then he would dial a new number. The exchange would think the
| payphone was making sure he paid, while the payphone would
| think he was still dialing a free number.
|
| So to call 0900 123 456 for free he would dial
| 0800-click-0900123456
|
| Obviously the phone company audits quickly turned up a problem
| but he got away with it for a little while.
| aksss wrote:
| Glad to know I wasn't the only kid trying, by hook or crook,
| to figure out what was on the other end of those 900 numbers.
| :D
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| When I was a kid, we had a trick here in Spain to make free
| calls in public pay phones. When the other person answered, you
| had to hang up, wait about half a second and then pick up the
| phone. The head piece was in a lever, so you had to manipulate
| that lever. The further the call recipient, the longer you had
| to wait to pick up. For a person 50 kms away you had to wait a
| bit over a second, if I recall correctly.
| J8K357R wrote:
| I'm, not sure admitting to fraud, even if the ISP is probably
| long gone, is a great idea.
| shitshitshit wrote:
| Fatnino wrote:
| Why is there a reverse the digits step in the cc# algorithm?
|
| Seems like it will work just fine without doing that.
| zamadatix wrote:
| My understanding is when doing it by hand some like to reverse
| it so when writing the products the digits get written
| continuously left to right. I.e. matter of preference.
| [deleted]
| lrvick wrote:
| Being able to disconnect when I leave my home office is how I
| stay happy and productive, and rejecting "app culture" by
| ditching my smartphone last year has been a big part of that.
|
| Still sometimes I need to make an outgoing call to some customer
| support line or other such nonsense that only works over "the
| phone".
|
| Back in the day before cellphones were an option I would
| sometimes use a payphone for these edge cases, but they basically
| no longer exist.
|
| I had already canceled my cell phone subscriptions a couple years
| ago and ported my one remaining cell number to a VoIP provider.
| This lets me get SMS over email for dumb services I can't avoid
| like banks that insist on using SMS verification still.
|
| Given that setup had worked well, I decided for rare life edge
| cases that still require classic phone system voice calls I could
| also get a VoiP ATA box and route calls to it. This let me setup
| some "dumb" landline phones at home, the first which logically
| had to be a payphone, which is now installed and working in my
| home office as of a few months ago, and I love it.
|
| It is visible in most of my work video calls and people are often
| skeptical that it really works. Some call it to test are amazed
| it works fine. It amuses me.
| sirius93 wrote:
| Nice article.
| swamp40 wrote:
| A pay-for-data would be much more useful in my house. We have a
| 1TB/month limit that we are constantly going over. And the ATT
| analytics/tools won't let you pinpoint where it is going.
| daniel_iversen wrote:
| This is very cool, but I'm personally more interested in what he
| is using for the big digital picture frame next to his phone :)
| ck2 wrote:
| One last generation might still understand the superman jokes and
| "I'm going to need an exit" but 100 years from now it's
| definitely going to need an explainer.
| 0des wrote:
| The matrix had phone booths in the good one.
|
| edit: not one of you asked "which one's the good one".. I rest
| my case.
| ck2 wrote:
| "Too bad they never made any sequels"
|
| https://m.xkcd.com/566/
| idontwantthis wrote:
| I rewatched all 3 recently, and I have to say I don't
| remember why I and everyone else disliked the sequels so
| much. They are exciting, and tell a good story. I haven't
| watched the new one yet.
| ck2 wrote:
| Do not watch the fourth. Not kidding. It's not worth the
| curiosity.
|
| Yes the 2nd and 3rd were great despite critics. The fourth
| is a "WTF who wrote this garbage money grab" the entire
| time, it's not even "fan service" because it destroys
| everything with poor writing and terrible acting, feels
| like someone was shouting "we'll fix it in post" after
| every first take rushing to the next shot to churn it out.
|
| Remember how epic the music was in the first three? The
| fourth is like that kid from Bob's Burgers mashing on a
| keyboard.
|
| Remember the epic dialog from Hugo Weaving and those
| chilling rants from Agent Smith? Yeah absolutely nothing,
| nothing even vaguely faintly like it in the fourth, it
| almost undoes the entire franchise.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| I'm really of the opinion that they did that on purpose
| given the philosophical underpinnings of the original.
| Like, to make a point, because Warner Bros owned the
| rights to their franchise and were going to make some
| banal crap anyways, with or without the Wachowskis.
| hnbad wrote:
| That's literally why.
|
| Also 2 and 3 were mostly bad because releasing two part
| movies wasn't a thing at the time and thus the films had
| to be forced into (unsatisfying) single-movie narrative
| arcs despite having an obvious overarching narrative.
|
| Re-watching 2 and 3 as a double feature years later makes
| them less of a trainwreck and more of a mildly
| underwhelming but watchable and solid sequel to a movie
| so good it was impossible to follow up on. It finishes
| the story, literally ends the universe it created and
| ties up the loose ends.
|
| On the other hand 4 is the sequel that never should have
| been but ultimately exists to seal the franchise
| permanently shut because any attempt to build on it can
| only be read as a soulless cashgrab because there is now
| literally nothing left to tell. WB didn't want to let its
| IP die so the Wachowskis had to drive a stake through its
| heart and kiss it goodbye.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| Ever watch the newest one they made? It's like
| baudrillardian banality taken to its logical extreme. The
| first half is literally a clip show. Comes off as a shitty
| superhero movie of now but with matrix characters
| hnbad wrote:
| The movie is infinitely better if you understand it
| within its real world context.
|
| The Wachowskis did not want to make another Matrix movie
| but the studio approached them and said that they would
| make the movie either way but they would be given full
| artistic freedom if they agreed. They basically had the
| choice of doing this themselves or letting the studio
| turn it into a soulless franchise detached from their own
| vision.
|
| The movie is mostly an allegory for how the movie was
| created and why it shouldn't exist. Aside from mindless
| indulgence the ending is also giving a middle finger to
| the production company. The philosophy is dull because
| everything that needed to be said was already said so the
| only thing left to do is repeat it more blatantly for the
| audience in the back.
|
| That doesn't mean it's a great movie and you can argue
| that a movie should be enjoyable without context, but for
| me knowing this context allowed me to enjoy it through
| that lens a lot more than I probably would have had I not
| come into this knowing this.
| mihaic wrote:
| My thoughts exactly. As a fan of the first Matrix, it
| felt a bit cathartic to see the honesty upfront, so I
| could just see this movie as a standalone statement with
| some decent visuals. It was pretty much the opposite of
| watching the latest Star Trek series, that have
| completely departed from the original philosophy.
| bredren wrote:
| This was a great post with a very sweet ending.
|
| The unexpected screenshot of the LORD intro ascii art was a blast
| from the past.
| ValtteriL wrote:
| I want a payphone to my house straight from a casino in Vegas
| too!
|
| Just worrying about the "seen some shit" thing: where I used to
| grow up, the only payphone was mostly used as a toilet by drunk
| people.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _This basically creates a closed network between two phones.
| You can configure it so that if you pick up one phone, the other
| phone rings, and when that phone picks up, you can talk, and
| vice-versa. So I bought one, drilled a hole to my daughter's
| room, and ran another RJ-11 cable to her phone._
|
| Okay, well, now I have something to do with the rotary phone I
| inherited from a previous job. Time to set up a phone line to my
| kid's room!
|
| I wonder if something exists to connect any arbitrary number of
| phones together. Maybe even with distinct phone numbers?
|
| edit: duh, of course it does, PBX. maybe that'll be my summer
| project.
| mrb wrote:
| I love it that he uses the payphone to talk to his daughter's
| phone in her room... or rather that _she_ uses her phone to call
| him ;) I also just set up a private phone network in my house,
| and my daughter can also call my room, from her bedroom. But it
| spiraled very quickly into something more evolved & more fun.
|
| It all started when I discovered after buying our new house that
| most rooms were pre-wired with RJ11 outlets, with all the lines
| going to a central closet. So one day I bought a cheap 8-port PBX
| for $80 (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B015MIQ12A) and bought a
| classic rotary phone for my daughter's room, and a regular phone
| for our room. The PBX needed no configuration whatsoever, it
| comes with the ports assigned extensions 601, 602, etc, so right
| away my daughter was elated she could call us from her room by
| just dialing "601" or whatever. It's important to note we do not
| have a landline; the PBX's outgoing lines were left unconnected,
| so it was purely a private phone network. The PBX could also be
| configured so it auto-dials an extension as soon as the phone is
| picked up. But I wanted my daughter to learn how to use a rotary
| dial so I didn't use that feature. As a side note, the "phone
| line simulator" that the OP uses is basically a minimalist 2-port
| PBX with no outgoing line.
|
| But I thought, how hard is it to replace the PBX with an Asterisk
| VOIP system? So I replaced the PBX with a $140 Analog Telphone
| Adapter (also 8 ports: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07B6TL7N6), I
| configured the ATA to route calls via SIP to my Linux gateway, on
| which I installed Asterisk. I wrote a simple Asterisk config
| defining even shorter extensions so my daughter only has to dial
| "1" or "2" instead of "601" or "602". Then I set up some
| extensions that play recorded audio files, like songs, or sweet
| messages we recorded to each other.
|
| Then, later I thought it might be practical for my daughter to be
| able to call my cellphone (in case of emergencies or whatnot). So
| I searched for VOIP providers, found https://voip.ms/ and signed
| up for an account. I configured Asterisk to place outgoing calls
| through this provider. And I defined new extensions: 3 rings my
| cellphone, and 4 rings my wife's cellphone, while the other
| extensions work just as before (eg. 1 still rings our bedroom.)
| But I specifically did NOT configure Asterisk to be able to place
| outgoing calls to arbitrary numbers. So the internal phones are
| only able to call my predefined extensions.
|
| And again later I thought it might be practical to be able to
| call her bedroom phone from my cellphone. So I added a DID number
| (direct inward dialing) to my voip.ms account. Then I configured
| Asterisk to accept incoming calls from voip.ms, then prompt for
| an extension, and forward the call accordingly. So when I call
| the number, I hear "please dial an extension", then I can type 2,
| and my daughter's phone rings.
|
| In order to avoid spam calls, I made Asterisk check the caller ID
| and accept calls coming ONLY from my cellphone or from my wife's
| cellphone. (I'm well aware that caller ID can be spoofed, in fact
| I have spoofed it myself a few times with my setup as a
| demonstration to family & friends.) In the 2 months since I
| bought the DID number I did not see a single call intercepted by
| my caller id filter. So it looks like I got a pretty "clean"
| number. I understand that I might not have been that lucky.
|
| And that's basically where I'm at today. We have a mostly private
| in-home phone network, that can also call our cellphones, and our
| cellphones only are allowed to call into the house phone system.
|
| Our daughter will call us in the morning when she wakes up to say
| what she wants for breakfast. When her cousins visit, they chat
| on the phone from room to room. It's fun!
|
| As someone who knew nothing about Asterisk, I found the official
| documentation utterly mediocre. The process of configuring it
| consisted mostly of finding real-world examples, then trying to
| reverse engineer them by finding what they do from the
| documentation. But in the end I still got everything to work
| exactly the way I wanted it.
| driverdan wrote:
| That is such a cool project. I would have _loved_ this as a
| kid.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| This is incredible! I want to set this up now. I don't suppose
| you have a more detailed write-up? Or is this a "setting this
| up is left as an exercise for the reader" situation?
| westhom wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. This is exactly what I want to do once I
| get a house. First just room to room calling with extensions,
| and then possibly outgoing for fun. It's good to know the
| actual hardware isn't expensive and it can support analog. And
| lots of fun old school phones to choose from.
| rconti wrote:
| I'm a Sonic customer and just learned about their Tradewars
| server! thanks!!
| naet wrote:
| I am a very happy Sonic customer as well (fuck comcast...) but
| the tradewars server doesn't seem to still be up? I think early
| Sonic had a lot of neat stuff like usenet, free hosting, and
| some other offerings that they have done away with over the
| years.
| slazaro wrote:
| I was just analizing the Luhn algorithm and... the step to
| reverse the digits doesn't seem to do anything, right? None of
| the other steps depend on it and in the end you just sum all of
| the digits together... Is it because the amount of initial digits
| might not have the same parity and therefore you'd sum a
| different set of digits depending on whether you reverse or not?
| account42 wrote:
| I think it only matters for which digits you double if there
| are an even number of digits.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| I'm not usually nostalgic, but I love everything about that phone
| line simulator. The case, the dip switches, the font, the model
| number DLE-200B. Brings back memories of a time long past.
| 2rsf wrote:
| Well, it is an old timer. I spent many days with one in the mid
| 90's and it wasn't new even then
| the_only_law wrote:
| I was really hoping to find an ISDN simulator with U-interfaces
| but anything I could find on eBay I wasn't going to pay for
| since I had no documentation on how to configure/operate them.
|
| I'd try to make one myself if I wasn't so good at killing
| hardware.
| wolrah wrote:
| Basically everything Viking makes has an old school telecom
| aesthetic.
| burnt_toast wrote:
| The ending was very wholesome
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Is there an adapter which allows you to connect an analog phone
| to a digital phone line?
|
| I would like to make use of an ancient analog phone.
| CaliforniaKarl wrote:
| Yup! You want an Analog Telephone Adapter (ATA). That's a box
| which takes Ethernet in, and gives you one or more FXS ports.
| (An FXS and an FXO port are similar, but the FXS port is the
| one which provides the current that powers the phone, generates
| the ringing signal, etc.)
|
| It's important to note that other than call routing, the ATA
| has to do almost everything the phone company would do. The ATA
| provides any Caller ID, for example. It provides call-waiting,
| or 3-way conferencing. If you want to use a rotary phone,
| you'll need one that handles pulse dialing.
|
| Your ATA will use SIP to connect to a VoIP provider. Some
| support using multiple SIP accounts (especially if the ATA has
| multiple FXS ports.
| wolrah wrote:
| > Is there an adapter which allows you to connect an analog
| phone to a digital phone line?
|
| A VoIP analog telephone adapter (ATA) would be the most common
| form of this these days. Most will have two analog lines,
| though other configurations are available.
|
| The Sipura SPA series and it's derivatives (Linksys PAP2(T),
| Cisco SPA122) are popular, as well as Obihai's lineup. I've
| used them all extensively and they're solid.
|
| You can connect these to a SIP based VoIP provider or they can
| operate entirely standalone just calling port to port. With a
| bit of work you can even link up multiple devices on a private
| network IP to IP.
| bschne wrote:
| My grandfather once built a phone line simulator you could
| connect up to 8 or 10 phones to and actually dial them by a one-
| digit number. I think he got the schematics from some old
| electronics magazine. Definitely one of the coolest ,,toys" I
| ever got as a kid.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| In the olden days (up to about the mid-1990s!) the island of
| Canna off the west coast of Scotland that had a ten-subscriber
| phone exchange where you could dial any number on the island
| with a single digit. You could only make one call at a time off
| the island, via a VHF link on around 80MHz to the telephone
| exchange in Mallaig about 25 miles away.
| julianbuse wrote:
| that's incredibly cool!
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