[HN Gopher] 2600.network Dialup Service
___________________________________________________________________
2600.network Dialup Service
Author : classichasclass
Score : 261 points
Date : 2024-03-17 19:47 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (2600.network)
(TXT) w3m dump (2600.network)
| joecool1029 wrote:
| Sweet, I've been looking for one of these to test CSD calls out
| for the first time in like 20 years before GSM gets shut down on
| T-Mobile. There was one other service in Vancouver that probably
| shut down last year but I'm not sure data calls work
| internationally.
|
| EDIT: This is that service if you are a Canadian that wants to
| try it, https://www2.vcn.bc.ca/free-internet-access-via-dial-up/
| lxgr wrote:
| Could you theoretically use an analog modem (or worst case an
| acoustic coupler) over IMS (VoLTE etc., which should all have
| at least some QoS), or are the jitter rates and codecs too bad
| for that (like they often are for Fax over VoIP on fixed
| lines)?
|
| I wonder if some of the networks that are continuing to offer
| GSM (usually via some core network emulations, as far as I
| understand, to make it more compatible with modern core
| networks) have already broken CSD for similar reasons.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| Theoretically, maybe. If you got a good 'HD voice' (higher
| bitrate EVS codec) call, it's possible you could negotiate
| and send a slower fax signal. No way on a full-rate or half-
| rate GSM codec or amr-nb though, just doesn't have the
| bandwidth, chops too much.
|
| Even back in the early 2000's when I was using free nights
| and weekends with my T68i to make calls to a free dialup
| provider in new england (9600baud yea), my call would still
| drop every hour or so just due to signal hiccups.
|
| (T-Mobile never enabled HS-CSD for 28.8kbps using more
| timeslots and it's unlikely my current rate plan will allow
| for CSD calls, but it doesn't mean I won't try, I still have
| an old sim card able to be used in 2G only phones, including
| that very same t68i which I tested last summer, still works.)
| dylan604 wrote:
| I thought VoIP codecs all chopped the frequencies that
| seems like it would be very detrimental to a data signal.
| Is the "HD" quality high enough for that, or was the analog
| data signal not as full frequency as I'm thinking they
| would be?
| wolrah wrote:
| Most internet-based VoIP services (read: full telephone
| providers, not just chat providers) use the same exact
| G.711 codecs used in the digital portions of traditional
| telephone lines for normal calls.
|
| In theory you can run anything over this that could run
| over a long distance PSTN link.
|
| In practice most modem technologies do not handle jitter
| and packet loss well at all, and quirks which a human
| would not even notice will trip up a data call. It still
| works, I have clients running credit card machines on
| VoIP lines all day, but the longer the call and the
| higher the bandwidth the more likely something is to go
| wrong. A short 9600bps data exchange from a card machine
| is a lot easier than a 30 page 33.6k fax which is a lot
| easier than a 56k modem on a PC.
|
| There's a special method called T.38 that allows VoIP
| providers with compatible endpoints to convert digital
| fax calls back to a data stream instead of audio which
| makes it a lot more tolerant of delay and jitter as well
| as slightly more tolerant of loss. Something similar
| could hypothetically be done for data modems but I
| haven't seen it.
| AvocadoPanic wrote:
| v.150.1
| throwaway67743 wrote:
| You want 722 really, one of the choices for "HD voice",
| it mangles it much less than even 711
| lxgr wrote:
| No, unlike G.711, G.722 is lossily compressed using
| psychoacoustic concepts, and modems wouldn't know what to
| do with the extra acoustic frequencies anyway.
|
| G.722 might sound better to humans, but G.711 is
| definitely better for modems since it's effectively just
| uncompressed PCM (disregarding a bit of dynamic range
| compression which modems are generally fine with).
| throwaway67743 wrote:
| It is compressed, yes, but at higher bitrates it is
| actually usable for modems/faxes, you're limited to low
| baud rates anyway due to jitter and sample intervals. But
| really the benefit is 16k sampling rate instead of 8, I'm
| not saying it's great but it's the best we've got.
|
| It would be possible to mask this with a relatively
| simple FXS device to hide all of this and pretend it's a
| modem while packetising the actual data, but I guess the
| demand is almost zero so why bother.
|
| I've been looking for a solution for many years to retain
| dialin services without having racks full of modems and
| trunks that are rapidly going out of fashion and at some
| point will not be available except via IP (and now we
| have the same problem at both ends), but they just don't
| exist.
| lxgr wrote:
| > really the benefit is 16k sampling rate instead of 8
|
| Regular modems can't make use of that, since the actual
| phone lines they were designed for (whether analog or
| digital via G.711) didn't support more than 300-3400 kHz
| anyway, so anything beyond 8 kHz sampling (corresponding
| to a Nyquist frequency of 4 kHz) is wasted on them.
|
| Maybe you could go crazy with a custom modem that knows
| how to exploit the additional high-frequency components
| of G.722 while dealing with the lossy/psychoacoustic
| compression across all bands, but I doubt it would yield
| any improvement over G.711:
|
| > It is compressed, yes, but at higher bitrates it is
| actually usable for modems/faxes
|
| No, they're both exactly 64 kbps (after
| compression/"compression"), so you wouldn't be able to
| fit any more signal in it from an information theoretical
| point of view.
| vel0city wrote:
| Lots of people say faxing over VoIP just won't work, but
| at least for faxes with only a few pages and having a
| decent internet connection I've had excellent results.
|
| I had a project using hylafax with about a dozen USB fax
| modems hooked up to a SIP gateway, connecting through a
| VPN back to the office where the PBX was and then out to
| our SIP trunk provider on G.711. It sent _a lot_ of 2-10
| page faxes. The system sent over a million faxes over its
| life, and excluding one receiver that tended to
| constantly have problems no matter what had an >95%
| success rate.
| lxgr wrote:
| It really mostly comes down to jitter. On a low-jitter,
| low-packet-loss path and/or using large receive buffers
| (which adds delay, but that doesn't matter at all for
| faxes) fax is very possible.
| porkbeer wrote:
| Ive gotten 2400 and occasionally 9600 over audio voip.
| Ymmv.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| So I looked into it (too late for me to edit), if you have
| a government account it might be possible to add CSDOPTION
| to your account for $9.99/mo. It's highly unlikely though,
| I found the old and current price schedules and this was
| removed from it.
|
| Old gov contract expired 2022: https://www.gsaadvantage.gov
| /ref_text/GS35F0503M/0VX37Z.3RNG... (search for CSD, it's
| there)
|
| New gov contract in effect (no CSD): https://www.gsaadvanta
| ge.gov/ref_text/47QTCA22D008N/0YTCAI.3...
|
| EDIT: I tried to CSD dialup using my K850i which can handle
| my new and older SIM cards, no good. Simple Choice plans
| are way too new for this (the old plan I had in the early-
| mid 2000's was the Get More one)
| grishka wrote:
| We still have 2G on all carriers in Russia with no plans to
| shut it down (no plans to introduce 5G either though). But
| I'm not sure there are any operational dial-up providers left
| I could test CSD with. But I am now curious to test it.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| How well can digital phone lines carry dial-up connections? It
| was an issue in the early days of digital lines - same as with
| fax. For fax we got v.34 and other improvements. IDK about dialup
| tho.
| toast0 wrote:
| If you can run g.711 for your codec, things should work ok,
| depending on your jitter... g.711 is the digital calling code
| from 1972 that telcos used for T1/E1. On voip, it's packetized
| into 20ms bursts rather than multiplexed one sample at a time.
|
| If you use one of the newer predictive voice codecs, expect a
| lot less success, but maybe moving to older/slower modem speeds
| will help.
| lxgr wrote:
| Early digital lines were purely circuit switched and didn't add
| any jitter (unlike modern VoIP based "lines"), so there
| shouldn't have been any problems running analog or digital fax
| over these.
|
| V.34 was mostly a speed improvement, as far as I remember, no?
| devkit1 wrote:
| I think WarOnPrivacy was thinking of the T.38 standard. Once
| T.38 gained enough adoption in the various providers fax over
| IP became far more reliable.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.38
|
| edit: That is I assume that they meant VoIP when they say
| digital phone lines. Fax over digital ISDN lines has been
| reliable since its inception as far as I am aware.
| FrankPetrilli wrote:
| Quite well. I wrote a blog post about this a few years back:
| https://frank.petril.li/posts/dialup-adventures-1/
| shrubble wrote:
| If you have an ATA like a Cisco SPA122 , Linksys or Polycom
| 302, then you should be able to get between 2400 and 14,400
| baud speeds; you will have to try different speeds.
|
| Faxes routinely get 9600 and 14,400 speeds over these ATAs; it
| helps a great deal if your coded is G711 which is an
| uncompressed codec (it is u-law PCM in the USA; PCM is just
| like the bits recorded on a music CD, but at a much lower
| bitrate).
| kingforaday wrote:
| Projects like this warm my heart. There is a level of detail to
| appreciate on the capture of 2600, the POTS regional numbers
| ending in 2600, and BBS xfers.
|
| Kudos to the owner, founder, and maintainers. You embody the
| spirit of 2600!
| alberth wrote:
| FYI - 2600 Hz is a common handshake tone used in telco.
|
| Hence why "2600" is referenced.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2600_hertz
| 0xEF wrote:
| Lots of fun history around 2600Hz for those too young to
| remember or not part of the phreaking crowd, a fairly extinct
| form of hacker these days.
|
| A phreaker going by Joybubbles was the first to exploit the
| tone by whistling. Later, a toy whistle in a cereal box was
| found to be able to produce the tone, leading to further
| exploit by John Draper, aka, Cap'n Crunch.
|
| You can 3D print the whistle these days for a bit of nostalgia.
|
| https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2630646
| plapsley wrote:
| Shameless plug for my book on the history of the subject, for
| those interested: https://explodingthephone.com/
| chris0x00 wrote:
| I enjoyed your book
| plapsley wrote:
| Thanks!
| kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote:
| I, too, enjoyed your book. Everyone go buy it, it's good.
| plapsley wrote:
| Thank you, appreciate the plug! :-)
| endgame wrote:
| Not surprised at all to see the author on here. Your book
| is marvelous. I demolished your book on a flight a few
| years back, thoroughly enjoyed it, and was sad that it was
| all over so quickly (both the book, and the phreaking era).
| It has a permanent home on my shelf next to "The Cuckoo's
| Egg" as one of my favourite old tech storybooks and I
| recommend it to anyone vaguely interested in the subject.
| plapsley wrote:
| Thanks for the kind words, they mean a lot!
| peterleiser wrote:
| Nice! I just ordered a copy and can't wait to read it!
| Getting Steve Wozniak to write the forward is quite
| literally a "ringing" endorsement. ;-)
|
| Woz spoke at UC Berkeley (might have been 1998
| commencement), and I asked him to sign an issue of 2600
| magazine. After he signed it he flipped through it and
| asked if 2600 was still good and worth reading because he
| was thinking of getting a subscription for his son.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I was going to suggest this book as well, but no need if
| you're here doing it. Just a quick thanks for the book!
| I've read it multiple times whenever I feel nostalgic, and
| recommend when the subject comes up. I've even gifted a few
| copies.
| plapsley wrote:
| Thank you!
| 0xEF wrote:
| Hey, I notice you sell via a variety of sources. Which one
| ensures you the most ROI? I've always been curious, and
| like supporting others, but I worry that there's so many
| hands between you and your customer that by the time it the
| money reaches you, there is not much left.
| plapsley wrote:
| That's a very kind question, thanks! In terms of what I
| get in the end, it doesn't really matter where you buy it
| (e.g., Amazon, local bookstore, whatever), although I'd
| love it if you supported your local bookstore -- they
| need help! Format matters a bit more in terms of royalty
| percentage (I get a higher percentage on ebooks)but
| ebooks also are priced lower, so the net to me between
| paperback and ebook is not much different.
| theryan wrote:
| Just a heads up, the Amazon link from your site lands on
| the hardcopy version which there are only used copies of.
| plapsley wrote:
| Thanks for the heads up! I'll attend to that!
| 462436347 wrote:
| > A phreaker going by Joybubbles was the first to exploit the
| tone by whistling.
|
| Joybubbles (formerly Joe Engressia) specifically denied being
| the first. In this interview (no timestamp), he mentions
| having heard of others phreaking as far back as the 50s: http
| s://www.2600.com/offthehook/mp3files/1991/off_the_hook__...
|
| He also demonstrates whistling 2600hz during that interview,
| including doing so on one of the only US trunks in service at
| the time still using it for supervision.
|
| > Later, a toy whistle in a cereal box was found to be able
| to produce the tone, leading to further exploit by John
| Draper, aka, Cap'n Crunch.
|
| Not true, even he admitted, belatedly, that Denny Teresi
| introduced him to it:
|
| > https://www.dailydot.com/debug/john-draper-beyond-the-
| little...
|
| > Denny called me and told me about this whistle that blew
| the magic tone that disconnects long distance phone calls,
| and that he had a spare. He asked me if I could drive him to
| San Francisco so he could show me how it worked.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| Thanks. I was in Team Virus and later Team Phreak, and we
| had plenty of people coming to tell their stories of being
| either Draper or the first to discover red/blue boxing
| after we put out NPA-NXX. A lot of absolute nonesense, but
| tons of fun while it lasted.
| peterleiser wrote:
| Oh, to live again in 1995! The year of peak payphone and
| working red boxes. It was glorious, but sadly lives on
| only in our memories:
| https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/pay-phones-coming-
| back...
|
| "The stark shift happened fast; in 1995, the number of
| pay phones in the U.S. peaked at 2.6 million, Slate
| reported in 2022. In less than three decades, that's
| dwindled to fewer than 100,000."
| 0xEF wrote:
| Thank you for the corrections! Looks like I have to revisit
| some history. I never did make it that far back in the Off
| The Hook archives, despite being a 2600 subscriber for
| about the last decade. Hacking history is nothing short of
| muddy waters hiding all sorts of interesting things.
|
| I was born in the very late 1970's, so I had the pleasure
| of trying to build my own Blue Box just as payphones were
| starting to see their death in the early 1990's. It was my
| first real attempt to be part of a group I felt I belonged
| with; the hackers. I grew up with the verbal history I
| mentioned, which as you pointed out is factually incorrect,
| but I cannot deny the power that mythos had over my
| thinking for the last few decades.
| retrac wrote:
| > for those too young to remember or not part of the
| phreaking crowd
|
| Always important to remember that the telecom revolution was
| underway in 1890, let alone 1990. I still think the telephone
| system trumps the Internet in terms of revolutionary impact
| on society.
| 462436347 wrote:
| > FYI - 2600 Hz is a common handshake tone used in telco.
|
| _Was_ a common supervision tone used by the NA toll network
| prior to the introduction of SS7. Also practically everyone
| here knows (or ought to) that already, given that Jobs and Woz
| dabbled in making Blue Boxes for profit, and Blue Boxes
| produced 2600hz (along with the set of MF tones used to encode
| numbers). The fact you posted your redundant FYI with a mobile
| wikipedia link (phoneposting) is even more egregious.
| riddley wrote:
| Is this where the name of the zine came from, I guess?
| djbusby wrote:
| Yep. See also Captain Crunch
| peterleiser wrote:
| Yes. Details under "Publication History":
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2600:_The_Hacker_Quarterly
|
| And "Blue Boxes" exploited the 2600Hz signal to make free
| phone calls, explained here under "Operation":
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_box
|
| Steve Wozniak built Blue Boxes and Steve Jobs sold them:
| https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/blue-box-designed-
| an...
| userbinator wrote:
| I've wondered if the Atari 2600 was named such in reference to
| that, and online searches seem to confirm that it was.
| coin wrote:
| > 2600 Hz is a common handshake tone used in telco
|
| WAS not IS. It was phased out sometime in the 80s.
| op00to wrote:
| I remember messing with a self-made blue box at my school's
| pay phone in the early 90s, mystifying and amazing my nerdy
| friends. That fun ended when the phone company visited the
| school, and it was blantantly obvious who was the culprit in
| the rash of telephone billing crimes committed from a single
| pay phone, only after 3pm. No charges pressed, but I had to
| promise some dude in a suit I had learned my lesson. I
| hadn't.
| devjab wrote:
| It was also the inspirational name behind a multitude of
| "hacker" (really more like tinker) communities back around the
| millennium. I'm not sure where these went, maybe they were
| killed by social media, but there used to be a lot of 2600
| named tinker group for technology "nerds" here in Scandinavia.
| I guess what happened was the same thing which happened for me,
| people got older and stopped "hanging-out", but I wonder where
| younger technology "nerds" go today. I think that it's really
| interesting that the whole, very anarchistic mentality, which
| later spawned things like Anonymous doesn't seem to have caught
| on with the younger generations even though they are even more
| oppressed and left behind by the current western economies and
| governments than my "generation" was. Most of it is still run
| by the people from that period who are now all 40+.
|
| Anyway, I assume these as well as the tone are also a strong
| inspiration for the name.
| thelittleone wrote:
| Was certainly around before the millenium, approximately '94
| on #efnet.
| aequitas wrote:
| 2600:: is also an easy to remember IPv6 address for a ping
| connectivity check, it reverses to www.sprint.net, part of
| cogent now.
| sonicanatidae wrote:
| It was used to signal the status of Trunk lines, specifically
| if they were in use or open/available. By blowing a 2600 tone
| at the right time, you could seize the trunk and reroute the
| call.
|
| I miss those days. Crawling in dumpsters at the local CO,
| staying up until 5a, on a school night, because you'd just
| discovered something really, really cool.
| oldstrangers wrote:
| Dial ups, war dialing, and telnet were peak internet as a child.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| Orinoco Gold! I switched to passive Atheros when they ended up
| in netbooks, but I probably still have my scancat equipment
| somewhere.
| dylan604 wrote:
| G3 MacBook Pro clamshell, Orinoco Gold PCMCIA expansion card,
| an external cable connected to a threaded rod in a Pringles
| can. Gotta love the old farts strolling down memory lane with
| back in the day stories.
| crtasm wrote:
| Wifi was somewhat later but yes, also lots of fun things to
| explore!
| opello wrote:
| I'm assuming the Orinoco Gold goes to "war driving" more
| than "war dialing."
|
| And agreed, many hours spent dialing and driving around
| with friends, laptops, serial cables attached to GPS
| devices, and wifi antennas.
| Solvency wrote:
| So how do I realistically access this with a modern laptop and
| zero ancient modems left to my name.
| SuperNinKenDo wrote:
| You could possibly use tethering to your mobile phone in some
| way, although I'm unsure, I'm just throwing an idea out there.
| tjohns wrote:
| Cellular compression will not play nicely with analog modems.
| (Or any lossy compression, really - this is why you have to
| use lossless G.711 to have any hope of this working on VoIP.)
|
| Back in the days of 2G cellular, GSM had an option to have
| your cell phone digitally connect to an analog modem in the
| cell tower, and have the tower place an analog modem call on
| your behalf. (Very similar to how T.38 works for faxes in the
| VoIP world.) You'd then connect your cell phone to your
| laptop over RS-232, IrDA, or Bluetooth. It was called CSD
| ("circuit-switched data), and used 1x voice channel for 9600
| bps, or 4x voice channels for 56 kbps. Needless to say your
| cell carrier charged quite a bit for using this capability.
|
| I don't know if there's any cell carriers left that still
| offer CSD calls.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I doubt any modern smartphone supports CSD even if you had
| a carrier that supported it. You'd need either an old
| feature-phone or 3G dongle (something that exposes a serial
| port).
| palmfacehn wrote:
| https://stirfriedpixels.wordpress.com/2014/11/07/on-homemade...
| Klonoar wrote:
| I mean, the site itself notes:
|
| _> Don 't want to pay for a landline? No worries! You don't
| have to! Using an Analog Telephone Adapter, you can dial in to
| 2600.network. The ATA will give you analog service from a SIP
| VoIP provider._
|
| So presumably, acquire an adapter and hook it up to some VoIP
| setup?
| ac29 wrote:
| That solves the no phone line problem, not the no modem
| problem
| xyst wrote:
| This predates me by at least a decade. How do you use the "BBS"?
| So once you dial in, it uses IVR to read and write messages?
|
| Sounds painful to me once you have more than a dozen active users
| pokot0 wrote:
| It's just text interface like running a program on a terminal,
| just the program runs on the remote computer. Much like a
| telnet session, with some primitives to transfer files.
| porkbeer wrote:
| Typically BBS's were single user systems, although many
| multiuser systems existed too.
| Delk wrote:
| All the data is digital (in case of BBS, mostly text, although
| file transfers are also possible). The analogue phone line is
| only used for transmitting digital data over the analogue
| medium. The dial-up modem converts the digital data to an
| analogue voice signal at the transmitting end and back from
| analogue to digital at the receiving end. (That's what a modem
| is: a modulator-demodulator.)
|
| So no, you don't interact with a BBS by speech.
| op00to wrote:
| google a "telnet BBS" and see for yourself. the experience is
| the same, especially if you can set up a 1200 BPS serial
| connection.
| numpad0 wrote:
| AIUI, I'm myself way below BBS age too, I believe you sign in
| to a shell program to someone else's *nix box that offers BBS
| features. The shell that spawns at the remote side is a
| stripped down ncurses program rather than being /bin/bash.
|
| The program allows narrow range of actions such as `ls
| /var/bbs/threads/`, `cat /var/bbs/threads/$1`, or `cat | sed -e
| s/^/\n$(whoami),$(date)\twrote:/ >> /var/bbs/threads/$1.txt`.
| The grumpy neckbeards with accounts on the remote system would
| have extensive secret sauce for `/usr/bin/expect` that can
| aggregate changes for each file so they can catch up to the
| latest flamewars happening there, while it wouldn't be a
| requirement to be explained how far away you are on spectrum,
| or something along that.
|
| idk. More than happy to be corrected.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| So a decade and a half ago there used to be the Google Search
| Appliance (no idea if it still exists). It was essentially a
| black (actually yellow) box with some Google magic inside that
| let you have Google search on premises and for local documents
| you didn't want leaving your data center back when people still
| had their own data centers.
|
| One problem with this premise was that when the appliance was not
| working how it was supposed to, you couldn't just log into it to
| fix it because the Google magic was secret. You needed one of
| their engineers to access it and figure out what's wrong, but the
| wrinkle was that every appliance was installed in a different
| environment and almost certainly behind a firewall that was not
| easy to open for this process. So to bypass it Google did a very
| clever thing and added a dial up modem to the appliance. That way
| you could just go down to the rack, physically connect it to a
| phone line, and put it into a diagnostic mode where it would dial
| out to Google to start the remote session. No firewall rules, no
| unintentional leakage, no accidental logins from who knows where.
| jojobas wrote:
| >No firewall rules, no unintentional leakage, no accidental
| logins
|
| No guarantee that the box won't poke for ways to break out
| either, or was there a pinky promise? I guess it was somewhat
| easy to disguise it, the search box is supposed to constantly
| poke around and index things, right?
| solatic wrote:
| My understanding of what the parent wrote is the phone line
| would be disconnected in the normal case - can't break out if
| it's physically disconnected.
| riobard wrote:
| I wonder... wouldn't a physically disconnected ethernet
| cable work as well?
| anonair wrote:
| That design probably has more with phone network
| penetration rather than corporate firewalls. The most
| likely use case for on prem Google would be far away
| sites with no connectivity except a phone line
| IgorPartola wrote:
| We used it for intranet documents but I suppose it had
| multiple uses.
| jojobas wrote:
| The phone line is disconnected, but maybe some other link
| isn't. I mean it would be an extremely cool hack but I
| wouldn't be super-surprised to learn that google deployed
| some sort of exfiltration search technology in these boxes.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| > [A] search box is supposed to constantly poke around and
| index things, right?
|
| Amusingly enough, that was Snowden's approach, at least they
| way he tells it.
| Cacti wrote:
| Corporate datacenters are still quite common.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Indeed. People thinking otherwise live in quite the news
| bubble.
| punnerud wrote:
| Image of the box: https://www.wired.com/2012/10/google-search-
| appliance/
| CalRobert wrote:
| I remember interviewing for Google circa 2010 and they asked me
| to present on "How does Google make money?". At the time I went
| with "well aside from ads you have this funky search appliance"
| and I hoped that they'd find more non-ad ways to make money.
| They didn't hire me, but it seemed like a neat device.
| postexitus wrote:
| Erm - so as soon as it dials out, it could give a non-
| firewalled access to LAN, no? Maybe they also disconnected
| ethernet while connecting the phone cable, but not sure how
| effective they can diagnose a problem without the network in
| place.
| Bluecobra wrote:
| POTS is/was a requirement for remote/out of band access to AT&T
| network gear as well. I did run into a funny thing when they
| started to migrate T1/PRI's to fiber. They still insisted that
| they needed a dedicated POTS line but converted the underlying
| copper circuits to a single fiber circuit. I was able to work
| around this with a phone line adapter but if the underlying
| fiber circuit was down they would be screwed.
| threeio wrote:
| I had one of those boxes, worked for a company that ran news
| and magazine publishing sites and we pushed all the data to
| them as opposed to rewriting our search on the sites.. they
| were pretty decent and seemed to also help our page rankings on
| the mothersite ;)
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| This isn't as uncommon as you'd think. AWS's storage gateway,
| which is a caching NFS layer over S3, has a diagnostic mode
| which starts a reverse shell over 22/tcp.
| masto wrote:
| Sometime around 1999/2000ish, I built a sort of distributed
| database application. Early web app days, Perl and PostgreSQL
| on FreeBSD, and almost no JavaScript. It was for fairly
| sensitive data that the users were a bit squirrely about
| sharing, so the idea was that you stored all of the bits you
| owned on your local node, and you could send a remote query to
| the whole network and each node would execute it, notify the
| local owner of the data "hey, Sally wants a copy of this
| record", and they could choose whether or not to send it back.
|
| Some of these installations were located in the middle of
| nowhere, and in those days we couldn't count on Internet access
| of any kind. But the company happened to also own a dial-up
| ISP... so I came up with a system, which I'm kind of proud of
| even though it was quick a hack. We ended up piggybacking the
| whole thing on dial-up e-mail using GPG-encrypted attachments.
| A couple of times a day, each node would call into the ISP and
| do a standard POP3 and SMTP routine, processing incoming
| requests and dropping off outgoing ones. Because it wasn't
| important for it to be real-time, we made the whole thing work
| asynchronously with the customer only having to supply a phone
| line.
| phone8675309 wrote:
| This feels like a perfect application for UUCP / NNCP.
| ebiester wrote:
| Dial up as a part of an appliance was a fairly established
| pattern. I remember working with IBM in 2007 and they had a
| tool for a fair number of products that was just about dialing
| in to a terminal. However, I don't think it dialed back to IBM
| - people just used the terminal over dialup.
| throwawy6153 wrote:
| This is fantastic!
|
| I recently stumbled upon a now ancient publication called 2600:
| The Hacker Quarterly. I enjoy print and it is right up my alley.
| It contains many neat topics and I figure this is a good post to
| plug it (not affiliated, just love their minimalist design and
| ethos). Definitely worth a read, it covers so many neat topics
| from phreaking to neat BASH scripts.
| hereonout2 wrote:
| An absolutely fantastic publication, nice to see it still
| going.
|
| If you can find it there's a 1000 page hardback compendium of
| some of the best articles available too.
| elliottcarlson wrote:
| You should also check out Phrack Magazine (an online
| distributed ezine that is still active, albeit with years
| between issues - they also have a 2024 call for writers
| though!) at phrack.org
|
| Another older print publication was Blacklisted! 411, very
| similar format to 2600. I attended some meetups from both of
| these back in the day.
| plapsley wrote:
| If you want something really ancient, check out YIPL/TAP,
| which was the first phone phreak newsletter (started
| publishing in May 1971) that was the granddaddy of 2600. You
| can get it on the Internet Archive:
| https://archive.org/details/YIPLTAP_1-91
| underlines wrote:
| For reference, 2600 is a famous phreaking and hacking e-zine from
| the earlier days. The name 2600 itself is a reference to the
| 2600hz frequency used in Phone phreaking.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2600:_The_Hacker_Quarterly
| Rayston wrote:
| Just to clarify, they are from the early days, but they are
| also from the now days. They are still publishing. A link to
| their official site is in the above Wikipedia article.
| sonicanatidae wrote:
| They are, but sadly, blowing a 2600 down the line these days
| just gives someone in the CO a chuckle when they read the
| logs, a week later.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| What is the significance of 2600 in networking?
|
| There is a really hold hacker magazine at 2600.com, 2600 series
| routers from Cisco, AT&Ts IPv6 starts with 2600, according to the
| comments a standard tone used in dialing, and so on.
| dagw wrote:
| 2600 Hz was a frequency used as a control tone by the old
| telephone switches.
|
| Basically the old telephone switches would communicate with
| each other by sending different frequency tones or tone pairs
| to execute different commands, and 2600 Hz was the tone send to
| indicate that a call had ended. 2600 Hz was the first of these
| control frequencies discovered by phone phreaks back in the day
| and kicked off the whole phreaking scene, and so 2600 became a
| shorthand for phone phreaking
| immibis wrote:
| More specifically, local phone lines are full electric
| circuits from you to whichever piece of equipment you're
| currently talking to (connected via relays through many other
| pieces that you've finished talking to). That equipment knows
| you're still on the phone because current is still flowing
| through the circuit, regardless of the audio signal.
|
| But for long-distance, to get the most calls out of the
| fewest wires, they used frequency multiplexing, with no
| steady current flow. Instead, unused frequency carriers
| carried a steady 2600Hz tone, which meant the circuit wasn't
| connected. One end detected the lack of current flow in its
| local circuit and added 2600Hz; the other end detected 2600Hz
| and interrupted its circuit. (These frequency-division
| systems interfaced as local phone lines at both ends). I'm
| not sure how this worked bi-directionally.
|
| So by sending a 2600Hz tone, your frequency multiplexer would
| still remain connected, but the other end's frequency
| demultiplexer would think it had disconnected. When you stop
| sending 2600Hz, it thinks a new connection is getting set up
| through the same channel (i.e. HTTP request smuggling), and
| interprets whatever it receives as the setup instructions for
| the next connection. So you send 2600 Hz, then you send the
| super-secret MF-tone encoding of the phone number you want it
| to connect you to, or you send some super-duper-secret
| encoding that you normally couldn't dial on your phone. Input
| sanitization and translation is done in the exchange your
| phone directly connects to, not in the core of the system, so
| now that you are talking to the core, you can pass it
| unsanitized input (i.e. server-side request forgery) - there
| are no buffer overflows or CSRF, but you can call things that
| your exchange doesn't give you a way to access, such as
| internal departments of the phone company that are meant to
| be called by operators for assistance on complex requests,
| various test signals, and numbers that are only meant to be
| dialable locally, such as the operator in that exchange.
|
| I highly recommend checking out https://evan-
| doorbell.com/group-1-playlist/ which hosts podcasts of an
| actual past phone phreaker explaining all of this _with
| actual recordings of the phone system from back then_
| highlighting all the dial tones, conversations with
| operators, internal machinery working noises and so on.
|
| (Networks still work this way, by the way, just with better
| filtering. If you could somehow get packets into the middle
| of your ISP's network, you could send them to all sorts of
| places you can't send them to from your end of the
| connection.)
| jsjohnst wrote:
| The old school phone network used in-band signaling for call
| setup/control. If you made long distance calls pre-90s you
| might remember tones after the call started connecting as an
| example. One of the most significant frequencies in that
| control setup was 2600hz (which disconnected the call in
| progress and left you with an open tandem trunk, giving full
| access to call routing functionality), made infamous by Blue
| Boxes, Captain Crunch, and the magazine of the same name.
| op00to wrote:
| Has anyone played with "D-Modem" [1]
|
| "D-Modem replaces a softmodem's physical hardware with a SIP
| stack. Instead of passing audio to and from the software DSP over
| an analog phone line, audio travels via the RTP (or SRTP) media
| streams of a SIP VoIP call." [2]
|
| Seems pretty cool.
|
| [1] https://github.com/AonCyberLabs/D-Modem?tab=readme-ov-file
| [2] https://www.aon.com/cyber-
| solutions/aon_cyber_labs/introduci...
| lol_catz wrote:
| no V.150.1 support?
| Rayston wrote:
| C*Net is a site that might be interest to you as well. They do a
| lot of interesting things with PBXs and Asterisk and Telephones
| in general.
|
| https://www.ckts.info/
| fnord77 wrote:
| does POTS still exist? Aren't all land lines VOIP now?
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