37 ms·
I made 50k calls to explore the telephone network
- schoen 5y agoTraditional wardialing was almost always looking for modems, but it sounds like the particular number ranges that this researcher selected didn't contain any modems at all? I'm sure there are still plenty of modems connected to landlines, not just for ISPs still offering dialup service, but also for SCADA systems and stuff.
- fogihujy 5y agoThe landline network in Finland is currently in the process of being taken down. I suspect the amount of modems connected is minimal.
- pomian 5y agoThat sounds like a terrible idea. Taking apart a useful infrastructure, with unlimited potential for adoption, for purposes we don't know about yet. They took apart most of the rail network across Canada, especially the smaller rural links. And sold the land. Imagine trying to recreate an efficient communications system in the future, and trying to purchase right of ways to interconnect all the villages and towns across a 5000km wide country.
- fogihujy 5y agoThe guys, who removed the telephone poles and the wires in these parts, mentioned they paid the local power utility around 40€ per year for each single pole shared with power lines. Mind you, we're talking (mostly) disused old copper wires, with signal quality too poor to deliver more than a few mbps over ADSL, and most of the country is covered by a very well-built 4G network delivering 10+ mbps pretty much everywhere. I agree it's sad to see working infrastructure being taken down, but everything was privatized in the 90's/00's and the new network owners have no incentive to keep paying for its upkeep.
- jimmaswell 5y agoWhat good do some relatively poor quality phone lines do when we have much better coaxial and fiber around?
- fogihujy 5y agoThe one advantage is that the old phone lines have been proven to be very reliable through a lot of times where something like a 4G connection hasn't. I used ADSL as a backup for times when 4G was unreliable, like extreme weather situations. On the other hand, once line noise reduces your speed to kbps rather than mbps, they're also of limited use in this day and age.
- slumdev 5y agoA fax machine uses a modem of sorts, just with one specific protocol and purpose. I can't find anything about how WarVOX differentiates modems from fax machines, but I wouldn't write them off right away.
- hdmoore 5y agoIt is based on peak frequency, you can visually see it here: https://speakerdeck.com/hdm/derbycon-2011-acoustic-intrusions?slide=24 https://speakerdeck.com/hdm/derbycon-2011-acoustic-intrusion... IIRC (it has been a bit), there was a specific frequency only used by modem negotiation but not fax machines (3150?).
- drblah 5y agoAs "rescently" as 2014 I as involved with an old computer, controlling a pre-processing stage for a high volume composite casting factory. It turned out the computer had a modem and was connected with its own phone line. It also had Norton pcAnyware for remote operation. The computer had been running since at least 1992. No one remembered ever getting remote support, so I left it disconnected just for good measure. If anyone had actually wanted, I think you could have done a decent amount of damage using that. Especially since no one knew how and what the software on the computer did anymore. :)
- ipunchghosts 5y agoMaple confirmation message for Clever crossing
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- user3939382 5y agoThat reminds me of this talk I heard a while back (I think this is it: https://youtu.be/Hk-21p2m8YY https://youtu.be/Hk-21p2m8YY) The guys working on nmap scanned the entire Internet. That set off some serious alarms because on the target side, it looked like they were aware of the existence of the relationship between IPs/assets that were classified. If memory serves some dudes in black suits showed up at their door lol
- zaarn 5y agoI don't think the MiB showed up but they got some very aggressive mail from people who got scanned.
- faeyanpiraat 5y agohttps://youtu.be/Hk-21p2m8YY?t=478 https://youtu.be/Hk-21p2m8YY?t=478
- Matumio 5y agoI heard a similar story at a university I once worked. They did some kind of one-off portscan in the early internet days (with blessing of the local providers whose range was scanned). Some local companies got really angry because they spent a lot of time investigating the source.
- therealcamino 5y agoThe author says that lots of measures were taken not to wake people up in the middle of the night, but that despite those efforts 3 people were. Wouldn't the most obvious method have been not to dial numbers at night local time?
- idiotsecant 5y agoIts very unlikely they didn't think of that. Not all humans attached to phone numbers reside in the physical area of the area code.
- mudita 5y ago"WarVOX spent 60 seconds on every call, whether it was answered or not. This resulted in a wardialing speed of 1 call/minute. For 56874 calls, this means roughly 40 days calling day and night." Seems like he did actually call at night times.
- mkr-hn 5y agoI think given their efforts to avoid calling people at their local night, it's safe to assume "day and night" refers to the caller's local night.
- burnished 5y agomy reading was that OP took efforts not to call people but still rang at all hours. I think your reading and assumption are mistaken.
- mkr-hn 5y agoIt's entirely possible.
- Pick-A-Hill2019 5y ago56784 (calls) / 40 (days) = ~1422, round down to 1400 for 'easy math' 1400 / 24 (hours per day) = ~58 per hour (round up to 60) 60 / 60 (seconds) = 1 per minute so nope, he was hammering at it 24/7 (unless my maths is totally wrong which is always possible).
- mikeodds 5y agoI would like to know more about the zombie apocalypse number
- fogihujy 5y agoSounds like some PR stunt for a video game or something.
- alfiedotwtf 5y agoI remember 2600 doing this a few years ago. They claimed that they found a number that was "weird" which encouraged listeners to try it out. Turns out the rabbit hole was run by them :)
- criddell 5y agoOr maybe just part of a game. We recently played an at-home escape room game and one of the clues was a phone number. We dialed it and it was a recording giving information about the next part of the game.
- vr000m 5y agoThis was set up in 2019, the team having some fun! Thanks for finding us.
- sva_ 5y ago>There was a single response that was present in 1074 answered calls (91% of all interesting answers) and that waits for the caller to interact with itself. It says “Tervetuloa palveluun” (Welcome to the service) followed by repeating “Anna tunnusluku” (Please give access code). The machine does not give any hint of what kind of service it is. I wonder whats that about.
- jonathantf2 5y agoSounds like a dial-in meetings system maybe?
- aaron695 5y agoBack in the day, you'd have to ring up or write (using stamps) to get the user manuals. Or dumpster dive, which the one time we tried it kinda sucked since we expected manuals but got all the pass-codes instead which ended the game. Google “Tervetuloa palveluun” “Anna tunnusluku” see where it leads. You'll need Google translate as you get into it.
- tyingq 5y agoIt appears to be a service offered by http://elisa.fi http://elisa.fi The excerpt from the manual[1], translated to English. Call the number __________________________ You will hear the bulletin “Welcome to the service” You will hear the message “Enter the passcode” http://esco.elisa.fi/rest/esco/blob/yritysten-asiakastuki/Vastaussarja_kytkeytymisohje-puhelimella.pdf http://esco.elisa.fi/rest/esco/blob/yritysten-asiakastuki/Va...
- voiper1 5y agoQuite possibly calling cards or conference lines. Recording voice prompts is "hard" so many just try to make due with the included prompts in asterix/freeswitch.
- FascistDonut 5y agoMy first thought (influenced heavily by Hollywood) was that it was some kind of assassin or other criminal service. You call in, give the correct pass phrase and someone tells you where to get your vacuum repaired locally (if you know what I mean).
- ubrpwnzr 5y agoThis is wonderful, any thoughts on about doing this in another country?
- h2odragon 5y ago> To avoid listening to all recordings myself, used Google Cloud Speech-to-Text to transcribe the recordings, and then used the transcriptions ... That's a lot of trust to place in google. Do all this work to gather data, then throw it away and analyze what google did to the data instead.
- iamgopal 5y agoThe amount of way google could have data, this is just peanuts.
- turminal 5y agoAll your data are belong to us!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- JCBird1012 5y agoTo be fair, most of the original recordings (with caveats listed there) were linked at the bottom, so I presume that the author still has them around - that's hardly "throwing" them away. I don't think the goal of using Google speech-to-text was to solely use the transcriptions for the rest of the project, but you've gotta find some way to sift through those recordings and pull out the interesting bits. I think that was the right choice providing additional context and picking out the good stuff. Imagine having to listen to ~28 hours of recordings (60 sec * 1724 answered calls) when there's a service that can easily turn those recordings into a more easily consumable format, and then you can go back and listen to the neat stuff.
- h2odragon 5y agoExcellent points. Still, it puts a lot of trust in the service, the analysis is of their results not the original data. Furthermore, it feels like cheating, dammit. We dialed half of an area code in a full a week back when, and didn't even have the luxury of recording equipment.
- williesleg 5y agoThat's illegal please arrest her.
- RIMR 5y ago>As there are no Shodan-like search engines for the telephone network, I needed to do the exploration myself. in the 2000's there was a massive telephone search engine hosted at bellsmind.net. You could find brief descriptions of hundreds of thousands of phone numbers. You could just run down a list of 800 numbers and call the ones that looked interesting. Some presented you with a new dialtone. Some played weird little jingles. Some lead you to a real person. A few were set up by phone hobbyists and let you play games. At some point the law caught up with BellsMind and the database was taken down. The whole site is gone now - even the blog. You can see remnants of that database here (just skip through time to see new stuff - the rest is mostly broken): https://web.archive.org/web/20041015131435/http://bellsmind.net:80/Engine/ListScanned.php https://web.archive.org/web/20041015131435/http://bellsmind.... EDIT: This is the page for "The 944 Project", which was a crawl of the entire 800-944-XXXX space. Easily the best list at the time. Some stuff might still be there. https://web.archive.org/web/20050125030027/http://bellsmind.net/Engine/BellsMindParseExtended.php?NPA=800&NXX=944 https://web.archive.org/web/20050125030027/http://bellsmind....
- VeninVidiaVicii 5y agoThat’s a huge amount of people who didn’t answer. Phones are basically worthless to get ahold of people — I called about 40 students last spring for interviews and got only one answer, myself.
- bombcar 5y agoNote that he intentionally picked numbers that were unlikely to be personal phone numbers.
- macintux 5y agoThat seems to be part of the problem with political polling lately: practically no one answers the phone (and of course not many of those who do are willing to participate).
- gravypod 5y agoDid you first leave a voicemail, text, or email as well? Most of my time I am busy. Either sleeping, working, relaxing (TV, games, friends), and only a small small fraction of my time am I doing nothing to such a degree that if pick up an unknown number call. Especially in 2020s due to spam callers. I've noticed some people saying "kids don't pick up phones anymore" and really, no, we don't. There's more efficient and reliable communication modes available. If I could pay for a sperate set of phone numbers that were text-only, I would have that instead.
- mindcrime 5y agoI've noticed some people saying "kids don't pick up phones anymore" and really, no, we don't. Kids? Hell, I'm 47 and that's my policy as well. I basically don't answer unsolicited phone calls unless it's my dad or one of a very small number of close friends or family members. And honestly, even that's not guarantee that I will pick up at times.
- erdo 5y agoSame (44) phone calls are for recruiters and marketing spam, so if I'm not currently looking for a job, the phone doesn't get answered
- ashleyn 5y agoThe "unknown machine" sounds like dtmf tones + pulse tones. It's anyone's guess what the actual meaning of the numbers are, but the tone+pulse encoding suggests a super legacy, perhaps proprietary automated system that you'd call up to get the status of something - maybe factory machinery or a power plant, but really it's anyone's guess. Pulse dialing was still somewhat common until the mid 80s so this system is potentially upwards of 40 years old.
- roliver 5y agoCould it be an auto-answer from a Telex machine? https://youtu.be/lCZmVXGyVQQ?t=15 https://youtu.be/lCZmVXGyVQQ?t=15 I have no idea what they sound like on a telephone line though.
- GrumpyNl 5y agoSounds like broken audio file on the other end.
- teeray 5y agoIt reminded me of alarm central station protocols. The earliest (e.g. 3/1 and 4/2) use pulse, and the later ones (Contact ID, SIA) use DTMF [0]. These systems are still installed and relied upon by alarms today. It does seem the industry is finally coming around to LTE, since a copper pair is basically a fiction we present to alarms at this point. [0] https://www.emergency24.com/cp/formats.aspx https://www.emergency24.com/cp/formats.aspx has a cursory overview of many protocols
- wpietri 5y agoThe author also posted an interesting bit on setting up a VOIP/SIP honeypot: https://shufflingbytes.com/posts/sip-honeypot/ https://shufflingbytes.com/posts/sip-honeypot/ Turns out is a ton of automated activity looking to make money via poorly secured phone systems.
- andrewtbham 5y agoRegarding: "Maple confirmation message for Clevercrossing." It sounds like they are saying "Global Crossing" which was a telecom company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Crossing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Crossing
- tdjsnelling 5y agoI'm also fairly sure it says 'mobile' not 'maple'
- mercora 5y agoi was told once some of the emergency lines on elevators in Germany could be called into once you uncovered their number and expected to read about something similar here but no. Still quite interesting of course. i wonder if these machine-machine range numbers might only accept calls from other machines in that range...
- ashleyn 5y agoThe elevator call boxes are surprisingly easy to "hack" considering they have virtually no security whatsoever and the industry doesn't appear to have practices that combat social engineering. https://hackaday.com/2019/08/10/those-elevator-emergency-call-buttons-are-actually-pretty-janky/ https://hackaday.com/2019/08/10/those-elevator-emergency-cal...
- wasmitnetzen 5y agoCoincidentally, the author works at an elevator company as a Product Security Engineer according to their LinkedIn profile.
- mercora 5y agois "illegal termination" when you funnel calls via VoIP to some local mobile network operators using sim cards usually provided to customers? like lets say to avoid billing it like a call into another network?
- Scoundreller 5y agoThat’s one example, yes. In some places that may be illegal, in other places, just a breach of contract. Lots of interesting contraptions on AliExpress with 64 SIMs in it. Other times, international traffic is supposed to pay more than domestic traffic (governments use it as a source of revenue), but it works on the honour system at some telecoms. Or someone is letting your traffic appear as coming from a telecom’s no-cost peer, even though you’re not their peer and are supposed to be buying termination. In these cases, you’re unlikely to get working callerID because that would make it too easy to trace the true origination.
- lormayna 5y agoIn one of my previous job, I created a fax spamming machine with the same principle: a SIP trunk and an Asterisk machine that bruteforce numeration blocks. After few months we collected an interesting database of fax numbers
- criddell 5y agoWhat were you trying to do?
- waltwalther 5y agoMaple confirmation message for Clevercrossing sounds a lot like "Mobile confirmation message for global crossing..."
- freedrock87 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Crossing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Crossing
- account42 5y ago> Ensured that any recording of private individuals did not end up outside the EU, being saved by third parties, or used to train machine learning models is incompatible with > To avoid listening to all recordings myself, used Google Cloud Speech-to-Text to transcribe the recordings
- matthewmacleod 5y agoThis is not true. Google Cloud's speech-to-text service allows users to select the region used to process data, and allows users to pay a higher rate in order to opt out of their data being logged.
- ezekg 5y agoBut Google's speech-to-text is the epitome of machine learning.
- ChrisKnott 5y agoBut it's unlikely to train on user inputs/outputs, because they wouldn't know if they were correct
- LeifCarrotson 5y agoData that customers are sending to an ML speech-to-text API seems like exactly the sort of data that one would want to save for training future models. Maybe I'm too cynical, but I have no confidence that Google throws away any data that they can get their hands on.
- matthewmacleod 5y agoI mean you can just read their description: By default, Speech-to-Text does not log customer audio data or transcripts. To help Speech-to-Text to better suit your needs, you can opt into the data logging program. The data logging program allows Google to improve the quality of Speech-to-Text through using customer data to refine its speech recognition service. As a benefit for opting in, you gain access to discounted pricing.
- ok123456 5y agoAs a pre-teen in the early 90s, I spent hundreds of hours wardialing most of the free-to-dial exchanges. I was lucky enough to have a US Robotics modem that reported the extended result status codes to detect voice, continuous tone, and fax lines. The results were typically for every exchange that 1% of the numbers were modems, 1% were fax machines, 70% were non-intercept recordings or humans, 0.3% were continuous tones and test numbers, and the rest were primarily unallocated or just did not complete.
- imroot 5y agoI did the same thing -- wardialed the free-to-dial extensions in the small town that I grew up in. The next day, someone from the gas company knocked on my parents door because apparently my war-dialer (who worked during the day when I was at school) knocked offline their monitoring system. Now-a-days, I'm sure I'd be hauled off to jail instead of a polite request to keep the 13 year old away from the phones for a bit.
- ok123456 5y agoAt one point, I got a knock on the door from some city detective because I dialed someone who, I guess, was the victim of some abuse and used *57, the code for initiating a trace and reporting it to an already assigned investigator. The optimal solution, I mean other than knocking off completely, would have been to use a reverse directory to blacklist all the residential subscribers.
- mindcrime 5y agoInteresting historical tidbit... "back in the day" the phone company often located "interesting" numbers (modem numbers, test numbers, etc.) within a given exchange in the npa-xxx-99zz block, or maybe npa-xxx-9zzz. So a friend and I started war-dialing that block in our local hick town, and found some test loops, ANAC numbers, modem numbers for the switch that served our town, etc, etc. Fun stuff. Then one day right after one of our sessions, we got a call - from the phone company, basically telling us to knock it off before we got into big trouble. I don't remember the exact wording, but that was the gist of it. They knew who we were and where I lived, so that "put the fear of god into us"... briefly. Then we discovered that you could beige-box the line connected to a COCOT[1] sitting at a remote convenience store out in the middle of nowhere at 2:00am and connect a modem to that. One cheapo refurbished "brick" of a "laptop" later, and we'd go out late Sat. night / early Sunday morning and run our scans and login sessions to their switch from this remote payphone. What was nice was this particular phone's demarc box was the kind that had an RJ-11 connector in it, so we didn't even need alligator clips. We just plugged a long telephone extension cord in, parked my car about 50 feet away and sat in there, huddled around the "laptop" and went to work. Good times. And then sometime in the late 90's we all realized that we were old enough to be tried as adults if we got caught, and that the authorities were starting to take this stuff more seriously and that getting busted could have real consequences like not getting hired for jobs, not getting into college, or even jail time. I mean, Operation Sundevil[2] had happened almost 10 years earlier, but we assumed that our risk was limited living in the hick town we lived in, with Barney Fife cops and low-tech telco employees, etc. But at some point we all walked away from that stuff, deeming the risk of continuing to play in that world to be too high. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COCOT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COCOT [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sundevil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sundevil
- jdalgetty 5y agoMany years ago I did something similar with a piece of software called ToneLoc. I called every number in my my city. The results back then were much more interesting as there were so many more modems and dial in networks.
- ananonymoususer 5y agoAccording to his data, no modems were present. It could be that he classified modems as facsimile, but he doesn't say.
- petercooper 5y agoThe "exception" music example isn't really an exception. It's Passages by Kenny G which is about as hold music as it gets, it's just heavily modulated.
- mindcrime 5y agoSee also, /r/weirdnumbers and, if you're into that sort of thing (that is, exploring the phone network), /r/phreaking Old-skool phreaking[0] (eg, using blue boxes and red boxes) is mostly dead (at least in the US and most "first world" countries. Maybe there is some vestige of in-band signaling left somewhere else) but there is still some fun to be had exploring phones and phone networks. Modern day phreaking is more about GSM sniffing[1], messing with the SS7 network[2][3][4], using SCTP[5]/SIGTRAN stuff[6], etc. etc. But, at least for the land-line / PSTN network, even some of the old "colored boxes"[7] still do useful things. You can always beige-box a landline phone, violet-boxes should still work, I think a gold-box would still work, etc. If you want to dig deeper into how the PSTN works, a good, fun book is Understanding Telephone Electronics[8] by Carr, Winder, and Bigelow. Another interesting one is Digital Telephony[9] by Bellamy. Another "oldie but goodie" is Voice and Data Communications Handbook[10] by Bates and Gregory. Also, don't ask me how or why I know any of this stuff... :-) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phreaking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phreaking [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzyuioto4y8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzyuioto4y8 [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JCusqL-Gdk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JCusqL-Gdk [3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wu_pO5Z7Pk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wu_pO5Z7Pk [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_System_No._7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_System_No._7 [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_Control_Transmission_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_Control_Transmission_Pr... [6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIGTRAN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIGTRAN [7]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phreaking_box https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phreaking_box [8]: https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Telephone-Electronics-Joseph-Carr/dp/0750671750/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=understanding+telephone+electronics&qid=1624461341&s=books&sr=1-3 https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Telephone-Electronics-J... [9]: https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Telephony-Telecommunications-Processing-2000-01-24/dp/B01K0RZYNA https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Telephony-Telecommunications-... [10]: https://www.amazon.com/Voice-Communications-Handbook-McGraw-Hill-Communication/dp/0072263350 https://www.amazon.com/Voice-Communications-Handbook-McGraw-...
- alcover 5y ago> don't ask me how or why I know any of this stuff... I think I know. You were a Ghost in the Wire !
- buzer 5y ago> I was very surprised to hear this bizarre message about the end of the world and a zombie apocalypse when listening to the recordings. So that's the reason someone called, we thought zombie apocalypse had already started...is what I would like to say, but reality is a bit more boring. It's one of our test numbers that we used for integration testing one of our call center integrations for our WebRTC monitoring platform (https://www.callstats.io https://www.callstats.io) and someone decided to have a bit of fun with call flow :) If you had pressed 1, you would have got a message about choosing to be rescued and that the agents take long tea breaks. (disclaimer: I work at 8x8 on the callstats product)
- adflux 5y agoThis is perfect
- FridayoLeary 5y agoreally?
- ValtteriL 5y agoThis is correct :D I verified this by calling again and pressing 1.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- hdmoore 5y agoI am the author of WarVOX (a mostly dead project these days). Some useful links: - WarVOX 2.0 Presentation: https://speakerdeck.com/hdm/derbycon-2011-acoustic-intrusions https://speakerdeck.com/hdm/derbycon-2011-acoustic-intrusion... - WarVOX Source: https://github.com/rapid7/warvox https://github.com/rapid7/warvox The US legal restrictions on wardialing are complicated and changes to the law made it difficult to continue the project. For fans of ToneLoc, I implemented the data format and visualization with my latest project (Rumble Network Discovery): - https://www.rumble.run/blog/subnet-grid-report/ https://www.rumble.run/blog/subnet-grid-report/
- david_shaw 5y agoThank you for your contributions to WarVOX, and to so many other projects that advanced the security community. I never would have guessed that in 2021 we'd have headlines about IRC drama and wardialing! Maybe history does repeat itself :)
- hdmoore 5y agoNo kidding and thank you!
- user3939382 5y agoWow ToneLoc… that really takes me back. It’s so fascinating to remember something for the first time in over 20 years.
- api 5y agoI'm surprised they found no modems. I don't see any listed. I'm sure there are still modems on the telco system for things like maintenance lines. I've seen them before in data centers to get into the networking hardware if everything else is down, for SCADA systems, to support really old credit card terminals, etc.
- mindcrime 5y agoI think some of those "off brand" ATM machines you find in like convenience stores and stuff, use dial-up comms as well. So somewhere, out there, there are modems waiting to receive those calls...
- woodruffw 5y agoYep. The ATM in my office's lobby (which used to be a bank headquarters, ironically) has a little speaker and you can hear it do the PPP handshake when it connects.
- nojokes 5y agoAvatar describes Moomin characters. These characters were first introduced by Swedish-speaking Finnish illustrator Tove Jansson. I find them very Nordic. But the characters were also adopted by a Dutch-Japanese animation production and they spoke Japanese. I found it also kind of fitting and natural.
- Hitton 5y ago>How I tried to avoid scaring people with ghost calls in the middle of the night. (...) You get a call, which you pick up, but the caller remains silent. After a while, the caller hangs up. This alone can feel threatening to some people. And the author's solution is... to delete call recordings. What about just playing prerecorded message explaining it? I can't help but question intelligence of the author.
- Syzygies 5y agoDunno what I said the last time a call violated the do-not-call list and woke me. They actually called back later to tell me how shook up they were, and that they'd been discussing my response with their lawyers. I don't see a difference between kidnapping one person for a week, and taking ten seconds away from 56,874 people. I'd support similar penalties. I decided to fix this problem. Phone.com is aimed at small businesses; if you have three extensions in your house they default to ringing separately like cubicles. However, any HN reader will have no trouble customizing their service. I have one service spanning homes on both coasts. The phone number I give out has a white list, or answers with a recorded message to press 7. Apparently this is enough to evade all robocalls. Successful callers ring the extensions where I'm scheduled to be, and the Phone.com app on my cell phone. My cell phone is otherwise set to "Do Not Disturb" so it only rings if you're in that address book. The Phone.com app is a bit clumsy (it doesn't track switching to AirPods once the call starts, for example) but for answering calls it works. Some legitimate businesses robodial numbers before putting on a human. They don't get through. Life goes on. They should know better than to appear to be a robocall.
- rightbyte 5y agoSo a captcha for phones? Like "press 7 to reach me". Great idea acctually.
- irobeth 5y agoI have this set up at twilio with a simple Studio workflow and so far it defeats 100% of automated dialers: A lot of auto-dialers wait to hear a human, so to trigger anything listening for a response, the challenge goes "Can you hear me? This number is protected by Samaritan Call Protection" (shout-out to Person of Interest) Then about a second later, it follows "Press 5 to be connected." Things that dial 5 get a ring-through to my cell, things that don't get blackholed.
- fapjacks 5y agoThis is exactly what I do, but I use a randomly-generated-per-call two-digit number to advance the caller from my (Asterisk-based) IVR. It works like a charm.
- jcuenod 5y agoWhen 55150 are unanswered, the title begins to feel clickbaity.
- balancemayvary 5y agoHaving read the whole thing, I wholeheartedly disagree. I went in expecting something vaguely phreaky, and I was not disappointed.
- PaulHoule 5y agoCirca 1998 I dialed a random sample of toll-free numbers in the US and found that 20% of them were numeric pagers. So you could write a script that does something like ATDT 1800*******PPP[victim] where * are random digits. If you did it 100 times, the victim would get about 20 calls from very confused big shots who had no idea who was calling them. You could make 5000 of those calls a day so it would be quite a hassle.
- withinboredom 5y agoThis reminds me of listing a free TV on Craigslist and using a “victims” phone number.
- bambam24 5y agoHorrible act, If in US he would probably get arrested
- bruce343434 5y agoWhy does audio sound so bad over the phone? Why can we have 1Mbps broadband over these lines but not pristine audio?
- mindcrime 5y agoAre you talking about a landline phone or a cell phone? There are pretty big differences between the two, traditionally. More concretely, cell phones generally have shitty sounding audio largely due to the compression and other manipulation of the signal that happens in during the overall process.
- vel0city 5y agoLandline phones have largely been compressed data since the 70s, and we're still using the same compression algorithms on most phone networks to this day. ~~Most cell phones will use the exact same audio codecs as most landlines and this has been true for decades.~~ EDIT: Actually this isn't exactly true. Most "landlines" will use G.711 while most GSM cell phones will use AMR. Either way, both are pretty highly compressed audio sources but AMR lets you drag the quality even lower. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.711 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.711 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Multi-Rate_audio_codec https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Multi-Rate_audio_code... Its been a long time since most landline phones were actually complete circuits from point A to B. Those old mechanical switches were crazy expensive to operate.
- mindcrime 5y agoEither way, both are pretty highly compressed audio sources but AMR lets you drag the quality even lower. That may be what I'm thinking of. And IIRC, regarding land-line phones, the issue of compression varied depending on whether you were placing a local call or a long-distance call, and varied depending on the long-distance carrier. But, to be fair, I haven't thought about most of this stuff, or studied these issues, in about 20 years, since I last worked for a company that did telephony work. So quite possibly my memory is wrong, or my knowledge is just outdated now.
- spullara 5y agoI might have written a wardialer and called all my local numbers right after watching the theatrical release of WarGames.
- doctorshady 5y agoThere's people who do this sort of thing in the US network regularly: https://www.twitter.com/shadytel https://www.twitter.com/shadytel Some of what can be expected to be found in telco test ranges: https://pastebin.com/7KAuZmQq https://pastebin.com/7KAuZmQq
- Hnrobert42 5y agoI am pretty sure I recognize the hold music. I believe it is from uberconference.com. You likely found one of their teleconference lines. Each paid UC user gets their own local number. When a conference is active, dialing it will connect you immediately to the conference. (Of course, the host can chose to require a PIN, but I never had any unknown drop ins.) It is SO much better than Zoom’s system.
- urbandw311er 5y ago> Maple confirmation message for Clevercrossing I think this one actually says “Mobile confirmation message for Global Crossing”. It’s a slightly nasal Brit accent so I can see why it might have been a bit harder to decipher.
- sgallant 5y agoUnrelated to the post, but the thumbnail that loads at the top of this page is very large (and slow to load). https://shufflingbytes.com/images/avatar.png https://shufflingbytes.com/images/avatar.png
- nonamesleft 5y agoDid a similiar thing with ToneLoc in 1993 or 1994 (not 100% sure of exact year, but 1994 at the latest as i still had my 286) using an USR 14400 Sportster in Finland also, but my scan was limited to the 9800/0800 1xxxx set which seemed to cover most of the freephone numbers. (I believe 9800 and 0800 were mapped to the same endpoints back then, memory slightly hazy.) I do recall getting far more modem pickups than your run, perhaps it was more popular back then. One that made me wonder back then was a modem answering stating it was a 'Cray Communications CMX', sadly now decades later i know that it has nothing to do with the supercomputer manufacturer.
- fart32 5y ago> 11 Calls were answered with only music. The music could indicate something, such as being in queue for some service. All music variants except for one sounded like generic elevator music that could be the default hold music in PBXs. Someone told me that there used to be actual phone lines playing music 24/7 that elevators would dial and output to a speaker. Speaking of elevators, their emergency lines are also usually just phones and, as someone already pointed out in this thread, with enough knowledge you can call the elevator and listen (and talk) to people in it.
- gwbas1c 5y agoDoes anyone else have a problem with this? I often get multiple calls like this a day! I firmly believe that the right to privacy includes a right not to be disturbed at random times on my phone. FIRST: The phone networks need to quickly detect spam like this and block these kind of calls. SECOND: This kind of behavior needs to be considered white-collar crime with appropriate fines, jail time, and other penalties. (Like not being able to have a phone and internet connection.)
- pontifier 5y agoHow would one go about getting a phone number in the Finnish machine to machine space? Sounds like a great number to have to avoid robo call spammers.