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Secret Military Telephone Buttons
- neom 5y agoIn case anyone wanted a picture: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b2/AUTOVON_telephone_-_Telephone_Museum_-_Waltham%2C_Massachusetts.agr.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b2/AUTOVON_... Now we have the answer to one of lifes burning questions, what does the FO button do?
- nexuist 5y agoIt's called "Flash Override" but I feel like a better name would have been "Fall Out."
- thelittleone 5y agoModern phones could do with an "FO" button for an entirely different purpose. Don't like the current call... hit the FO button... let them know. In particular a disturbing practice I noticed in Australia. The bank calls, I pick up and a recording: "this is XYZ bank, please hold an operator will be with you shortly". A golden opportunity for an FO button. It could work like an email spam button Enough FO's and the number gets auto blocked.
- JdeBP 5y agoIt already exists on many telephone service providers in some countries. It doesn't have a specific button, and it isn't standardized across providers. But on one provider in the United Kingdom, for example, it is 14258 then star twice to blacklist the number that last called. (On another provider, just to show the variation, it is 1572 then 1.) * https://sse.co.uk/asset/pdf/guide-to-call-features-with-your-sse-phone https://sse.co.uk/asset/pdf/guide-to-call-features-with-your... * https://plus.net/help/phone/call-features/ https://plus.net/help/phone/call-features/ The downside of a single button would be that even with the existing systems it is all too easy to accidentally blacklist the wrong people. I know someone who was accidentally blacklisted by one of xyr elderly friends. It caused all sorts of interesting fallout until the two of them had the opportunity to speak in person. One can imagine what a single button could do in the hands of small children. And, indeed, we have known for a couple of decades what anti-spam buttons can do in the hands of people who (say) decide to "junk" every mail message after reading it. For Australia, see rather the Do Not Call Register, which is the better option as these blacklisting systems are usually restricted to a couple of handfuls of numbers. * https://donotcall.gov.au https://donotcall.gov.au
- emmelaich 5y agoFlash is a priority higher than urgent in Navy communications.
- InvaderFizz 5y agoIf you want a slightly more up to date example, these were in common use at least as recently as 2010: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Red_Switch_Network https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Red_Switch_Network As to what the FO button does, it cuts off whatever call the number you were dialing is on and connects your call instead. So you had better be sure your call is is important enough to potentially cut off a General Officer. At least that's how it was explained to me back in 2003. Never had occasion to use the priority modes.
- monocasa 5y agoIt's more that on systems with a circuit switched network there are typically fewer outgoing/incoming lines at a location then there were telephones, so you can get in a situation where a choke point in circuits can mean that you can't make a call because they're all busy. FO will force hang up other calls to make sure yours can go through. That's very likely to hang up other, unrelated calls in order to get through, rather than the person you're calling (it will hang up their call too if they're currently on a call though).
- a-dub 5y agoyes, it sets your priority for throwing others off of interswitch trunks and keeps others from throwing you off, as i understand. traditional phone network would give a fast busy or an "all circuits are busy" message if all lines between two switches are busy. the special buttons let you assign priority for your use of those lines. F0 is just max priority.
- usrusr 5y ago...and now imagine how likely "all circuits are busy" would be in a network were half of the infrastructure was freshly nuked. A dedicated button for "give me a line, I'm the president!" doesn't seem that far fetched anymore. Who knows, if they spend enough time pondering communications availability in such dire circumstances someone might invent an internet!
- Natsu 5y agoThis makes me realize that "Crash Override" was probably a riff on "Flash Override" which I somehow never connected before.
- op00to 5y agoPlease please please say it stand for “fuck off” and ignites the rocket under your desk chair for a quick escape.
- pigbearpig 5y agoIt's also interesting that the precedence concept was in the original IP header RFC 791. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc791#page-12 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc791#page-12 Probably a good thing it was dropped along the way or I can only imagine what Comcast would have done with that. Here are allegedly the guidance on what the precedence levels should be used for. http://www.plexoft.com/SBF/Autovon.html http://www.plexoft.com/SBF/Autovon.html
- colanderman 5y ago> Probably a good thing it was dropped along the way or I can only imagine what Comcast would have done with that. You think you're joking. ToS morphed into DSCP [1], which is sometimes used in residential networks to prioritize VoIP. (I can't speak to business or industrial networks; presumably it finds use there as well.) WLAN networks can be configured to heed this priority, more aggressively grabbing airtime for high-priority packets. I configure my home network that way. DSCP does not generally cross the home network<->Internet boundary, but there is one major exception I know of: Comcast. They tag all non-CATV traffic as the lowest priority (DSCP 8), resulting in terrible performance of any home network configured to heed DSCP values. (You can avoid this by stripping DSCP values from inbound packets.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differentiated_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differentiated_services
- jcrawfordor 5y agoHah, I wish I'd remembered that when I wrote this post. There's a whole story about IP having borrowed concepts from AUTODIN and AUTOVON as well as computer precedents like NCP. Of course the idea that DoD would move their networks over to IP was actually surprisingly unsuccessful and to this day a lot of the originally envisioned concepts like multilevel security on IP networks are no closer to happening. In parallel, most modern military/IC telephone systems are commodity Cisco with specialty features added somewhat awkwardly. Not nearly as exciting as it once was.
- solarkraft 5y ago> commodity Cisco with specialty features added somewhat awkwardly What type of functionality does the US military need that individual customers wouldn't want?
- a-dub 5y agofunny. was thinking about autovon today and was wondering if adding notions of priority/qos are basically the bedrock of building reliable systems...
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y agoA couple of years ago one acquaintance of mine, who works at a company making aviation simulators, bought some flight manual for US fighter jet on Ebay.... And when he travelled to Georgia (near the Black sea one), he was detained and deported to the US and has spent a year in prison there on espionage charges. He was released after great efforts by many people and is forever banned entry to the US. So I wouldn't touch anything 'secret' and 'military' even with a 2 meter pole.
- mhh__ 5y agoIs this one of the DCS developers?
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y agoYeah, that one. He went for a salsa dancing festival in Georgia, and it totally didn't go as planned.
- SOMA_BOFH 5y agohe shipped the manuals to russia through a third party to obscure his identity because he knew it was illegal. the reaction to the crime may have lacked proportionality but there are more details to the story.
- op00to 5y agoMan what a bummer. The F16 is my favorite jet to fly in DCS. :(
- pbhjpbhj 5y agoIs there any suggestion that there was anything to learn from manuals being sold in eBay that wouldn't already be well known? Did the person selling the manuals get prosecuted? Was someone court martialed for releasing them?
- 5y ago
- tiahura 5y agoSurely we all read Hackers?
- joezydeco 5y ago
- Animats 5y agoHere's the earlier system mentioned, MF, shown in an operator training film.[1] Two vertical rows of five numeric keys, plus the KP and START keys. Those tones were used within the long distance system, not out to customers. The phone system started out entirely manual and slowly migrated to fully automatic over decades. Switching was automated before billing and routing. What you see in that video is an operator who is placing a long distance call for a customer. When this film was made, around 1949, local calls were mostly automatic dial, but long distance was only semi-automatic. The operator is doing the routing and billing. They have to find an idle outgoing trunk on their board to the next toll office along the route. Then they can use the keyboard to remote control that toll switch to connect them another step forward. When they get to the desired end office, which connects to customer lines, they can punch in the number of the final destination phone and complete the call. Lots of things can go wrong; hence all the different blinking light signals. All this was gradually automated, before computers, using relays and special purpose hardware. Some background info:[2] [1] https://archive.org/details/Operator1949 https://archive.org/details/Operator1949 [2] http://atlantatelephonehistory.org/atlanta:part3 http://atlantatelephonehistory.org/atlanta:part3
- rcarmo 5y agoThat page has the best footer I’ve seen in a long, long time.
- euroderf 5y agoAre there publicly-published guidelines anywhere on the appropriate uses for each level (R,P,I,F,FO) ?
- pigbearpig 5y agohttp://www.plexoft.com/SBF/Autovon.html http://www.plexoft.com/SBF/Autovon.html That’s is apparently the guide.
- IgorPartola 5y agoA few years ago I read a story online which may or may not be true but that went something like this: the poster worked in a call center that would auto dial random numbers to do whatever telemarketers do. One day he got a high level official at a three letter agency who was quite upset at being called because “you shouldn’t have been able to dial this number”. The agency allegedly sent agents to the call center to investigate how that was possible. For a long time I’ve been wondering exactly what the mechanism of this kind of phone call would have been and I wonder if it was one of these priority keys that was used. Incidentally, now whenever I get a call from my pal Scam Likely I answer it with “FBI Fraud Prevention Division, this is Brennan” or “911, what’s the location of your emergency?” or “is he dead? I told you not to call me unless he is dead!” I’ve had a bit of good fun with these.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoAnyone else remember their local phone company charging than extra $10/month for the privilege of using DF? This is why my family stuck to pulse dialing for a long time.
- shellback3 5y agoAUTOVON brings back memories from the mid 1960s. I was on a US Navy Oiler which was getting some maintanance from the shipyard in Subic Bay, PI. The shipyard officer we were assigned hosted a small party at his home and learning that I had been frustrated in not been able to complete a phone call to my wife in California imitated a call for me from his phone. Amazingly the call went through almost instantly and as I heard my wife answer an operator said more or less: "Sir, are you aware that this priority is used by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and ... . Sir what is your name, rank, and position?" Operating under the conceit that I may be stupid but not that stupid I quickly hung up. The handset was a 'regular' one, not the one illustrated.
- sandworm101 5y agoAnd a reminder of how unsecure and unencrypted these communications channels were. That operator not only could listen in, but was certainly instructed to listen in on all such priority calls in order to police them. No encryption. No channel hopping. Anyone with a handset and a pair of alligator clips could have literally clipped into the line at any point. Anyone in the know would also be able to monitor a trunk line looking for that priority signal. So it would probably have been more secure to hide amongst the masses by not pushing the priority buttons.
- yencabulator 5y agoMuch like today's TCP/IP world, the encryption was layered on top of the phone call. The military used codebooks, code words, and authorization codes.
- hereforphone 5y agoWhat's secret here? Fourth-row buttons and prioritization on the Autovon (and other systems) is public knowledge. Sounds cool, but nothing to see here.
- jcrawfordor 5y agoThe title was a joke, sorry.
- hereforphone 5y agoAh. Still an interesting article, thanks for posting it
- temac 5y agoIIRC there is a standard field in ISDN and H323 for transmiting precedence levels.
- throwawayForMe2 5y agoThere is the Government Emergency Telecommunications Service, and also the Nationwide Wireless Priority Service. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Emergency_Telecommunications_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Emergency_Telecommu... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationwide_Wireless_Priority_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationwide_Wireless_Priority_S... After 9/11 the company I worked for then (a quasi-government non-profit company) ramped up their security and disaster planning a bit. The whole department I was in had to get national security clearances, and they also issued cards for the GETS system. On 9/11 I remember it was very hard to get any call through.
- plapsley 5y ago<shameless plug> I love this stuff. So much so that I spent years researching and writing a book about it: "Exploding the Phone", a history of phone phreaking and the telephone systems the phreaks hacked on, from 1950-1980. http://explodingthephone.com/ http://explodingthephone.com/ </shameless plug> Regarding MF being an informal or loose standard, it was described in detail in the the 1955 AT&T publication "Notes on Nationwide Dialing" (http://explodingthephone.com/hoppdocs/nond1955.pdf http://explodingthephone.com/hoppdocs/nond1955.pdf, pdf page 95) and the 11956 AT&T subsequent technical publication "Notes on Distance Dialing" (http://explodingthephone.com/hoppdocs/nodd1956.pdf http://explodingthephone.com/hoppdocs/nodd1956.pdf, starting pdf page 82) and then in subsequent editions of "Notes on Distance Dialing" (1968, 1975) and then in "Notes on the Network" 1980. It was also specified in several international standards (CCITT, now ITU). For those interested in this kind of stuff, this page will be of interest: http://explodingthephone.com/docs.php http://explodingthephone.com/docs.php Search of autovon docs: http://explodingthephone.com/search.php?q=autovon&sort=relevance http://explodingthephone.com/search.php?q=autovon&sort=relev... Some interesting stuff there because you get a sense of AT&T, FBI,, and NSA being worried about this stuff. Also, this particular hack is interesting -- it describes a clever technique called guardbanding to get into AUTOVON from the civilian telephone network: http://explodingthephone.com/docs/dbx1032.pdf http://explodingthephone.com/docs/dbx1032.pdf
- mattl 5y agoIt’s a really good book and I’ve recommended it to several people.
- rolph 5y agohttps://autovon.org/ https://autovon.org/ http://www.bunkertours.co.uk/autovon.html http://www.bunkertours.co.uk/autovon.html https://wd0giv.com/Autovon.html https://wd0giv.com/Autovon.html http://www.paul-f.com/weAutovon.html http://www.paul-f.com/weAutovon.html
- throwaway32mkz 5y agoSecret? Okay, maybe not common knowledge vs. the # of people that use "normal" touch tone telephones (or used now, now that hardly anyone does!). But A/B/C/D are not a secret by any stretch. This stuff has been well documented for a few decades. Back in the 90s when I first learned about this, and had a modem that would dial these additional digits just fine, I used to see how various PSTN LECs would handle them. Mostly ignored, but some results were interesting. Also, back then I was living in the Greater Houston (Texas) area, and had to have a "metro" phone line to be able to get local calling to various NXXs outside of the core Houston (some even still came with a toll charge!). Often when dialing between these zones, the in-band MF tones used by the switching systems were audible to the caller. A lot of this stuff really interested me, and I really got into phreaking and such as a teenager. See also red box, blue box, and all the other colors.
- walrus01 5y agoSome of the largest and most hardened at&t long lines sites around the 48 states, most of which are still in existent, carried AUTOVON traffic. Some of them are literally massive concrete bunkers built on top of mountains, with roads bulldozed to the top, that if you tried to duplicate today would probably cost $75 million per site. Significantly less useful in an era when inter city phone and data traffic goes by fiber optic cable and not 6GHz microwave on horn antennas. Some have found re-use for cellular purposes and vhf/uhf radio repeater, public safety, etc. Some of the key long lines and AUTOVON sites out there also carried data circuits linking the SAGE network together.