12 ms·

2600.network Dialup Service

WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
  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?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - devkit1 3y ago
    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 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.
    - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
      > I think WarOnPrivacy was thinking of the T.38 standard You are right btw. I was working off long disused recollections and then had to leave.
- FrankPetrilli 3y ago
  Quite well. I wrote a blog post about this a few years back: https://frank.petril.li/posts/dialup-adventures-1/ https://frank.petril.li/posts/dialup-adventures-1/
- shrubble 3y ago
  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 3y ago
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 3y ago
FYI - 2600 Hz is a common handshake tone used in telco. Hence why “2600” is referenced. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2600_hertz https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2600_hertz
- 0xEF 3y ago
  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 https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2630646
  - plapsley 3y ago
    Shameless plug for my book on the history of the subject, for those interested: https://explodingthephone.com/ https://explodingthephone.com/
    - chris0x00 3y ago
      I enjoyed your book
      - plapsley 3y ago
        Thanks!
    - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3y ago
      I, too, enjoyed your book. Everyone go buy it, it's good.
      - plapsley 3y ago
        Thank you, appreciate the plug! :-)
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
oldstrangers 3y ago
Dial ups, war dialing, and telnet were peak internet as a child.
- washadjeffmad 3y ago
  Orinoco Gold! I switched to passive Atheros when they ended up in netbooks, but I probably still have my scancat equipment somewhere.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    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 3y ago
    Wifi was somewhat later but yes, also lots of fun things to explore!
    - opello 3y ago
      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 3y ago
So how do I realistically access this with a modern laptop and zero ancient modems left to my name.
- SuperNinKenDo 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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 3y ago
  https://stirfriedpixels.wordpress.com/2014/11/07/on-homemade-modems-and-bbsing-in-the-1980s/ https://stirfriedpixels.wordpress.com/2014/11/07/on-homemade...
- Klonoar 3y ago
  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?
xyst 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
  Typically BBS's were single user systems, although many multiuser systems existed too.
- Delk 3y ago
  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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  >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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      I wonder… wouldn't a physically disconnected ethernet cable work as well?
      - anonair 3y ago
        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
throwawy6153 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 https://archive.org/details/YIPLTAP_1-91
underlines 3y ago
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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2600:_The_Hacker_Quarterly
- Rayston 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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/ 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.)
op00to 3y ago
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 https://github.com/AonCyberLabs/D-Modem?tab=readme-ov-file [2] https://www.aon.com/cyber-solutions/aon_cyber_labs/introducing-d-modem-a-software-sip-modem/ https://www.aon.com/cyber-solutions/aon_cyber_labs/introduci...
lol_catz 3y ago
no V.150.1 support?
Rayston 3y ago
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/ https://www.ckts.info/
fnord77 3y ago
does POTS still exist? Aren't all land lines VOIP now?
Monalisa12 3y ago
[dead]
joecool1029 3y ago
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/ https://www2.vcn.bc.ca/free-internet-access-via-dial-up/
- lxgr 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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?

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 3y ago
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 3y ago
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?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- devkit1 3y ago
  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 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.
  - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
    > I think WarOnPrivacy was thinking of the T.38 standard You are right btw. I was working off long disused recollections and then had to leave.
FrankPetrilli 3y ago
Quite well. I wrote a blog post about this a few years back: https://frank.petril.li/posts/dialup-adventures-1/ https://frank.petril.li/posts/dialup-adventures-1/
shrubble 3y ago
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 3y ago

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 3y ago

FYI - 2600 Hz is a common handshake tone used in telco. Hence why “2600” is referenced. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2600_hertz https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2600_hertz

0xEF 3y ago
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 https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2630646
- plapsley 3y ago
  Shameless plug for my book on the history of the subject, for those interested: https://explodingthephone.com/ https://explodingthephone.com/
  - chris0x00 3y ago
    I enjoyed your book
    - plapsley 3y ago
      Thanks!
  - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3y ago
    I, too, enjoyed your book. Everyone go buy it, it's good.
    - plapsley 3y ago
      Thank you, appreciate the plug! :-)

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

oldstrangers 3y ago

Dial ups, war dialing, and telnet were peak internet as a child.

washadjeffmad 3y ago
Orinoco Gold! I switched to passive Atheros when they ended up in netbooks, but I probably still have my scancat equipment somewhere.
- dylan604 3y ago
  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 3y ago
  Wifi was somewhat later but yes, also lots of fun things to explore!
  - opello 3y ago
    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 3y ago

So how do I realistically access this with a modern laptop and zero ancient modems left to my name.

SuperNinKenDo 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
https://stirfriedpixels.wordpress.com/2014/11/07/on-homemade-modems-and-bbsing-in-the-1980s/ https://stirfriedpixels.wordpress.com/2014/11/07/on-homemade...
Klonoar 3y ago
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?

xyst 3y ago

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 3y ago
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 3y ago
Typically BBS's were single user systems, although many multiuser systems existed too.
Delk 3y ago
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 3y ago
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 3y ago
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 3y ago

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 3y ago
>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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    I wonder… wouldn't a physically disconnected ethernet cable work as well?
    - anonair 3y ago
      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

throwawy6153 3y ago

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 3y ago
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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 https://archive.org/details/YIPLTAP_1-91

underlines 3y ago

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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2600:_The_Hacker_Quarterly

Rayston 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago

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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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/ 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.)

op00to 3y ago

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 https://github.com/AonCyberLabs/D-Modem?tab=readme-ov-file [2] https://www.aon.com/cyber-solutions/aon_cyber_labs/introducing-d-modem-a-software-sip-modem/ https://www.aon.com/cyber-solutions/aon_cyber_labs/introduci...

lol_catz 3y ago

no V.150.1 support?

Rayston 3y ago

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/ https://www.ckts.info/

fnord77 3y ago

does POTS still exist? Aren't all land lines VOIP now?

Monalisa12 3y ago

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joecool1029 3y ago

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/ https://www2.vcn.bc.ca/free-internet-access-via-dial-up/

lxgr 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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?