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Sending and Receiving SMS on Linux (2015)

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Re: Sending and Receiving SMS on Linux (2015)

#11

Post by pbhjpbhj »

pixelN wrote: post #6
songzme wrote: post #3

Great read, this spiraled me down a rabbit hole of research, posting it here in case someone has the same questions: How phone numbers / phones work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZsajM6M3UY How to buy a block of phone numbers: https://www.siptrunk.com/2015/12/how-to-find-did-number-bloc... I'm trying to do a thought exercise on how I might approach building a Twilio side project, but after I buy phone numbers fro…

this might be interesting for you: https://jmp.chat/

>"JMP gives you a Canadian or US phone number that is yours to keep. JMP allows you to send and receive text messages and picture messages using your Jabber client, with calls delivered to voicemail (including a text transcription) by default. "

Re: Sending and Receiving SMS on Linux (2015)

#12

Post by confounded »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #10

I've long suspected that the only way to make an actually private/secure cellular phone is by bypassing 3G all-together and making it optional -- forcing the SMS/SIP features of the phone were actually on separate hardware that had very limited integration with the phone itself (essentially as dangerous as any external USB device would be)? Most smart phones are considered pwned-by-default due to the inclusion of the…

> SMS/SIP features of the phone were actually on separate hardware... basically a phone that only uses SDR for connectivity?

Not exactly what you’re after, but the Librem 5 (crowd-funded, at the head-scratching stage) aims to put the baseband processor in an optional M2 slot with killable power. On a device that runs Debian. From following progress on that project I’ve got the impression that everything to do with chips for mobile connectivity are so patent/IP-law encumbered that there’s little hope for Free Software replacements.

https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/

However, hacking on that handset is the best chance I’m aware of for you getting the device you want (perhaps with something else in the M2 slot).

Re: Sending and Receiving SMS on Linux (2015)

#14

Post by songzme »

techsupporter wrote: post #7
songzme wrote: post #3

Great read, this spiraled me down a rabbit hole of research, posting it here in case someone has the same questions: How phone numbers / phones work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZsajM6M3UY How to buy a block of phone numbers: https://www.siptrunk.com/2015/12/how-to-find-did-number-bloc... I'm trying to do a thought exercise on how I might approach building a Twilio side project, but after I buy phone numbers fro…

Depending on what you want your project to do, you don't need to connect a phone number to a SIM card. Twilio does that for you, letting you use their API to send and receive SMS (text) messages with other phone numbers. It's the recipient's phone number, not your Twilio one, that's connected to a SIM card. What the linked post here talks about is using a device that's basically a mobile phone in a USB stick form fac…

Oops I reread my statement and I think I miscommunicated. I meant I'm trying to figure out how I might build Twilio (the product). OP's article shows how to send/receive texts (check). I don't know how Twilio buys numbers, and how I might build a service that buys numbers for people.

Re: Sending and Receiving SMS on Linux (2015)

#15

Post by magnat »

> So, we got hold of a USB GSM modem and used a prepaid phone SIM. This allowed us to receive unlimited messages for free.

Keep in mind it is common (at least in EU) for mobile providers to forbid M2M and M2P traffic when using typical customer tariff plan, especially ones with unlimited messages. It's quite easy to detect it and SIM cards used in such way are blocked rather quickly.

Re: Sending and Receiving SMS on Linux (2015)

#16

Post by diftraku »

The first mistake in the article is using smstools. Having personally had to deal with smstools for the past two years, using Gammu SMSD or even a paid SMS Gateway would have been a better choice.

Granted, this was on OpenWRT using a frozen version of smstools and largest issues were with trying to get Å, Ä & Ö to work (fun times with UCS-2/UTF-8/WTF-8 and Latin1/CP-1502/ISO-8859-1). It sure was an experience and in the end, the problem was blown away by just using UTF-8 (which had the unfortunate side-effect of doubling the amount of sent messages due to the space taken by the encoding).

What puzzles me is how easily large entities go for services that send from a random phone number (for example, VR in Finland sends "mobile train tickets" via random numbers that change with every message) where as some opt to "fake" the from number to have the company/service name.

Re: Sending and Receiving SMS on Linux (2015)

#17

Post by znpy »

confounded wrote: post #12
hardwaresofton wrote: post #10

I've long suspected that the only way to make an actually private/secure cellular phone is by bypassing 3G all-together and making it optional -- forcing the SMS/SIP features of the phone were actually on separate hardware that had very limited integration with the phone itself (essentially as dangerous as any external USB device would be)? Most smart phones are considered pwned-by-default due to the inclusion of the…

> SMS/SIP features of the phone were actually on separate hardware... basically a phone that only uses SDR for connectivity? Not exactly what you’re after, but the Librem 5 (crowd-funded, at the head-scratching stage) aims to put the baseband processor in an optional M2 slot with killable power. On a device that runs Debian. From following progress on that project I’ve got the impression that everything to do with ch…

> but the Librem 5 aims to put the baseband processor in an optional M2 slot with killable power.

If that comes true I am definitely getting one.

Re: Sending and Receiving SMS on Linux (2015)

#18

Post by pjc50 »

songzme wrote: post #3

Great read, this spiraled me down a rabbit hole of research, posting it here in case someone has the same questions: How phone numbers / phones work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZsajM6M3UY How to buy a block of phone numbers: https://www.siptrunk.com/2015/12/how-to-find-did-number-bloc... I'm trying to do a thought exercise on how I might approach building a Twilio side project, but after I buy phone numbers fro…

https://www.aaisp.net.uk/telecoms-sip2sim.html ?

Re: Sending and Receiving SMS on Linux (2015)

#19

Post by pjc50 »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #10

I've long suspected that the only way to make an actually private/secure cellular phone is by bypassing 3G all-together and making it optional -- forcing the SMS/SIP features of the phone were actually on separate hardware that had very limited integration with the phone itself (essentially as dangerous as any external USB device would be)? Most smart phones are considered pwned-by-default due to the inclusion of the…

> a phone that only uses SDR for connectivity?

There are some hardcore GSM hackers slowly assembling the parts for this: http://git.osmocom.org/

Re: Sending and Receiving SMS on Linux (2015)

#20

Post by gsich »

magnat wrote: post #15

> So, we got hold of a USB GSM modem and used a prepaid phone SIM. This allowed us to receive unlimited messages for free. Keep in mind it is common (at least in EU) for mobile providers to forbid M2M and M2P traffic when using typical customer tariff plan, especially ones with unlimited messages. It's quite easy to detect it and SIM cards used in such way are blocked rather quickly.

Read again, it was receiving.
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