Earlier quoted context omitted.
Shameless plug for my book on the history of the subject, for those interested: https://explodingthephone.com/
I enjoyed your book
Thanks!
2600.network Dialup Service
91–100 of 119 posts
Re: 2600.network Dialup Service
#92Re: 2600.network Dialup Service
#93This 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.
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.
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
Re: 2600.network Dialup Service
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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?
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.
The phone line is disconnected, but maybe some other link isn't.
I mean it would be an extremely cool hack but I wouldn't be super-surprised to learn that google deployed some sort of exfiltration search technology in these boxes.
Re: 2600.network Dialup Service
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, unlike G.711, G.722 is lossily compressed using psychoacoustic concepts, and modems wouldn’t know what to do with the extra acoustic frequencies anyway. G.722 might sound better to humans, but G.711 is definitely better for modems since it’s effectively just uncompressed PCM (disregarding a bit of dynamic range compression which modems are generally fine with).
It is compressed, yes, but at higher bitrates it is actually usable for modems/faxes, you're limited to low baud rates anyway due to jitter and sample intervals. But really the benefit is 16k sampling rate instead of 8, I'm not saying it's great but it's the best we've got. It would be possible to mask this with a relatively simple FXS device to hide all of this and pretend it's a modem while packetising the actual d…
> really the benefit is 16k sampling rate instead of 8
Regular modems can't make use of that, since the actual phone lines they were designed for (whether analog or digital via G.711) didn't support more than 300-3400 kHz anyway, so anything beyond 8 kHz sampling (corresponding to a Nyquist frequency of 4 kHz) is wasted on them.
Maybe you could go crazy with a custom modem that knows how to exploit the additional high-frequency components of G.722 while dealing with the lossy/psychoacoustic compression across all bands, but I doubt it would yield any improvement over G.711:
> It is compressed, yes, but at higher bitrates it is actually usable for modems/faxes
No, they're both exactly 64 kbps (after compression/"compression"), so you wouldn't be able to fit any more signal in it from an information theoretical point of view.
Re: 2600.network Dialup Service
#96So 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 i…
POTS is/was a requirement for remote/out of band access to AT&T network gear as well. I did run into a funny thing when they started to migrate T1/PRI's to fiber. They still insisted that they needed a dedicated POTS line but converted the underlying copper circuits to a single fiber circuit. I was able to work around this with a phone line adapter but if the underlying fiber circuit was down they would be screwed.
Re: 2600.network Dialup Service
#97For 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
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.
Re: 2600.network Dialup Service
#98So 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 i…
I had one of those boxes, worked for a company that ran news and magazine publishing sites and we pushed all the data to them as opposed to rewriting our search on the sites.. they were pretty decent and seemed to also help our page rankings on the mothersite ;)
Re: 2600.network Dialup Service
#99C*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.
Re: 2600.network Dialup Service
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Most internet-based VoIP services (read: full telephone providers, not just chat providers) use the same exact G.711 codecs used in the digital portions of traditional telephone lines for normal calls. In theory you can run anything over this that could run over a long distance PSTN link. In practice most modem technologies do not handle jitter and packet loss well at all, and quirks which a human would not even noti…
Lots of people say faxing over VoIP just won't work, but at least for faxes with only a few pages and having a decent internet connection I've had excellent results.
I had a project using hylafax with about a dozen USB fax modems hooked up to a SIP gateway, connecting through a VPN back to the office where the PBX was and then out to our SIP trunk provider on G.711. It sent a lot of 2-10 page faxes. The system sent over a million faxes over its life, and excluding one receiver that tended to constantly have problems no matter what had an >95% success rate.