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Anonymous public voicemail inbox

afterthebeep.tel

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Re: Anonymous public voicemail inbox

#81

Post by wanderingstan »

quasse wrote: post #50
laborcontract wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh my God, I remember doing this to my friends. The default voicemail password always worked so I reset their voice messages to strange sounds or me doing voices. It’s amazing how insecure everything was. I remember as a kid walking around with a cordless phone realizing you can pick up other peoples’ conversations. There was something so charming about technology back in the day. I don't think it's purely nostalgia.…

I feel the same way thinking about computer security back in the early 00's. Nothing was ever really locked down, sometimes you could get administrator access by pressing "Cancel" on the login dialog three times, network drives were just open to everyone and you could install new software by just bringing it to school on a floppy and installing it on the lab computer. I think that environment was what really fostered…

In the late 90s at my first job I would invite all my housemates to my office after hours for LAN parties using my co-workers computers. There were no logins and it didn’t even bother my co-workers unless a newly installed game took up too much drive space.

I feel we viewed computers more like expensive toys that should be shared rather than than the highly personal items they are today.

Re: Anonymous public voicemail inbox

#83

Post by enobrev »

This reminds me of the 90s - but not just from the looks.

There was a time in the mid 90s in Chicago ( maybe most cities? ) when pagers were the thing, and a pager would come with a free voicemail box. The pager companies would set the voicemail pin to the last 4 digits of the pager number. The customer was meant to change it when they first signed up for their account.

And so I knew quite a few people who would test numbers all day and night to steal voicemail numbers and then use them for all sorts of things.

Promoting raves and other parties

Party lines

Message boards

Various things involving graffiti.

It was a normal thing back then to find a local pay phone and call a couple known voicemail boxes for figure out what to do that weekend or to see where friends were going to be.

Re: Anonymous public voicemail inbox

#84

Post by spzb »

laborcontract wrote: post #48
technothrasher wrote: post #36

I don't know why, but this reminded me of going to school in the early 90's, we'd go through the university's voicemail system inputting random phone numbers and trying the default password, '0000', which meant the voicemail on that number had never been set up. When we found one, we'd record a song as the greeting. We then posted notes by the various public phones on campus for our 'dial a song' directory so anybody…

Oh my God, I remember doing this to my friends. The default voicemail password always worked so I reset their voice messages to strange sounds or me doing voices. It’s amazing how insecure everything was. I remember as a kid walking around with a cordless phone realizing you can pick up other peoples’ conversations. There was something so charming about technology back in the day. I don't think it's purely nostalgia.…

> The default voicemail password always worked

That kept newspaper editors in scoops for years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_International_phone_hacki...

Re: Anonymous public voicemail inbox

#89

Post by phrotoma »

BuildTheRobots wrote: post #44
nico wrote: post #17

Really cool, thank you for posting Are you using something like asterisk or FreeSWITCH to connect to the siptrunk? If so, do you have a backend for the dialplan? Would love to see the code if possible

> If so, do you have a backend for the dialplan? not wanting to take away from the ops work, but on FreeSwitch you could do the SIP side of this with the default config and a free or cheap sip provider. As default it'll provide voicemail services to offline phones, so if you add your sip provider and direct all incoming calls to (eg) extension 1000 but never connect a sip handset to that extension, everyone gets sent…

You seem to know your stuff, perhaps you could suggest some direction for an offhand idea I had? I'd like to build a standalone version of something like this site for an art installation at a festival a friend is hosting. I was thinking of having an analog phone plugged into a USB modem in a Raspberry Pi that doesn't even produce a dial tone when you pick it up the handset. It'd just go directly into a voicemail prompt. I assume there's a software stack which could accomodate this but I know basically nothing of telephony.

Any suitable projects come to mind which might facilitate this?

Re: Anonymous public voicemail inbox

#90

Post by technothrasher »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #49
stavros wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hate this. Who were the songs hurting? Nobody, someone just decided to make the world a little bit worse because it wasn't "proper".

Hurting anyone, no, but the whole jukebox probably cost the provider at least a penny all told, and that's a good enough reason for someone to close the oversight. EDIT: thinking about it again, there is such a thing as surplus capacity. Like how before we all transitioned to pay-as-you-go elastic cloud services you would just have an idling CPU you could point at SETI and folding@home. The jukebox probably didn't st…

To be fair, while our jukebox couldn't really cause an issue, that wasn't where we stopped. We also figured out a test code that opened a long distance line on any phone. Since we had to pay for long distance calls back then, that was likely much more damaging to the school when we spread that around.
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