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Why radio receivers won’t tune 800-900 MHz

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Re: Why radio receivers won’t tune 800-900 MHz

#151

Post by proverbialbunny »

koyote wrote: post #94
proverbialbunny wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That and in 1999, if you were writing cracks, very few people were doing that in the demo scene at that point. The demo scene and the scene split up. In 1996 RNS started this change. By 1999 pre nets were already up, as well as top sites. I miss the 90s. I was 12 years old in 1999, but I started disassembling code when I was 8, so as you can imagine, people online thought I was an adult with all of illegal things I d…

I too miss those days... That being said, I feel like back then a most vulnerabilities were so simple due to lack of foresight/security that quite a few 12-year olds with a decent understanding of computing could perform them: I fondly remember an IIS bug which allowed you to basically 'cd' into any directory on the host machine and execute cmd.exe remotely. I believe it was as simple as the server not sanitising '..…

Yah. There was a backdoor on all MS operating systems in net bios. As long as they were not behind a firewall and had not manually setup file sharing settings you could get full access / root.

All the way through the thousands there was a backdoor on OSX' remote desktop. As long as they were not behind a firewall and had not manually setup remote desktop, you could get full access as well.

And all the way through the 90s and the thousands, there was a backdoor on Motorola and Buffalo cable models, so you could remotely inject your own firmware and remotely reboot the router if you wanted. Everyone online was soldering those things to get hacked internet back then and I was just scratching my head as to why they were not using the backdoor instead.

I can go on. I haven't done anything infosec in a very long time. When I was 18 I got interested in certificate decryption and my passions took a more math heavy direction, eventually leading to quantitative finance.

edit: Oh, and to keep more on topic, regarding listening to cell phone chatter, the cell tower where I lived didn't change to digital until 2006, so in the thousands I knew you could listen in, but frankly I wasn't interested. I was more interested in making cantennas and injecting an 802.11 signal 2 miles away, decrypting their WPA. Surprisingly I did not find a single router that had a different admin password than its WPA password.

In the 90s all the way into the early thousands, to get online I had to get hacked internet, as my parents didn't really understand the internet and thought it was a fad. This may be what inspired some of the black hat stuff I did.

Re: Why radio receivers won’t tune 800-900 MHz

#152

Post by jfalcon »

jfalcon wrote: post #149
jcrawfordor wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not know about the Newt Gingrich incident! That really adds some interest. There was definitely a lot of public attention to the issue at the time, and in some ways rightly so, but of course the resulting efforts were misdirected at a legislative fix. A point that I wanted to make in the article but I'm not sure I completely articulated was basically "this is what happens when Congress writes technical regulati…

Yeah. Let's put it this way: OKI900's and all that were around before 1992. And that phone was favoured because you could easily reprogram the ESN/NAM/MIN for cloning as well as turn it into a scanner by turning on it's speaker and had control of the frequency. It was a modder's dream to hack on. But the same could be done with Motorola phones with a few more button presses. That was 1992. 1997: AMPS system is waning…

Well probably not so much the previous link... but this is an article that brings it all together from around that time:

https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Popular-Communications...

Page 14 for "H.R. 2369 and The ARRL"

Re: Why radio receivers won’t tune 800-900 MHz

#153

Post by jfalcon »

mschuster91 wrote: post #113
jfalcon wrote: post #73

I think the OP's write up misses one very important piece of the puzzle: Politics. Newt Gingrich who was Speaker of the House at the time got embroiled in an incident that was recorded from a cell phone conversation. https://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1997/01/13/tape/index.shtml Now fast forward to a few years later with the Patriot Act and metadata controvery that Edward Snowden exposed... same shit, different day...

> Newt Gingrich who was Speaker of the House at the time got embroiled in an incident that was recorded from a cell phone conversation. I wonder why it's always the same names that crop up as the reason for bullshit regulations.

The 1990's were big on passing a metric fuckton of laws impacting technology as that is when most of the people started getting "online" as it were.

Wargames came out in 1984. It took about 2 years for there to be a law against computer intrusion (hacking). 18 USC 1030. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act

But it got most of it's teeth in the 90's. Newt and Bill pretty much ran the 90's. Along with Janet Reno and the rest of them. People may have happy memories of the 90's but for "hackers", it was a terrible time as people were passing bad laws with little info. It's only gotten marginally better over time due to people gaining better comprehension of technology - yet somehow we haven't caught up with our own privacy invasions as a whole. (ie: GDPR and data collection)

Re: Why radio receivers won’t tune 800-900 MHz

#154

Post by jcrawfordor »

tonyarkles wrote: post #137
jcrawfordor wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A large portion of SDRs have no FCC equipment authorization at all, and so don't necessarily comply with regulations---including the lack of an AMPS lockout. This makes them a little bit iffy for sale in the US, but there is generally a rule that allows "test equipment" to be sold without equipment authorization under certain conditions on its use. I (not being an expert on this, I am not a lawyer, etc) would describ…

> I think it might be a good idea to restrict such devices to people with amateur radio licenses Am a Canadian HAM, and also the owner of multiple transmit-capable SDRs. While I don't disagree with you on principle, one tricky part with that is that the majority of my usage of these devices has been commercial. Requiring an amateur license to do commercial work is kind of the opposite of how the system is supposed to…

That's true - any locking down of SDRs probably also requires a "fast track" experimental license program so that commercial users (including individuals who are performing commercial experiments, not just well-resourced companies with a licensing specialist) can obtain them easily.

Re: Why radio receivers won’t tune 800-900 MHz

#155

Post by nezgar »

sterlind wrote: post #26
heavyset_go wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now, not only does someone not need to be actively listening, they don't even need to save the audio. Just convert it to text, keep it indexed and whatever three letter agency is doing the tapping has an easily searchable record of your communications should they ever feel the need to look into you without you knowing.

Converting to text loses data and will fail on unexpected languages or accents. It's better to use a specialized voice codec, which can have fantastically high compression rates, or just keep the (already annoyingly-companded) 8kbit voice stream around in its entirety. It's pretty small.

You must mean 8Khz - which results in a 64kbps stream. (8000 bytes per second) The companding was actually a very good use of 8 bits per sample for voice, introducing little artifacts except at high amplitudes and the low pass filter. Nowadays I find it ridiculous mobile networks feel it's still necessary to compress the audio further - 64Kbps is nothing on modern mobile networks, ie VoLTE etc... WB-AMR is definitely an improvement with it's 16Khz sample rate and a bitrate lower than that of G.711, but mostly not supported between different mobile carriers...

Re: Why radio receivers won’t tune 800-900 MHz

#156

Post by nezgar »

ynniv wrote: post #133

And yet you could dial TESTMODE on a StatTAC and listen to any analog channel. http://www.jax184.com/projects/StarTAC/wireless/testmode.htm...

Heh, I built that site as a StarTAC fan all those years ago, and Jax decided to preserve it when I donated the server hard drives and my box of startacs to him heh... the real limitation with testmode was there was really only about 4 channels you could choose to snoop on, but nonetheless there were still enough AMPS calls in 95-2000 in dense urban areas to be somewhat interesting... heard a couple of "juicy" conversations that also mentioned a phone number - was tempted to freak them out by calling it haha

Re: Why radio receivers won’t tune 800-900 MHz

#157

Post by BenjiWiebe »

t0mas88 wrote: post #144
nabla9 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you build nanosatellites or cubesats or do rocketry those limits are exeeded. For example NovAtel OEM-719 GPS has no COCOM limits. Fortunately COCOM limits for GPS are not enforced. It's empty clause.

Rockets that go above 60,000ft and at 1000kt are the case that this limit was designed for, they didn't want enemy ballistic missiles guided by GPS. Of course that regulation is now useless because foreign receivers don't implement the limit and competing GNSS systems also don't have it. But at the time it was written this was a sensible restriction because it was a unique technology.

High powered model rocketry can and does exceed this.

Re: Why radio receivers won’t tune 800-900 MHz

#158

Post by mschuster91 »

jfalcon wrote: post #153
mschuster91 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Newt Gingrich who was Speaker of the House at the time got embroiled in an incident that was recorded from a cell phone conversation. I wonder why it's always the same names that crop up as the reason for bullshit regulations.

The 1990's were big on passing a metric fuckton of laws impacting technology as that is when most of the people started getting "online" as it were. Wargames came out in 1984. It took about 2 years for there to be a law against computer intrusion (hacking). 18 USC 1030. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act But it got most of it's teeth in the 90's. Newt and Bill pretty much ran the 90's. Along w…

> It's only gotten marginally better over time due to people gaining better comprehension of technology - yet somehow we haven't caught up with our own privacy invasions as a whole.

It's time for both the US and the EU to vote out all the incompetent morons of our parliaments...

Re: Why radio receivers won’t tune 800-900 MHz

#159

Post by Lammy »

dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #150
Lammy wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pica_(disorder) maybe?

Yeah pica but can you eat an aluminum can and not die? Wouldn’t that certainly cause internal bleeding?

They were probably just chewing on it

Re: Why radio receivers won’t tune 800-900 MHz

#160

Post by coin »

mherdeg wrote: post #83
breput wrote: post #10

I had (and probably still have) a Radio Shack Pro-2006 scanner from the late 80's. Even pre-Internet, instructions on how to bypass the cellular band block were easily found on Fidonet and local BBSes, and all it involved was removing a single diode. https://www.wentztech.com/radio/Equipment/Pro2006/pro2006mod... It was really a golden time for snoop...er..listening to cellular phones because they were so enormously…

Roughly in this genre, the 9/11/2001 pager text data ( https://911.wikileaks.org/files/index.html ) are an interesting peek inside people's putatively private conversations.

> 2001-09-12 00:26:08 Metrocall [0134738] A ALPHA Frm: MSN Txt: Hotmail TheFreeStuffNews.com:Take a 5 minute Survey to Win $1,000!

I see that spam was alive and well back then

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