The lack of fun, to me, is mostly because of how everything changed around it.

I can make a basic website now, no problem, everything is easier than it was aside from the fact we pretty much have to have HTTPS.

But, nobody will read it, because it will be lost in a sea of clickbait. I will have a hard time writing it, because I will be distracted by the sea of clickbait, and worst of all, I'll have a hard time finding things to write about.

And of course, the very fact it all does work so incredibly well, with a Sci-fi level of polish, means... it's no longer new. Most of it is being a cruise ship tourist, not an Arctic explorer.

Because the internet is dead without the offline stuff that gives it meaning.

It's like, binoculars and a field notes book with nobody to spy on, the perfect party where nobody shows up, or a spreadsheet showing all the customers someone doesn't have.

I think it's just like the idea of set and setting.

The internet/tech/coding/etc is the drug, and we lost all the cultural context, so now it's less "A beer at the bonfire with friends" and more "I had a bottle of wine alone because I don't know what else to do with myself".

Welcome to the 21st century! One of the 20th century's main themes was humans having to learn how to live in a world of infinite sugar, fat and salt.

Here in the 21st century, we have to learn how to live in a world of infinite information.

What will you do with your attention today? Will you consume the mental equivalent of broccoli or snickers bars?

You can now basically find “facts” that support any assertion you wish to make. You can even live in a comfy echo chamber where everybody else agrees with your “facts.” It doesn’t even matter if your “facts” are actually correct because there is a huge body of “evidence” on the internet to fully back you up. It starts to make you question if there is even an objective truth to things.

It’s one reason I get so nervous about labeling things as “misinformation”. Because often times “misinformation” simply means “something I disagree with” and todays “misinformation” will eventually become “information”

We are entering into a post-truth era.

My GFs blog is like in its 6th year now and every year its more visitors. Its not that much in internet terms (we are at ~700 visitors a day) but its serious content (dogs and science around dogs). No clickbaits, no cookies, no nothing.

That admission was the best part! Everyone here was not goody two shoes in their teens. Accepting this reality can release people from expectations of perfection. Perhaps ironically, kids' behavior can improve when they feel their imperfections are airable.

And yet, it still doesn't sit quite right with me. I suppose its because there doesn't seem to be the slightest hint in the writing that credit card fraud is wrong, or that it's even something you shouldn't do. I looked for it.

And to add to that, what he did wasn't 'a hack', it wasn't particularly clever. It was just theft of services and a lot of lying because he didn't have something he wanted.

I think if he would describe it as a youthful indiscretion or something similar it would go a long way.

For the same reason you’ll rarely see urbex photographers expressing remorse for trespassing. Getting onto skyscraper roofs and into steam tunnels is just what you do.

Related - I went to college in the late 90s, at the end of this era, where there was a constant game of cat and mouse between the University unix and network admins and the hacker kids. Yes it was technically felonies all night long, but there was legitimate mutual respect for technical skills on both sides and following the unwritten rules of not causing data loss or disrupting services. This is how I learned the skills to start my career, and probably how they learned themselves back when they were students. For them to rat out a student was kind of unsportsmanlike. It would be admitting they weren’t good at their jobs.

I’m told this hacker culture no longer exists at my Uni. If you get caught escalating privileges on a computer you’d be facing expulsion and referral to the police.

it has a reason. We did not have our life story at our fingertips in those days. Even if the university computers may not have sensitive information but they could be hijacked to be part of bot net or just mint bitcoins. They stakes are much higher. I am not at a uni so don't know the reality but I can understand if they are doing it.

It's there,

> I also don’t want her calling up an ISP and convincing them to make an account for her - I’m not quite ready to reap what I sow.

That point did make it come across as "youthful indescretion" to me.

> what he did wasn't 'a hack', it wasn't particularly clever. It was just theft of services and a lot of lying because he didn't have something he wanted.

Who says a hack needs to be clever? And what is clever? Bug fixes are often something very simple that can take a long time to discover. I'd put hacks into the same category.

Again, I think demonizing confessions like this can cause more trouble. Just because we don't talk about mischievousness doesn't mean it isn't out there.

Some history: Waaay back in the mists of time (1988) I was a 1st-year undergrad in Physics. Together with a couple of friends, I wrote a virus, just to see if we could (having read through the Advanced User Guide and the Econet System User Guide), then let it loose on just one of the networked archimedes machines in the year-1 lab.

I guess I should say that the virus was completely harmless, it just prepended 'Copyright (c) 1988 The Virus' to the start of directory listings. It was written for Acorn Archimedes (the lab hadn't got onto PC's by this time, and the Acorn range had loads of ports, which physics labs like :-) It spread like wildfire. People would come in, log into the network, and become infected because the last person to use their current computer was infected. It would then infect their account, so wherever they logged on in future would also infect the computer they were using then. A couple of hours later, and most of the lab was infected.

You have to remember that viruses in those days weren't really networked. They came on floppy disks for Atari ST's and Amiga's. I witnessed people logging onto the same computer "to see if they were infected too". Of course, the act of logging in would infect them... Of course "authority" was not amused. Actually they were seriously unamused, not that they caught us. They shut down the year-1,2,3 network and disinfected all the accounts on the network server by hand. Ouch.

There were basically 3 ways the virus could be activated: - Typing any 'star' command (eg: "* .", which gave you a directory listing. Sneaky, I thought, since the virus announced itself when you did a '* .' When you thought you'd beaten it, you'd do a '* .' to see if it was still there :-) - The events (keypress, network, disk etc.) all activated the virus if inactive, and also re-enabled the interrupts, if they had been disabled - The interrupts (NMI,VBI,..) all activated the virus if inactive, and also re-enabled the events, if they had been deactivated.

On activation, the virus would replicate itself to the current mass-storage media. This was to cause problems because we hadn't really counted on just how effective this would be. Within a few days of the virus being cleansed (and everyone settling back to normal), it suddenly made a re-appearance again, racing through the network once more within an hour or two. Someone had put the virus onto their floppy disk (by typing *. on the floppy when saving their work, rather than the network) and had then brought the disk back into college and re-infected the network.

If we thought authority was unamused last time, this time they held a meeting for the entire department, and calmly said the culprit when found would be expelled. Excrement and fans came to mind. Of course, they thought we'd just re-released it, but in fact it was just too successful for comfort...

Since we had "shot our bolt", owning up didn't seem like a good idea. The only solution we came up with was to write another (silent, this time :-) virus which would disable any copy of the old one, whilst hiding itself from the users. We built in a time-to-die of a couple of months, let it go, and prayed...

We had actually built in a kill-switch to the original virus, which would disable and remove it - we didn't want to be infected ourselves (at the start). Of course, it became a matter of self-preservation to be infected later on in the saga - 3 accounts unaccountably (pun intended :-) uninfected... It wasn't too hard to destroy the original by having the new virus "press" the key combination that deleted the old one.

So, everyone was happy. Infected with the counter-virus for a while, but happy. "Authority" thought they'd laid down the law, and been taken seriously (oh if they knew...) and we'd not been expelled. Everyone else lost their infections within a few months ... Anyway. I've never written anything remotely like a virus since [grin]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOHell

I knew of several in Lake Tahoe that were high-school kids at the time in the late 80s - someohow managed to get credit cards and would order deliveries to "vacation homes" in lake tahoe where they knew the owners lived in the bay area and wouldnt be at the house - and would have things dropped off to the vacant houses to go get them.

Also, in 1980 - we had a payphone inside our home in Tahoe. I didnt know this was an odd thing to have until much later.

Online since 1993.

the highs of an exploit working or a bypass make drugs look like candy.

It's really not a valid question -> only a court can determine if you've commited a crime, that's why we call people suspects, not criminals, before they are convicted.

For example recently in UK, a group of 4 people have toppled a statue and threw it in the river. This sounds like a crime to any normal person, and they were charged with criminal damage.

The accused raised defences of lawful excuse, owner's consent, etc. They were found not guilty - with many people foaming at the mouth because they disagreed with the decision, media calling them criminals, you know the drill.

But the opinions of random people are just that - opinions. In fact even if you think you commited the crime, the court is not required to accept your guilty plea and could still find your innocent.

Only judge and jury can evaluate defences presented and decide if this is a crime. So what should these four people answer to such a question? Or suppose those 4 people where never charged- what should they have answered?

case in question: https://thesecretbarrister.com/2022/01/06/do-the-verdicts-in...

Yet the opinion of the US (UK?) Government is so final, and often without appeal.

Breaking into someone's house is obviously a crime, but if you were running away from a axe-wielding murder then it isn't.

Taking someone's car is theft, but it isn't if 'they would have agreed for you to use it if they had known the situatiojn at hand'.

That's called projection.

That's right -- modern age stuff isn't as _hackable_. Especially not at the hardware level. You get an Alexa or a mobile phone or a camera, it's all just a chip on a PCB in a plastic case, not intended to be fiddled with by anybody (not the owner, not some repair show, literally _nobody_) just to be thrown away after a year or two and replaced by a new one.

It's all very sad. There is still some software component to things that's hackable, but even that's harder to do. In the past you turned on your C64 and could start write away code, average Joe Teenager needs to install some IDE and pull in hundreds of NPM dependencies from shady places just to show a hello world. Unless daddy/mommy gave them a Linux box, then the story is different.

Or he could open a console in his web browser.

I, for one, learned how to bcdedit my way into booting from a .vhd on my school-issued laptop. And how to SSH tunnel on port 443 to get past the proxy. How LSPs worked on Windows. Messing around is how kids get their start in computers, and I couldn't agree with the parent comment more.

And, sadly, they tend to get punished for it, once it's found out.

The point was that it's hard to do it with the thing you already have. Of course it's easier if you just get a new thing -- which installing a new OS corresponds to in the software world.

The kinds of hacking you can do today are different, but things are just as hackable if you want. If you don't want to hack, just get things done, then today things are much better, computers mostly just work for people who need to get things done.

It was simple and therefore easier to tamper and play with. Also, because it was so simple, more knowledge and understanding of the underlying mechanisms was required to use the technology. In the early years of the internet, simply operating a computer and exploring the web was an adventure in itself!

Now, things have gotten plenty complicated and that complexity brings bugs and makes the technology impenetrable to the common folk even with an educated mind - you need to be an expert now. If it's too complex, you can't play with it, and if you can't play with it, you don't learn and you don't have fun.

I feel that your conclusion, 'it just worked', is more a consequence of the increase in complexity rather than a root cause in itself.

Of course, I have to admit that my Bluetooth headset is pretty good, and a first-class gaming headset would be even better.

The Western Electric model 1500 [1], from 1963, is generally considered the best analog phone [1]. This was rented, not sold, so it is extremely reliable and rugged.

Best audio quality was with ISDN phones. Digital end to end, synchronized at the bit level, no noise, no dropouts.

[1] http://www.telephonearchive.com/phones/we/we1500.html

The best speakerphone ever made (even better than modern ones) is a 4A Speakerphone.

Also in my opinion, an AE 80 with a non cohered up carbon mic will outperform a 500/1500/2500 on a short loop (sub 15kf), and can be tuned to outperform on a long. The self compensating network in the WE set is better however.

That all said, a modern Northern Telecom or Aastra analog phone will consistently outperform a 500 set, because of the electret mic in them. Carbon mics have benefits as an amplifier, but transistors rendered them obsolete in most cases.

I use a lot of voip services and there's something to be said for the phone companies actually making a competitive product, here.

I suppose one could argue that "HD calling" is technically just VoIP as well.

"HD voice" is exactly VoIP and with few exceptions is only transported over SIP or a SIP-like protocol using the existing RTP negotiation mechanism, which usually ends up selecting 64kbps companded PCM (same as a landline phone). Increasing use of VoLTE, which is essentially an optimized form of SIP designed to "combine" session control features with LTE for lower overhead, has made this pretty common as HD voice support is standard from VoLTE vendors. There was such a thing as HD Voice over 3G using a similar mechanism that leveraged HSPDA but it was never very common, at least in the US.

VoLTE will quickly become the only way to make cellular phone calls in the US which we can expect to make HD Voice pretty universal. Right now it can be spotty when calling between networks, depending on how their peering is set up.

Maybe smartbrick?

Someone made an interesting observation the other day: it used to be that you rented the phone from the telephone company. Those phones never broke. Now that you buy phones, they do. And the moral is: always look for the incentives. Or, put another way: follow the money.

I have no idea why modern mobile phones have no (or very low volume?) sidetone. It makes the UX orders of magnitude better.

If the relay works you could also simulate the pulse dialing signals with clicking audio on the dial return.

The author:

1. Had more time than he knew what to do with.

2. Didn't have money

3. Had authority figures getting in the way of what he wanted to do.

A decade later, kids were 'hacking' their parents' wifi access points by logging in as admin/password to bypass "go to bed and stop using the internet" restrictions, but the author was not, because he likely had more money, less time, and most importantly, no authority to bypass :)

  > part of the tragedy is that a lot of technology that worked well has been replaced by "better" technology that doesn't work well.

Yes I know that POTS landlines generally discard much not-in-human-vocal-range sounds that still affect how we perceive voice. But even with that limitation, I feel that the difference in sound quality as I remember it and as I now experience it cannot all be attributed to 30 years of rock concerts and rifle fire on these eardrums.

That's a very crude way of saying it and I 100% agree. The digital revolution promised to make analog world more precise, but we ended up having so much complexity as a result and the benefits gained by precision at low level is replaced by ever increasing chaos at high level. We seem to think having many things rendered simultaneously and faster are inherently so good not just for things like games that we built frameworks like React that run big parts of the web.

It's as if we decided increasing entropy isn't so bad after all.

Standing next to the phone talking to friends was strangely fun and nostalgic experience, despite the fact I had only used a payphone once in my life. I got a cellphone very quickly (perks of having a tech journalist in the family), so by the time I was old enough to be able to buy a phone card with my own money I no longer needed it. During the pandemic, all of the remaining phonebooths in the country were quietly shut down and dismantled.

I know it's completely irrational, but I'm still sad that I had to eventually return the one I worked on and that in the many years the system was still operational it never occurred to me to buy a card and call someone from a phone booth just for the fun of it.

P.S.: If anyone from Slovenia or other ex-Yu countries has any ideas how I could get my hands on one of those Iskra payphones, drop me an email (address in bio). I have so many ideas for projects involving them, but it seems that I'm a bit too late to stand behind the Telekom dumpster and snag a few before they're scrapped.

Some, near the end, could take a credit card or a telco card.

I presume you could buy the cards back in the day, anywhere and easily?

Seems the same elsewhere, too, as per other replies.

I recall our phones, as I said, having a card slot and coin slot at the end.

I wonder if they retrofitted, with the goal of getting people used to cards, before removing the change slot entirely. This logic seems typical here.

But then the smartphone explosion happened, so just decided to never buy new payphones with slots only.

EG, rather than phase out for card only, they'd have years of spare parts and phones, as they slowly removed booths.

I'm using two of those 2€ sound cards from China to drive the handset and ringer speakers and both work quite well. I would probably need to add a small amplifier if I wanted the ringer to be heard from the street through the metal enclosure and plexiglass booth, but that wasn't a requirement for this project.

He installed a small switch between the payphone and the line before it went into the ground. He then exploited the lack of coordination between the phone and the exchange.

* First he would pick up the phone and start dialing 0800 (equivalent of 1-800), the phone would see this was a free number and ignore what was being entered next.

* Then he would briefly interrupt the line. The phone wouldn't notice but the exchange would think the call had ended.

* Then he would dial a new number. The exchange would think the payphone was making sure he paid, while the payphone would think he was still dialing a free number.

So to call 0900 123 456 for free he would dial 0800-click-0900123456

Obviously the phone company audits quickly turned up a problem but he got away with it for a little while.

In Japan, they would just accept DTMF tones from anything that would generate them. There was all these people using hacked cards that they installed countermeasures against which were hilarious because people using these hacked yakuza cards would keep one foot in the doorway in case the fabled alarm would go off, i knew a guy who did this thinking naaah it would never happen to me. NOPE happens to him, he had to squeeze himself out of that phone booth and run after a red light started flashing and the door slammed shut on his shoe... Literally just playing the DTMF tones into the handset would have gotten past that on every 'grey phone' out there (The ones that advertise ISDN connectivity). Wouldn't be surprised if that still works if they still have those phones anywhere.

The other way I did it in another country was a telephone company test line (toll free!) which would give you 30 seconds of silence then a dial tone (presumably 'remote'). From this dial tone you could call anywhere in the world. We got some list that phonelosers used to make and called places like the president of Kenya.

This guy mentions using a payphone which accepts incoming calls to get the internet as a kid in the 90s. Those which still rang on incoming were mostly gone by my time but a few were still configured to act like that. Was fun to sit down the road with a cellphone and watch people be scared to pick up the line after watching it ring for a few seconds.

This did not happen.

Almost no Japanese public telephones even in 2022 have a) doors which lock or b) motors/servos to operate the door. The exception on motors is a specialty item "automatic door (electric type)" which is sold primarily as an accessibility aid for people who cannot operate unpowered doors. The door, in all cases, is for caller privacy, not for preserving the integrity of telephone billing.

I feel _extremely_ confident in this, and confident that you would get an immediate on-the-record denial from NTT if you asked. One reason among many: if the phone booth was physically capable of locking people inside that would endanger human life in a natural disaster, and the first rule of engineering in Japan is that one's system must function during natural disasters.

On this I will see "I once talked to a Japanese woman" and raise you "I have written the acceptance testing protocols required by that 'rule' for a firm which produced publicly-deployable hardware artifacts." plus "I have two working eyeballs and can confirm the absence of a motor in almost all telephone deployments."

(Apologies for someone-is-wrong-on-the-Internet here but we were extremely serious about rule #1.)

Why didn't you install DTMF filters on the phones lol I was calling like new zealand and shit.

And I'm talking like, 20 years ago plus here... It could be bullshit for sure, I'm relating someone else's story.

How did this work? Did it literally lock you inside and how did you exit?

It's something that happened in the late 90s, some time after I was in Japan myself. I trust the source, his Japanese wife corroborated it somewhat embarrassed.

Wow, there's a name I haven't heard or thought about in years... I wonder if RBCP's writings are still floating around somewhere. Even the fictional ones (especially the fictional ones, I guess) are amazing.

This was like 5 years before my own time in Japan but pretty hilarious nonetheless

Remember playgrounds back then? I remember one around Osaka Castle which was like a huge children's slide with those industrial conveyor rollers you rode down on pieces of cardboard (to go stupidly fast!),which I'm sure you could pinch yourself on really bad.

In my mind I thought that pay phones were fully automated, especially the count the money part.

Edit: oh yeah, and after that, you’d just call the operator and tell them the keys were sticky and to dial the number for you, then you’d “insert the coins” by playing the tones.

Well, or you just third party billed the call to someone you didn’t know. That worked too.

So does this mean that there was a dedicated second microphone hidden somewhere within the payphone body, that would continue to record the sound the coins made?

I used to mess with the proctor test set (dialing 117 in the US at least on GTE) and only ever convinced it I inserted a nickel even with many tries using a digital recorder or a computer speaker.

(Once they straighten out the funds, there’s a series of about six different operators needed to get the call across the country; all talking to, over, and past each other. “Hello, Hyannis, this is Truro. I have a call for Los Angeles! Westwood 5689.“ — “Hello Wellfleet, this is Hyannis. I have a call for Los Angeles. Westwood 5689.” — “Hello Boston, this is Wellfleet. I have a call for Los Angeles, Westwood 5698.” ­— ”No, Westwood 5689.” — “Who was that, Wellfleet?” — “That was Truro, Boston.” — “No, I’m Truro. That was Hyannis.” Meanwhile, the caller: “Are we still in Massachusetts??”)

Quite funny! :)

https://www.reddit.com/r/seinfeld/comments/4chcmp/seinfeld_e...

Billing automation came in the 1960s, but didn't involve computers yet. Special purpose hardware, paper tape, and punched cards were involved.

[1] https://vimeo.com/390769230

> My daughter is 5 - I don’t want her dialing 911.

Five year old girls calling 911 has saved a lot of lives. I just listened to a whole podcast series about that.

> Why yes, payphone.com, yes I have.

This had me rolling but it's also a great example of knowing your niche target audience.

One of them did not validate the card number, so you could just type in 000000000000 or whatever and your free trial was enabled for a month or whatever and then be auto cancelled when they tried to bill for your first month after the trial. In the UK though local calls were not free and charged by the minute.

I think that ISP also bundled a <1.0 version of Netscape's Mozilla (0.8?) on their disk which was nice as otherwise I only had mosaic.

Good times.

Edit: I think the version of netscape/Mozilla was this one - I distinctly remember the "M" logo that would rotate as pages loaded slowly on a 14.4 modem: https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/uploaded/old-software/web-br....

Curious that it was called "mosaic netscape" - I don't remember that.

Presumably the activation of service happened locally in the device, or with minimal cross-checking with the backend billing service.

A few months later I tried it on another unit and the number no longer worked for activation :)

When I visited the US I was shocked that you could do all kind of business by just telling or typing in the number on the phone. I soon learned that cheaper businesses (e.g international calls at discount rates) did not accept my foreign card. However, more expensive businesses (like AT&T to stay at the same example) just accepted the number, no questions asked. CVV wasn't in use. A concept that exceeded my imagination, credit card numbers are not that secret, everone working at a checkout could collect them. When reading this I guess they would have also accepted phantasy numbers with a matching checksum.

My conclusion back then was: For those operating at comfortable margins some loss by fraud is just priced in. Those offering cheap prices don't have the luxury to do so, so they reject everything that is not easy to verify, like e.g. foreign cards.

Just need an old PC, a compatible dial-up modem with voice, and a card with a few FXO ports to go to the payphone and child's phone...

General rule of thumb is that any payphone that accepts credit cards is actually a COCOT, any payphone not branded by the ILEC is a COCOT, and a lot of the rest are COCOTs too depending on the telco. "Genuine" exchange-controlled payphones (that signal coin drops back to the exchange) have become rare.

I'm pretty surprised he went with the Viking box actually because it costs more than an inexpensive FXS ATA, and a lot more than getting an ATA used. It's simpler to set up, but on the other hand some ATAs have internal logic to connect their two lines that you can enable so they behave as standalone devices. I think this is typical on the older Ciscos.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Secrets

Sure, culture has become more sensitive to these things overall and criminal prosecution of credit card fraud and computer crimes has become a lot more effective but there's a tangible difference between generating fake credit card numbers and masking your identity to defraud ISPs and hacking the Pentagon to access government secrets (namely, the latter fits into the hacker ethos of "liberating information" and rejecting authority whereas the former just provides personal gain). Changing your school records as a student is a childish version of the latter (as the intent is not to create false credentials for monetary gain but to defy the authority of teachers by subverting their means of "punishment").

Um no, definitely not.

> Sure, culture has become more sensitive to these things overall

Decades of fearmongering in media, omnipresent surveillance and the buying off of all competent hackers did a good job of that.

this could not possibly be further from the truth -- the early hacking/phreaking scene was quite possibly one of the most diverse in tech history, mostly because it was actually meritocratic

even the population of kids that hung out on IRC during early web2.0 DDoSing each other and trading 0days had a disproportionate amount of minority individuals, and large portions of them graduated to today's cybsec industry

The weird thing is we have had the CFAA hanging over us as some kind of Sword of Damocles for decades and we just collectively ignored it. Honestly everyone was even pretty cavalier about this stuff during and after the Mitnick prosecution...

In the 2000s when I talked to people who do urban exploration there was at least an understanding that you should not be taking photos in sensitive locations -- "please don't make a felony diary".

The 90s were cavalier. We're talking over 20 years ago, different time.

The big difference was that people were... for lack of a better designation, intensely naive back then. There just wasn't a lot of understanding around consequences.

I am pretty sure kids today are also doing some different mildly illegal stuff with technology, but we'll have to wait 20 years to find out about it.

Also scamming product returns, food delivery refunds, stuff like this.

Curious what other things people have run across.

to be fair that movie follows a group of teenagers showcasing illegal activities that finally culminate into their federal arrest.

yeah, they're later exonerated because 'Movie-FBI' has a heart and a sense of justice, but that's probably not the best movie to try to pull criminality psych from.

my guess : Eric Corley injected a lot of his own personal ethos into that movie. He was apparently an unpaid consultant.

I'm purely speaking retrospectively here

Orherwise ISPs are the poster child of monopoly giants that had to be broken down kicking and screaming, but kept screwing the customer over and over because there is litteraly nothing that we can do about it (voting won't help). They can burn in hell I wouldn't care.

ISPs were also pretty liberal with free trials (AOL CDs galore) since it was mostly customer acquisition cost (it wasn't yet established that you had to have an Internet connection like you did a landline and Cable TV) and the marginal cost was low (ideally, the cost of peering -- the ISP basically had some routers and modem banks between an internet exchange and a phone exchange; and the user paid any applicable long distance charges to call the ISP). Whereas now you'd preauthorize the card at signup time to catch this sort of fraud beforehand.

There were a pretty good number of nationwide ISPs to choose from too, if you wanted something less fly by night. A whole heck of a lot of consolidation happened since then of course. But even the winners of dial-up pretty much lost to cable and baby bells. It was easy to setup a dial-up ISP, but it's darn hard to setup a broadband ISP, so we're stuck unless you can convince the FCC that the 1996 Telecom Act applies (might need some court work as well) and we can get mandatory line sharing back.

Also, not every valid number will be used (e.g. all 0s won’t be an option), and every number don’t need to be valid at the same time. If I renew 25 cards, their numbers are burned with no reuse.

That’s a long way to say, I’m not a fan in general of throwing in naive probability calculations and calling it a day.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31605950

The BIN/IIN is traditionally the first 6 digits. Extended BINs can be 8-11 digits, which is like subnetting -- the BIN sponsor can delegate assignment control of an extended BIN range to another entity. So in some cases, there can be as few as 4 "random" digits in the full card number (PAN).

E.g.:

  BIN     "random"  Check
  411111  111111111 1

  ExtendedBIN "random" Check
  41111111111 1111     1

We can't know the likelihood of hitting a valid number without knowing the count of assigned PANs in that BIN, but clearly the capacity would be 1 billion (or 10 million) possibilities.

These days isn't it a lot easier to deal with that? You basically just get on the phone with equifax/transunion and upload some documents.

Guess that trial and error had to start somewhere.

Also I really wonder what the mathematical chances are that the card actually matched with someone back then. Like obviously a collision risk here but how large?

Even if it's still a pretty huge space.

[0] https://medium.com/@ma.juber/mathematics-behind-credit-debit...

So if you have fourteen digits, one of which is a check digit and up to six of which are non-random, that leaves only seven truly random digits per issuer, i.e. a pool of 10'000'000 (10^7) numbers rather than the 1'000'000'000'000 (10^12) possible numbers claimed elsewhere.

Of course the actual pool is different as the number of fixed digits seems to vary per issuer and for some it seems to be only one.

You have to remember how expensive this stuff was in the 80's and 90's, how low risk this type of fraud was, and how us teens didn't really think about it. ISPs billed by the hour, something a teen could not afford.

Check out any history of phreaking [0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_box

In my town in the 1990s, it had the unique feature of a free local number you could dial and use to play games, get movie showtimes, find out the time, and more. It was almost like audio-only webpages you pulled up with a four digit code after initially dialing a regular phone number. I would spend lots of time on there, typing in random codes to see if I could find an Easter egg. And I did.

I found a code - I think it may have been 9876 - that opened up a service where you could leave a short message that the next person could hear. Frequently it was nothing much, but sometimes it was … pretty strange, sometimes pretty entertaining.

Did anyone else stumble upon this strange corner of phone service, where you left a recording for strangers, and listened to what they left?

https://cdn.remarkedusercontent.com/file/remarked-prod/1/mar... https://cdn.remarkedusercontent.com/file/remarked-prod/1/mar... https://cdn.remarkedusercontent.com/file/remarked-prod/1/mar... https://cdn.remarkedusercontent.com/file/remarked-prod/1/mar... https://cdn.remarkedusercontent.com/file/remarked-prod/1/mar... https://cdn.remarkedusercontent.com/file/remarked-prod/1/mar...

I do remember our town had a local number, 8463, that we could call to get current time and temperature played back to us.

There was only one phone, so the rest of the kids were in a queue waiting to call theirs. You'll get an earful if you were the one to fill the coin storage (the phone company only comes once a month or so to collect the money) or jam a coin.

It all started when I discovered after buying our new house that most rooms were pre-wired with RJ11 outlets, with all the lines going to a central closet. So one day I bought a cheap 8-port PBX for $80 (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B015MIQ12A) and bought a classic rotary phone for my daughter's room, and a regular phone for our room. The PBX needed no configuration whatsoever, it comes with the ports assigned extensions 601, 602, etc, so right away my daughter was elated she could call us from her room by just dialing "601" or whatever. It's important to note we do not have a landline; the PBX's outgoing lines were left unconnected, so it was purely a private phone network. The PBX could also be configured so it auto-dials an extension as soon as the phone is picked up. But I wanted my daughter to learn how to use a rotary dial so I didn't use that feature. As a side note, the "phone line simulator" that the OP uses is basically a minimalist 2-port PBX with no outgoing line.

But I thought, how hard is it to replace the PBX with an Asterisk VOIP system? So I replaced the PBX with a $140 Analog Telphone Adapter (also 8 ports: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07B6TL7N6), I configured the ATA to route calls via SIP to my Linux gateway, on which I installed Asterisk. I wrote a simple Asterisk config defining even shorter extensions so my daughter only has to dial "1" or "2" instead of "601" or "602". Then I set up some extensions that play recorded audio files, like songs, or sweet messages we recorded to each other.

Then, later I thought it might be practical for my daughter to be able to call my cellphone (in case of emergencies or whatnot). So I searched for VOIP providers, found https://voip.ms/ and signed up for an account. I configured Asterisk to place outgoing calls through this provider. And I defined new extensions: 3 rings my cellphone, and 4 rings my wife's cellphone, while the other extensions work just as before (eg. 1 still rings our bedroom.) But I specifically did NOT configure Asterisk to be able to place outgoing calls to arbitrary numbers. So the internal phones are only able to call my predefined extensions.

And again later I thought it might be practical to be able to call her bedroom phone from my cellphone. So I added a DID number (direct inward dialing) to my voip.ms account. Then I configured Asterisk to accept incoming calls from voip.ms, then prompt for an extension, and forward the call accordingly. So when I call the number, I hear "please dial an extension", then I can type 2, and my daughter's phone rings.

In order to avoid spam calls, I made Asterisk check the caller ID and accept calls coming ONLY from my cellphone or from my wife's cellphone. (I'm well aware that caller ID can be spoofed, in fact I have spoofed it myself a few times with my setup as a demonstration to family & friends.) In the 2 months since I bought the DID number I did not see a single call intercepted by my caller id filter. So it looks like I got a pretty "clean" number. I understand that I might not have been that lucky.

And that's basically where I'm at today. We have a mostly private in-home phone network, that can also call our cellphones, and our cellphones only are allowed to call into the house phone system.

Our daughter will call us in the morning when she wakes up to say what she wants for breakfast. When her cousins visit, they chat on the phone from room to room. It's fun!

As someone who knew nothing about Asterisk, I found the official documentation utterly mediocre. The process of configuring it consisted mostly of finding real-world examples, then trying to reverse engineer them by finding what they do from the documentation. But in the end I still got everything to work exactly the way I wanted it.

I had the pleasure of knowing a guy who knew a guy when I was in school. Basically there was a prefix 786 that you could (within the area code of course) dial the prefix for the callback 971 and the last 4 digits of the host (thankfully the number of the pay phone is right there on the pay phone) and then hang up twice the phone would ring until you picked the phone up.

Fast forward to another thing of the past, the mall! The mall had BANKS of pay-hones just sitting around. So a group of friends and I got to all of the banks and decided to make all the phones ring. We walked around the mall forever as people just looked at the ringing phones and carried on about their lives.

After doing it for about an hour security caught on and I got banned from the mall, I think for the fourth or fifth time.

It was a beautiful site to see. Two dozen or so payphones just ringing and people completely perplexed as to why.

Well… hmm. I taught my daughter how and when to do that by that age. You never know. That could end up saving a life. She knows not to do it frivolously. This does not seem too advanced a concept for a kindergartner.

That said, intercom-like internal system Bertrand built seems to be much cooler than having the real phone.

Yes, that was really weird to have as the very first item. As a parent I taught my child, when she was young, to know my phone number, to dial 911, and to recognize a police officer and other service people.

I’d try to make one myself if I wasn’t so good at killing hardware.

Okay, well, now I have something to do with the rotary phone I inherited from a previous job. Time to set up a phone line to my kid's room!

I wonder if something exists to connect any arbitrary number of phones together. Maybe even with distinct phone numbers?

edit: duh, of course it does, PBX. maybe that'll be my summer project.

One day I noticed the tones produced by putting a quarter in a pay phone to tell the backend switch a quarter had been inserted. It was, like, beep beep beep beep beep, really fast. Dimes and nickels made the same tones, but they were shorter, less beeps.

Something sounded familiar about these tones, and through trial and error, I realized these tones were made from the DTMF tones of either the asterisk key or the octothorpe key (I can't now remember which, and btw, it is not a hash symbol, it is an octothorpe). By putting enough presses of the right key into the memory of the Radio Shack dialer, I could fool payphones into thinking I had deposited quarters. I had turned my off the shelf Radio Shack DTMF dialer into a Red Box, without actually doing anything to the hardware or electronics. And it was a lot more svelte than the original Woz Red Boxes, about the size of a flip phone when closed.

At first, this worked at every payphone, always, any kind of call, local or long distance. I spent a lot of time at the airport and hotel pay phone banks calling a gf long distance. But eventually, my DTMF dialer stopped fooling the switch, so I could no longer make free local calls. But with long distance calls, I'd usually get an operator once the spoofed coin inserts failed, but they would always still fool the operator, who I think assumed line interference prevented (what I assume were) the new digital switches from recognizing coin insert tones. Then that stopped working; somehow the operators knew what I was doing and would accurately describe my spoof to me.

So it no longer worked with ordinary common pay phones. But I found a pay phone installation that was not ordinary, I believe it was called a "Smart Payphone," but it was not smart in the way we think of smart phones today; it just had some extra electronics and a small 3 line LCD panel which told you how long your call lasted. I could continue to make local and long distance calls from only these types of pay phones for a few more years until every place I knew there had been one had been uninstalled.

It only occurred to me later that I was not stealing from AT&T or some local Bell affiliate. I had been stealing from whomever owned the pay phone, who still had to pay for those long distance calls I made. I have carried the guilt and shame of my juvenile crimes ever since. Not kidding. That was all very, very wrong.

edit: not one of you asked "which one's the good one".. I rest my case.

Yes the 2nd and 3rd were great despite critics. The fourth is a "WTF who wrote this garbage money grab" the entire time, it's not even "fan service" because it destroys everything with poor writing and terrible acting, feels like someone was shouting "we'll fix it in post" after every first take rushing to the next shot to churn it out.

Remember how epic the music was in the first three? The fourth is like that kid from Bob's Burgers mashing on a keyboard.

Remember the epic dialog from Hugo Weaving and those chilling rants from Agent Smith? Yeah absolutely nothing, nothing even vaguely faintly like it in the fourth, it almost undoes the entire franchise.

Also 2 and 3 were mostly bad because releasing two part movies wasn't a thing at the time and thus the films had to be forced into (unsatisfying) single-movie narrative arcs despite having an obvious overarching narrative.

Re-watching 2 and 3 as a double feature years later makes them less of a trainwreck and more of a mildly underwhelming but watchable and solid sequel to a movie so good it was impossible to follow up on. It finishes the story, literally ends the universe it created and ties up the loose ends.

On the other hand 4 is the sequel that never should have been but ultimately exists to seal the franchise permanently shut because any attempt to build on it can only be read as a soulless cashgrab because there is now literally nothing left to tell. WB didn't want to let its IP die so the Wachowskis had to drive a stake through its heart and kiss it goodbye.

The Wachowskis did not want to make another Matrix movie but the studio approached them and said that they would make the movie either way but they would be given full artistic freedom if they agreed. They basically had the choice of doing this themselves or letting the studio turn it into a soulless franchise detached from their own vision.

The movie is mostly an allegory for how the movie was created and why it shouldn't exist. Aside from mindless indulgence the ending is also giving a middle finger to the production company. The philosophy is dull because everything that needed to be said was already said so the only thing left to do is repeat it more blatantly for the audience in the back.

That doesn't mean it's a great movie and you can argue that a movie should be enjoyable without context, but for me knowing this context allowed me to enjoy it through that lens a lot more than I probably would have had I not come into this knowing this.

So they own it as much as the 1st 2nd or 3rd. They did not have to do that. In fact it would have been an even stronger statement if every review of the 4th started off with "done without the original creators input or approval".

But now the 4th has been done with the original creators input and approval, so it's their fault, their mess.

In hindsight you can now see the wonder and amazement of the first movies were not just from them but everyone that worked so hard for them, not just the actors but everyone behind the scenes, even the clever color timing, completely absent from the 4th as well as the horrible music, everyone just phoned it in for the paycheck.

"Because someone else would do it if we didn't" is not a viable excuse, it would have been a statement otherwise, a path they purposely didn't chose for either ego or profit.

The Wachowskis not being involved wouldn't have affected the movie's commercial success. There are plenty of examples of "franchises" being carried on by different directors even in directions the original director never intended and to still be successful.

What the Wachowskis did was take a story that had nothing left to tell and then make a movie about the experience of having to keep adding to that story, drive home the point of the original story and provide an ending to the story that is impossible to write around without discarding the source material and starting over (not that that stopped e.g. Star Wars Rise of Skywalker from doing pretty much this with The Last Jedi).

The Matrix is intrinsically anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian and queer. But much of its fanbase likes it entirely for cosmetic reasons (cool slomo fights and explosions and sunglasses). WB would have been entirely happy to cater to that crowd and would likely have gotten away with it. Instead the movie ended up amplifying those themes and alienating anyone who just wanted another film with cool slomo fights and explosions and sunglasses. And IMO they did it in an interesting way nevertheless.

https://m.xkcd.com/566/

Still sometimes I need to make an outgoing call to some customer support line or other such nonsense that only works over "the phone".

Back in the day before cellphones were an option I would sometimes use a payphone for these edge cases, but they basically no longer exist.

I had already canceled my cell phone subscriptions a couple years ago and ported my one remaining cell number to a VoIP provider. This lets me get SMS over email for dumb services I can't avoid like banks that insist on using SMS verification still.

Given that setup had worked well, I decided for rare life edge cases that still require classic phone system voice calls I could also get a VoiP ATA box and route calls to it. This let me setup some "dumb" landline phones at home, the first which logically had to be a payphone, which is now installed and working in my home office as of a few months ago, and I love it.

It is visible in most of my work video calls and people are often skeptical that it really works. Some call it to test are amazed it works fine. It amuses me.

After that, I switched to just getting a temporary SIM at the airport.

The unexpected screenshot of the LORD intro ascii art was a blast from the past.

I understand the anti-capitalist (or at least anti-corporate) and anti-authority attitudes of hacker culture but these stories are not told by anarchist cyberpunks "sticking it to the man" but almost invariably by sheltered (usually WASP) yuppies working for billion dollar companies or in this case, Slack.

These aren't so much stories about clever hacks and youthful rebellion but of a youth isolated from consequences for criminal offenses that would otherwise have been sufficient to give them a career-ending criminal record.

Nostalgia: Early 1960s near Liverpool UK. Being taken up the street to the phone booth to learn how to make a phone call (coins, dial number, press A button, talk, hang up, press B button to claim any leftover coins). Big thing when you are 6 years old.

https://www.google.com/maps/@55.9164681,-3.1675508,3a,15y,27...

Personally I’d go with a specialist/approved company such as x2connect.

As you might imagine, a lot of free outgoing calls were snuck in. Just pick it up when the clerk isn't looking. And no one wants to sit around all day guarding the phone, anyway. And so payphones. In those environments, you'd want them to be able to receive calls at a pre-arranged time, as well as place them. And it just kinda carried forward. But many regions in North America did start prohibiting incoming calls on payphones eventually. You couldn't do that in the 90s where I grew up in Canada.

Here's a list with physical addresses and phone numbers. Enjoy.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/B15mu7h/Payphones/master/P...

Wow, didn't know about this at all. Will be experimenting with these for sure. Thanks!

Just worrying about the "seen some shit" thing: where I used to grow up, the only payphone was mostly used as a toilet by drunk people.

I would like to make use of an ancient analog phone.

It's important to note that other than call routing, the ATA has to do almost everything the phone company would do. The ATA provides any Caller ID, for example. It provides call-waiting, or 3-way conferencing. If you want to use a rotary phone, you'll need one that handles pulse dialing.

Your ATA will use SIP to connect to a VoIP provider. Some support using multiple SIP accounts (especially if the ATA has multiple FXS ports.

A VoIP analog telephone adapter (ATA) would be the most common form of this these days. Most will have two analog lines, though other configurations are available.

The Sipura SPA series and it's derivatives (Linksys PAP2(T), Cisco SPA122) are popular, as well as Obihai's lineup. I've used them all extensively and they're solid.

You can connect these to a SIP based VoIP provider or they can operate entirely standalone just calling port to port. With a bit of work you can even link up multiple devices on a private network IP to IP.