One last generation might still understand the superman jokes and "I'm going to need an exit" but 100 years from now it's definitely going to need an explainer.
I rewatched all 3 recently, and I have to say I don't remember why I and everyone else disliked the sequels so much. They are exciting, and tell a good story. I haven't watched the new one yet.
Ever watch the newest one they made? It's like baudrillardian banality taken to its logical extreme. The first half is literally a clip show. Comes off as a shitty superhero movie of now but with matrix characters
The movie is infinitely better if you understand it within its real world context.
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.
My thoughts exactly. As a fan of the first Matrix, it felt a bit cathartic to see the honesty upfront, so I could just see this movie as a standalone statement with some decent visuals. It was pretty much the opposite of watching the latest Star Trek series, that have completely departed from the original philosophy.
They put their name on it. They made appearances. They took a huge paycheck despite already being millionaires and not needing it.
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.
I don't disagree that they own it, but I disagree that it's a bad movie. I actually found the movie largely enjoyable even without its real world context, but I acknowledge that this is a matter of personal taste.
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.
Do not watch the fourth. Not kidding. It's not worth the curiosity.
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.
I'm really of the opinion that they did that on purpose given the philosophical underpinnings of the original. Like, to make a point, because Warner Bros owned the rights to their franchise and were going to make some banal crap anyways, with or without the Wachowskis.
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.
I did this back in the early 2000s, when Asterisk first became really popular. My plan was to create an Asterisk PBX in my house and hook the payphone to that and be able to use it to receive and make VoIP calls. Unfortunately, the project never got off the ground because I bought a phone 1) without any keys to the locks and 2) without the proper software and interface cables to be able to program it. I ended up selling it again on eBay for what I paid for it.
I did really enjoy this post, but is it just a tiny bit weird how casual he is about repeatedly committing fraud? Not asking for some grand apology (lord knows the crap I did as a kid), but the post is written like defrauding an ISP is just a normal and fine thing to do. Am I off base here?
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.
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.
-- 1997 - 11 years old - figured out the username password & dial up numbers for everyone in our small town are based on the mailing address - once the bandwidth limit was reached on the account - id just switch to someone elses - at the time i justified it as 'borrowing their internet' - in retrospect it was wrong - oh well --
Photoshopping printed documents (school enrollment records, event tickets, covid stuff, etc.) was definitely weirdly popular among a certain demographic.
Also scamming product returns, food delivery refunds, stuff like this.
The credit card fraud is to me the worst, as any random number might actually match an existing one, and back in the days I wouldn't expect much scrutiny from the card processor. That's then up to the poor soul who's number was used to go through paperwork purgatory to dispute the charge.
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.
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?
There's 12 random numbers, and I assume banks reject some numbers based on obviousness (e.g. all 0, all 1s, 1234, all 3 groups are identical etc.) so I'd assume there's actually less probability space than what we'd expect.
Sorry I think I'm missing it, does that page explain somewhere how the 12 digits that are not set by the MII/IIN and check digit rules are not random ?
It says the first six digits are the IIN (and the first one of those is the MII).
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.
IIRC in the 90s online credit card processing was a minutes-long affair since it would require dialing into the bank's computer system, or possibly calling a human banker to check the authorization. IIRC it wasn't uncommon to just do it offline with physical pieces of paper in the mail. Towards the late 90s they got better at rejecting CCs if you did authorize online (especially after PayPal gave away a lot of $5 prepaid ones).
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.
If every human being alive today (~8 billion) had a valid Visa card (14 digits not counting the beginning 4 and the check digit), there would be a 0.008% chance of a collision.
I kinda agree with the low probability, but you also ignored the article (he’s faking mastercard), and I see 12 digits not 14.
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.
There are generally 9 "random" digits in a 16-digit Visa/MC card number.
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).
If you were sweeping a PAN range for live numbers, you'd start with a known-valid BIN, probably 6 or 8 digits. Then randomly choose the next 9 (or 7) digits, and then calculate the check digit.
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.
Dial-up ISPs were the poster child of anarchistic markets. If you could get a data T1 and a PRI T1 and some modems, you could run an ISP. When your PRI fills up, get another. When your data fills up, get another. Etc. A lot of those were pretty small operations (which is why the author had to get friends to call in).
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.
You must be Gen-Z or younger. Small-time "fraud" antics like this were part of the hacker ethos throughout the 80s and 90s, some highlights being the Anarchist Cookbook, Matthew Broderick changing school records in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and Kevin Mitnick as one of the notable poster children of the new era of cyber enforcement crackdowns. Even the word "hacker" meant something a lot different than today where kids now say that someone "hacked" their Instagram.
Not to mention Matthew Broderick changing school records in Wargames (before almost starting World War III). He was doing a lot of changing school records back in the 80s.
^ This is accurate. And when I saw the William Poundstone "Big Secrets" reference, I knew I was home. For anyone who hasn't played in that series, do yourself the favor!
Outside of movies these antics were confined to a specific (wealthy, male, usually white) demographic, though. Likewise a lot of 80s movies happily depict "funny" antics that would even at the time have been considered sexual assault or rape if the perps weren't wealthy white college "boys".
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").
>Outside of movies these antics were confined to a specific (wealthy, male, usually white)
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
Fandom types and 80s hackers have that in common - mostly white neckbeards roleplaying diversity and thinking it's for real. (Most of the people who called themselves "anarchists" back then too. Feels like political spaces have seen a bit more improvement though.)
This is more or less the tone of 2600 magazine though -- people very cheerfully admit to stuff which, yes, is totally unwise to write down that you have done.
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".
There is extremely low risk of colliding with a real number, and people didn't feel guilty about using services that had nearly zero marginal cost. Phreaking or fake-cc-number fraud was considered pretty victimless, and if there was a victim it was a baby bell that had just been busted up for being a massive monopoly.
As others pointed out a lot of us did that kind of stuff. I signed up for AOL at least a hundred times using fake credit card and bank account numbers. After that I picked a random person out of the phone book and signed up for a local ISP that mailed the bill, no credit card required. That worked for something like 6 months before they cancelled the account.
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.
Back when I was a kid I had alot of fun using methods to get free phone calls on these things. Like, beyond just red-boxing or whatever (Past that time).
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.
Yeah a red light would flash over the booth and the door would shut closed, hence having to put your foot in there. Alot of people buying and using these cards were like 'bullshit!' but this guy who told me about this figured to err on the side of caution anyways and ended up having to comically escape the situation with all these people looking at him.
This was like 5 years before my own time in Japan but pretty hilarious nonetheless
I'm not saying you're wrong but a) this sounds like a massive safety issue and b) this sounds like exactly the sort of thing I'd say to anyone trying to get a dodgy phone card from me, "yeah you need to wedge your foot in the door in case it detects the card is hooky, and tries to lock you in" just so I could stand there and laugh at their contortions trying to keep one foot outside while they use the phone.
Heh yeah I feel the same but the 90s were a different time
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 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.
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.
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..
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.)
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.
I found that if you had 2 adjacent pay phones you could make free calls by inverting the 2 handsets and placing the call on one phone, but putting your money in the other so the sound of the money dropping would make the operator think that you had paid for your call. Your money would be returned to you when you hung up the second phone.
Was it literally just the sound of money dropping that validated the call? Presumably this was before automatic switching and a live operator had to connect you?
At one point it was. You could even record the sound on a handheld recorder and play it back. But it hasn’t worked in a long while. Pay phones mitigated this in a low tech way - by software muting the handset.
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.
After this mitigation was put into place enterprising phreaks would take a lighter to the microphone part of the handset, twist it open, cut the yellow wire, and redbox away.
> Pay phones mitigated this in a low tech way - by software muting the handset.
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?
The coins weren't recorded, it was just a short tone that indicated 5¢. A quarter was five quick tones. A dime two.
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.
It was automated. The coin drop sound (or at least what was generated for the wire by the phone) was what drove the switch. All signals on POTS lines were sounds (thus the tones for pressing buttons or the numbers of clicks from dial phones).
There’s a (very old, by now) Henry Morgan sketch I remember about an expensive long distance call: after an interminable series of dings and bongs, the operator admits that she lost count and has to return the coins so he can try again.
(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??”)
Automatic switching came decades before automated billing. See "Operator Assisted Toll Dialing" (1949).[1] The operators are tone-dialing calls, but the billing system is entirely paper based.
Billing automation came in the 1960s, but didn't involve computers yet. Special purpose hardware, paper tape, and punched cards were involved.
I once made a call from a pay phone and after I was done it rang. I picked up. A very nice lady told me I had not paid enough and whether I could please put in another quarter or whatever. That was an interesting experience.
In my mind I thought that pay phones were fully automated, especially the count the money part.
Someone across the street could have been messing with you.
This sounds like it was from a time where you could ask to borrow a bars phone to make a free local call and it could be worth someone's while crossing the street to collect a quarter.
No, there were tones that the phone sent for each coin value. IIRC they were fairly brief and somewhat "blippy", unlike the flat DTMF tones. Back in the day you could build a Red Box (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_box_(phreaking)) that would simulate these tones.
Awesome, I used to work with Mitel PBX which have a feature called DISA which allows you to call a number and place calls from there. The number you call will give you dial tone and you could place calls anywhere I looked up the list of customers with Visa find the main number and try the first 20-100 numbers which was normally the range used (sold DIDs by Telco) during my installation I gave myself access to those via 1800 numbers so it was pretty much able to call LD/cell phone which used to be expensive before
I feel like the logical next step is for the author to discover PBX, such as Asterisk or something built on top of it. Then they can call between the two in-house phones and also dial out to the real phone line in an emergency.
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...
It would be cool! You'd need FXS ports, though (those are the ones which provide the line/ring voltage). You'd also need to research how the payphone indicated coin insertion (bell/2bell/bong or something else), and how to tell the payphone to either return the coins or drop them into the box (in some cases it's an MF signal, in others it's polarity reversal of the phone line).
The PacBell branding suggests this unit hasn't been converted, but most popular payphone model have a COCOT conversion kit available. COCOTs or customer-owned-coin-operated-telephones perform the charging internally and don't require exchange support, so they're a lot simpler to get working. The conversion kits are pretty readily available because a good majority of payphones out in the world today, even operated by the incumbent telco, are actually COCOTs since they've become cheaper and easier to manage over time. Plus a lot of payphones aren't managed by the telco anymore but instead by a separate private company like PTS, which runs all COCOTs with an arrangement where they "dial in" to a management system regularly for configuration and reports.
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.
You can also get used Cisco VoIP ATAs for cheap from eBay (mine was $20) with 2 lines that can be programmed for internal calls and incoming/outgoing SIP, that's what I did to play around with old modems and also set up 2 old-style phones to play phone with my kids.
I’m not usually nostalgic, but I love everything about that phone line simulator. The case, the dip switches, the font, the model number DLE-200B. Brings back memories of a time long past.
I was really hoping to find an ISDN simulator with U-interfaces but anything I could find on eBay I wasn’t going to pay for since I had no documentation on how to configure/operate them.
I’d try to make one myself if I wasn’t so good at killing hardware.
Yup! You want an Analog Telephone Adapter (ATA). That's a box which takes Ethernet in, and gives you one or more FXS ports. (An FXS and an FXO port are similar, but the FXS port is the one which provides the current that powers the phone, generates the ringing signal, etc.)
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.
> Is there an adapter which allows you to connect an analog phone to a digital phone line?
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.
That's a really awesome story with a great opening, middle, and especially the end, if one ignores the adolescent fraud. I think it really highlights the simple joy that technology that literally just works can bring. I'm around the same age as the author, a little younger in fact, but there's just something about today's Internet and a lot of the overwhelming amount of technology that just isn't fun or memorable. From game consoles to land lines to various other things, there were pieces of technology that just worked and worked well. Of course, there was technology that didn't work well, but I think part of the tragedy is that a lot of technology that worked well has been replaced by "better" technology that doesn't work well.
Very true. The old-fashioned telephone handset was a masterpiece of human engineering. I bet with state-of-the-art mic and speakers, it would still be way better than a smartphone for actual phone calls.
Of course, I have to admit that my Bluetooth headset is pretty good, and a first-class gaming headset would be even better.
With the 1950s mic and speakers, it was substantially better than a smartphone.
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.
I'm not sure why you picked a 1500 as the best sounding, the 500, 1500 and 2500 all used the same network, receiver, and transmitter elements - I've used all three, they perform identically, the 1500 set is actually incredibly rare - touch tone was just not common until the 2500 was out.
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.
The mic and speaker in the 90s Iskra payphones are far superior in sound quality to anything you'd find in a cheap phone these days. I hooked one up to Discord last month for an art instalation and could not believe my ears when it sounded way better than the 3 other people in the call using flagship smartphones.
I'm not sure this is true universally. I just spoke to a friend for the first time since I got a phone that does "HD" calling, and although I've been speaking to them for 25 years on the phone, I didn't recognize their voice. I feel like POTS and edge->3g calling made me miss out on a lot of detail and intonation. I'm just glad I get to experience this call quality with non-technically inclined friends before I go completely deaf.
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.
VoIP systems negotiate codec choice on call initiation, generally using a "best common denominator" rule. Even when only companded PCM is available (PCM-a, PCM-µ), 64kbps will be used since it's the universal norm on the TDM (conventional) telephone newtwork. Unfortunately, as a capacity measure GSM specifies very low bitrates for voice connections, as low as 5kbps in the worst case and 10-20kbps typical. This requires the use of high-efficiency vocoders like CELP variants that are sufficient for intelligible speech but, well, only for that purpose.
"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.
You're calling the wrong people, or people on the wrong networks. I am on Verizon, and certainly if I call another Verizon customer (and I'm pretty sure if I call another carrier), it sounds as clear as if we were in the same room, as good as FaceTime audio or any other high fidelity voice system. You may just not realize it until you call someone else and compare, or hear someone move from their car's older Bluetooth system to cellular when they get out of the car (or headphones, etc), but voice quality has definitely improved to the point of not needing to improve further.
The bitrate can be way higher, but the latency is often much worse these days. It's high enough on most calls that I just don't like talking on the phone anymore and I think it's because of the latency.
"The mic and speaker in the 90s Iskra payphones are far superior"
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 converted an old rotary phone into a mobile phone (https://www.stavros.io/posts/irotary-saga/), and the quality is much better than a mobile. Even just the sidetone makes it SO much better to talk on.
I have no idea why modern mobile phones have no (or very low volume?) sidetone. It makes the UX orders of magnitude better.
Yes, sidetone (hearing your own voice through the handset) makes all the difference! I'm not exactly sure why, but I find it so much easier to talk on the phone when there's a sidetone. In general, for me, talking on the phone is like talking into the void, and sidetone at least gives me the assurance that, yes, it's still working. Like the little inset video feed of yourself when you're on a Skype call.
Hmm, probably not, actually, that's a good idea. It was one of my first projects, so I didn't really know what I was doing, which limited how much I could do.
> That's a really awesome story with a great opening, middle, and especially the end, if one ignores the adolescent fraud.
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.
I am not sure credit card fraud is innocent pranks or misbehavior... I can tell you with certainty that most teenagers have never committed that sort of crimes tbh.
If we’re talking about the AOHell era of the mid 90s then I have anecdotal evidence that the majority of kids I knew were committing some kind of wire fraud in exchange for internet access!
Credit card fraud was really common in the 80 among "hacker" types.
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.
Late 1980 was when criminality was going up and right before its peak. It is quite lower now ... and people who were teenagers in late 1980 are almost 60 now.
All credit card fraud is not created equal. He didn't steal any physical goods, nor did he steal anyone's credit card. He stole some hours of internet connection, which probably didn't cost the ISP that much. Not saying it is totally fine, but it really isn't that bad.
In the grand scheme of things, what he did is hardly the end of the world.
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.
In the hacker ethos, gaining access to systems is in no way unethical or deserving of remorse. The hack in this case was (1) exploiting the ISP’s delayed batch processing of credit card orders, and (2) circumventing their deny list of callback phone numbers.
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.
> 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.
Sure, but imagine a kid 16, reading 2600, figuring things out. Trying to get access to the best tool for figuring things out.
I think a lot of people transgressed at that age. I, for one, benefitted from being granted a bit of leeway. My transgressions actually taught me to not WANT to break the law which I think is better than just not breaking the law because that’s what’s expected and one has never considered the alternative.
I wrote my first ever (and last) virus for the Archimedes...
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 infectio...
> 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.
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.
Going through the grueling immigration process, Homeland Security eventually sits across the table from you, looks you in the eye, and asks "have you ever committed a crime for which you have not been convicted?"
I doubt there's a single person alive who could answer "no" to that question with certainty and still be telling the truth. What is the purpose of a question like that?
It's malevalent question - most people don't even know the names of all crimes that exist - let alone defences avaliable and how they all work togetehr.
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'.
Exactly. It bothers me every day. It defines much of my self-image in being present in the US. I was confronted with that question in my citizenship interview, and more recently in my global entry interview. I know of many others who have been asked the same thing. I'm thinking "heck I drove 9% over the speed limit driving to this interview. They probably know that. When I parked the car, I jay-walked across the empty street into the building. They have that on video!". If I say no, if I say yes, either way I have committed perjury. All just because I wanted my slice of the American dream. I had a friend (deceased) who was a federal agent. He explained to me years ago that the US code is intentionally drafted so that EVERYONE is a criminal (sorry @ClumsyPilot, a "suspect"). If you are in compliance with one section of code you are automatically in violation of another. If the 3-letter agency wants to get you, they can ALWAYS get you. I'm not sure that I believe that. I'm not sure I want to believe that. But he certainly believed that.
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?
I believe the reason technology could spark so much joy for a young mind back a few dozen years back is more that it was much simpler rather than "it just worked".
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.
> but there's just something about today's Internet and a lot of the overwhelming amount of technology that just isn't fun or memorable.
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.
> 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.
Or average Joe Teenager installs a Linux distribution, which then provides bash, perl, awk, Python, C, C++, often Tcl/Tk, etc. and usually includes one or more editors for creating source files. All without "pull[ing] in hundreds of NPM dependencies from shady places"
That's a lot of work just to show a "hello world".
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.
What about the kids in school districts that issue locked-down Chromebooks? They probably can't even do that!
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.
In the past you couldn't upgrade the memory in your C64, now you can open the case on any desktop and put in different RAM. Laptops are sometimes upgradable as well. The raspberry pi even comes as a bare board for hacking on.
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.
I think the technology itself is 100x better in just about every way(Except for pure novelty, smartphones largely killed true gadgets)
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".
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.
Not just infinite information but “legitimate” information that directly conflicts with other interpretations of the same thing.
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”
For those of us who still embrace RSS and try to avoid the clickbait and social media, please create a basic website. The more of those basic sites we have, the more people will avoid social media to some extent.
I have a lot of the same nostalgia, but so much of this story is that necessity is the mother of invention.
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 :)
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.
Survivorship bias I think is at play here (especially with our own memories being infallible). I also remember a TON of shit being a pain in the ass and not working well at all.
> part of the tragedy is that a lot of technology that worked well has been replaced by "better" technology that doesn't work well.
I am 100% convinced that '80's era landlines had superior sound quality to today's cellphones by any manufacturer. I went out of my way to get a Samsung Note that ostensibly supports some high-quality sound when communicating with another device that supports whatever this profile is called, but all conversations are streams of "what? say again?".
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.
I think the ISP didn't ask for an address. Back then I doubt credit card companies were doing address verification, at least for lower-value purchases. (The infrastructure probably didn't exist.)
This is a different era of ISP. He was not signing up to have fiber installed to his house or whatever (which was not a thing back then), he was signing up to be able to call out to an ISP's server with his modem and get on the Internet from there. So the only thing the ISP knew about him was a username, password and fake billing details, and since the ISP was presumably not a telco, they could also not tell where the call was coming from.
Wow this brings back memories. I stayed at a high school hostel, and and remember calling the high school sweethearts after 9pm, when they had super cheap fares. 9 minutes for an equivalent of $0.02.
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.
> > Have you ever used a payphone and thought to yourself, “That would be a great novelty idea for the pool room, family room, or office. What a conversation piece”.
> Why yes, payphone.com, yes I have.
This had me rolling but it's also a great example of knowing your niche target audience.
I love it that he uses the payphone to talk to his daughter's phone in her room... or rather that she uses her phone to call him ;) I also just set up a private phone network in my house, and my daughter can also call my room, from her bedroom. But it spiraled very quickly into something more evolved & more fun.
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 t...
Thanks for sharing. This is exactly what I want to do once I get a house. First just room to room calling with extensions, and then possibly outgoing for fun. It’s good to know the actual hardware isn’t expensive and it can support analog. And lots of fun old school phones to choose from.
This is incredible! I want to set this up now. I don't suppose you have a more detailed write-up? Or is this a "setting this up is left as an exercise for the reader" situation?
My grandfather once built a phone line simulator you could connect up to 8 or 10 phones to and actually dial them by a one-digit number. I think he got the schematics from some old electronics magazine. Definitely one of the coolest „toys“ I ever got as a kid.
In the olden days (up to about the mid-1990s!) the island of Canna off the west coast of Scotland that had a ten-subscriber phone exchange where you could dial any number on the island with a single digit. You could only make one call at a time off the island, via a VHF link on around 80MHz to the telephone exchange in Mallaig about 25 miles away.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 271 ms ] threadedit: not one of you asked "which one's the good one".. I rest my case.
https://m.xkcd.com/566/
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.
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.
Personally I’d go with a specialist/approved company such as x2connect.
https://www.google.com/maps/@55.9164681,-3.1675508,3a,15y,27...
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.:
If you were sweeping a PAN range for live numbers, you'd start with a known-valid BIN, probably 6 or 8 digits. Then randomly choose the next 9 (or 7) digits, and then calculate the check digit.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.
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.
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".
Check out any history of phreaking [0]
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_box
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
The unexpected screenshot of the LORD intro ascii art was a blast from the past.
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! :)
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
In my mind I thought that pay phones were fully automated, especially the count the money part.
https://www.reddit.com/r/seinfeld/comments/4chcmp/seinfeld_e...
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.
I’d try to make one myself if I wasn’t so good at killing hardware.
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.
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.
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.
the highs of an exploit working or a bypass make drugs look like candy.
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.
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.
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 infectio...
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.
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'.
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.
That's called projection.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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".
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
> Why yes, payphone.com, yes I have.
This had me rolling but it's also a great example of knowing your niche target audience.
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.
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 t...