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Topic: Interesting phone phreaking idea

The phone's ringer is a pretty simple thing: there's a coil, a magnet and a hammer controlled by the magnet that hits the gongs when there is AC current in the coil. The ringer system is connected directly to the phone line when the phone is on hook. (Actually through a capacitor that protects the ringer system from DC current normally present in the line.)

If you haven't figured yet, the coil with the hammer is a speaker, not a perfect one, but a speaker anyway, and that also means that the system can be used as an electrodynamic microphone. Any ordinary speaker is an electrodynamic microphone at the same time, if you hook it up to an audio amplifier using normal microphone input.
http://melikyan.blogspot.com/2010/01/er … boxes.html

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Re: Interesting phone phreaking idea

curios, anyone has any comments on this?

I am a veggie coz I hate plants. I am a non-veggie coz I hate animals and I am a cannibal because I hate humans. :-)
  • From: Israel
  • Registered: 2002-10-13
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Re: Interesting phone phreaking idea

The phone idea itself is, without any doubt, awesome. And the guy does have a point when it comes to modern technology, but it doesn't come as a surprise. We all knew that. I dare anyone to even try to figure out what's going inside an intel processor. The processes that happen in there are so complicated that my guess that even at intel, there is no one that understands the whole thing. Hell, probably not even a decent chunk of the whole thing.

Science advances in an exponential paste, the more we know - the more we learn.  Some of the shit invented today is so complicated that it took hundreds if not thousands of people, each with his own specialty to create it. Even before the legal contracts and EULAs, how does he think a guy can reverse engineer a processor?
The time of the one or two guys sitting in a basement and creating a revolutionary product are over . Well, at least in the field of electronics.

Last edited by Cygnum (2010-01-20 09:00:36)

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Re: Interesting phone phreaking idea

Cygnum wrote:

The phone idea itself is, without any doubt, awesome. And the guy does have a point when it comes to modern technology, but it doesn't come as a surprise. We all knew that. I dare anyone to even try to figure out what's going inside an intel processor. The processes that happen in there are so complicated that my guess that even at intel, there is no one that understands the whole thing. Hell, probably not even a decent chunk of the whole thing.

Not only that, bugs in the processor can have disastrous consequences.

Bug Attacks
Abstract. In this paper we present a new kind of cryptanalytic attack
which utilizes bugs in the hardware implementation of computer instructions.
The best known example of such a bug is the Intel division bug,
which resulted in slightly inaccurate results for extremely rare inputs.
Whereas in most applications such bugs can be viewed as a minor nuisance,
we show that in the case of RSA (even when protected by OAEP),
Pohlig-Hellman, elliptic curve cryptography, and several other schemes,
such bugs can be a security disaster: Decrypting ciphertexts on any computer
whichmultiplies even one pair of numbers incorrectly can lead to full
leakage of the secret key, sometimes with a single well-chosen ciphertext.


Full Paper: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.893/2009/re … ttacks.pdf

I am a veggie coz I hate plants. I am a non-veggie coz I hate animals and I am a cannibal because I hate humans. :-)
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Re: Interesting phone phreaking idea

I doubt that the true handset microphone on the other end was completely cut off when the phone was hung up, it's a simple modification. The KGB would not have been using the ringer as a microphone, like he said you would have to scream into it just to get a weak signal. Anything that vibrates can be used as a microphone, I think I read somewhere about someone making a lamp into a eally shitty microphone. The main problem is that the quality is beyond poor. It's a nice story though, then again so is Pinochio.

His thing about black boxes is interesting though, but slightly flawed he states: 

conspiracy theory dude wrote:

Not only because billions of transistors which are inside, or millions of lines of source code are probably beyond my comprehension even if I spent months and years studying them - not only that. The strangest thing is that I have no legal right to do it.

that is wrong, you can buy it and disassemble it to the Nth degree, what you can't do is take what you learned and make another product.

"It's not stupid, it's advanced." -Space Invader Zim

"Possum non errare, falli, decipi." -Nostradamus