2600.network Dialup Service

Lots of fun history around 2600Hz for those too young to remember or not part of the phreaking crowd, a fairly extinct form of hacker these days.

A phreaker going by Joybubbles was the first to exploit the tone by whistling. Later, a toy whistle in a cereal box was found to be able to produce the tone, leading to further exploit by John Draper, aka, Cap'n Crunch.

You can 3D print the whistle these days for a bit of nostalgia.

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2630646

Is this where the name of the zine came from, I guess?

It was also the inspirational name behind a multitude of “hacker” (really more like tinker) communities back around the millennium. I’m not sure where these went, maybe they were killed by social media, but there used to be a lot of 2600 named tinker group for technology “nerds” here in Scandinavia. I guess what happened was the same thing which happened for me, people got older and stopped “hanging-out”, but I wonder where younger technology “nerds” go today. I think that it’s really interesting that the whole, very anarchistic mentality, which later spawned things like Anonymous doesn’t seem to have caught on with the younger generations even though they are even more oppressed and left behind by the current western economies and governments than my “generation” was. Most of it is still run by the people from that period who are now all 40+.

Anyway, I assume these as well as the tone are also a strong inspiration for the name.

2600 Hz is a common handshake tone used in telco

WAS not IS. It was phased out sometime in the 80s.

I've wondered if the Atari 2600 was named such in reference to that, and online searches seem to confirm that it was.

It was used to signal the status of Trunk lines, specifically if they were in use or open/available. By blowing a 2600 tone at the right time, you could seize the trunk and reroute the call.

I miss those days. Crawling in dumpsters at the local CO, staying up until 5a, on a school night, because you'd just discovered something really, really cool.

2600:: is also an easy to remember IPv6 address for a ping connectivity check, it reverses to www.sprint.net, part of cogent now.

FYI - 2600 Hz is a common handshake tone used in telco.

Was a common supervision tone used by the NA toll network prior to the introduction of SS7. Also practically everyone here knows (or ought to) that already, given that Jobs and Woz dabbled in making Blue Boxes for profit, and Blue Boxes produced 2600hz (along with the set of MF tones used to encode numbers). The fact you posted your redundant FYI with a mobile wikipedia link (phoneposting) is even more egregious.

No firewall rules, no unintentional leakage, no accidental logins

No guarantee that the box won't poke for ways to break out either, or was there a pinky promise? I guess it was somewhat easy to disguise it, the search box is supposed to constantly poke around and index things, right?

Sometime around 1999/2000ish, I built a sort of distributed database application. Early web app days, Perl and PostgreSQL on FreeBSD, and almost no JavaScript. It was for fairly sensitive data that the users were a bit squirrely about sharing, so the idea was that you stored all of the bits you owned on your local node, and you could send a remote query to the whole network and each node would execute it, notify the local owner of the data "hey, Sally wants a copy of this record", and they could choose whether or not to send it back.

Some of these installations were located in the middle of nowhere, and in those days we couldn't count on Internet access of any kind. But the company happened to also own a dial-up ISP... so I came up with a system, which I'm kind of proud of even though it was quick a hack. We ended up piggybacking the whole thing on dial-up e-mail using GPG-encrypted attachments. A couple of times a day, each node would call into the ISP and do a standard POP3 and SMTP routine, processing incoming requests and dropping off outgoing ones. Because it wasn't important for it to be real-time, we made the whole thing work asynchronously with the customer only having to supply a phone line.

Corporate datacenters are still quite common.

I had one of those boxes, worked for a company that ran news and magazine publishing sites and we pushed all the data to them as opposed to rewriting our search on the sites.. they were pretty decent and seemed to also help our page rankings on the mothersite ;)

This isn’t as uncommon as you’d think. AWS’s storage gateway, which is a caching NFS layer over S3, has a diagnostic mode which starts a reverse shell over 22/tcp.

Image of the box: https://www.wired.com/2012/10/google-search-appliance/

Erm - so as soon as it dials out, it could give a non-firewalled access to LAN, no? Maybe they also disconnected ethernet while connecting the phone cable, but not sure how effective they can diagnose a problem without the network in place.

Dial up as a part of an appliance was a fairly established pattern. I remember working with IBM in 2007 and they had a tool for a fair number of products that was just about dialing in to a terminal. However, I don't think it dialed back to IBM - people just used the terminal over dialup.

I remember interviewing for Google circa 2010 and they asked me to present on "How does Google make money?". At the time I went with "well aside from ads you have this funky search appliance" and I hoped that they'd find more non-ad ways to make money. They didn't hire me, but it seemed like a neat device.

POTS is/was a requirement for remote/out of band access to AT&T network gear as well. I did run into a funny thing when they started to migrate T1/PRI's to fiber. They still insisted that they needed a dedicated POTS line but converted the underlying copper circuits to a single fiber circuit. I was able to work around this with a phone line adapter but if the underlying fiber circuit was down they would be screwed.

Could you theoretically use an analog modem (or worst case an acoustic coupler) over IMS (VoLTE etc., which should all have at least some QoS), or are the jitter rates and codecs too bad for that (like they often are for Fax over VoIP on fixed lines)?

I wonder if some of the networks that are continuing to offer GSM (usually via some core network emulations, as far as I understand, to make it more compatible with modern core networks) have already broken CSD for similar reasons.

Early digital lines were purely circuit switched and didn’t add any jitter (unlike modern VoIP based “lines”), so there shouldn’t have been any problems running analog or digital fax over these.

V.34 was mostly a speed improvement, as far as I remember, no?

If you can run g.711 for your codec, things should work ok, depending on your jitter... g.711 is the digital calling code from 1972 that telcos used for T1/E1. On voip, it's packetized into 20ms bursts rather than multiplexed one sample at a time.

If you use one of the newer predictive voice codecs, expect a lot less success, but maybe moving to older/slower modem speeds will help.

If you have an ATA like a Cisco SPA122 , Linksys or Polycom 302, then you should be able to get between 2400 and 14,400 baud speeds; you will have to try different speeds.

Faxes routinely get 9600 and 14,400 speeds over these ATAs; it helps a great deal if your coded is G711 which is an uncompressed codec (it is u-law PCM in the USA; PCM is just like the bits recorded on a music CD, but at a much lower bitrate).

Quite well. I wrote a blog post about this a few years back: https://frank.petril.li/posts/dialup-adventures-1/

You could possibly use tethering to your mobile phone in some way, although I'm unsure, I'm just throwing an idea out there.

I mean, the site itself notes:

> Don't want to pay for a landline? No worries! You don't have to! Using an Analog Telephone Adapter, you can dial in to 2600.network. The ATA will give you analog service from a SIP VoIP provider.

So presumably, acquire an adapter and hook it up to some VoIP setup?

https://stirfriedpixels.wordpress.com/2014/11/07/on-homemade...

Typically BBS's were single user systems, although many multiuser systems existed too.

It’s just text interface like running a program on a terminal, just the program runs on the remote computer. Much like a telnet session, with some primitives to transfer files.

google a "telnet BBS" and see for yourself. the experience is the same, especially if you can set up a 1200 BPS serial connection.

AIUI, I'm myself way below BBS age too, I believe you sign in to a shell program to someone else's *nix box that offers BBS features. The shell that spawns at the remote side is a stripped down ncurses program rather than being /bin/bash.

The program allows narrow range of actions such as `ls /var/bbs/threads/`, `cat /var/bbs/threads/$1`, or `cat | sed -e s/^/\n$(whoami),$(date)\twrote:/ >> /var/bbs/threads/$1.txt`. The grumpy neckbeards with accounts on the remote system would have extensive secret sauce for `/usr/bin/expect` that can aggregate changes for each file so they can catch up to the latest flamewars happening there, while it wouldn't be a requirement to be explained how far away you are on spectrum, or something along that.

idk. More than happy to be corrected.

All the data is digital (in case of BBS, mostly text, although file transfers are also possible). The analogue phone line is only used for transmitting digital data over the analogue medium. The dial-up modem converts the digital data to an analogue voice signal at the transmitting end and back from analogue to digital at the receiving end. (That's what a modem is: a modulator-demodulator.)

So no, you don't interact with a BBS by speech.

Orinoco Gold! I switched to passive Atheros when they ended up in netbooks, but I probably still have my scancat equipment somewhere.

You should also check out Phrack Magazine (an online distributed ezine that is still active, albeit with years between issues - they also have a 2024 call for writers though!) at phrack.org

Another older print publication was Blacklisted! 411, very similar format to 2600. I attended some meetups from both of these back in the day.

An absolutely fantastic publication, nice to see it still going.

If you can find it there's a 1000 page hardback compendium of some of the best articles available too.

2600 Hz was a frequency used as a control tone by the old telephone switches.

Basically the old telephone switches would communicate with each other by sending different frequency tones or tone pairs to execute different commands, and 2600 Hz was the tone send to indicate that a call had ended. 2600 Hz was the first of these control frequencies discovered by phone phreaks back in the day and kicked off the whole phreaking scene, and so 2600 became a shorthand for phone phreaking

The old school phone network used in-band signaling for call setup/control. If you made long distance calls pre-90s you might remember tones after the call started connecting as an example. One of the most significant frequencies in that control setup was 2600hz (which disconnected the call in progress and left you with an open tandem trunk, giving full access to call routing functionality), made infamous by Blue Boxes, Captain Crunch, and the magazine of the same name.

Just to clarify, they are from the early days, but they are also from the now days. They are still publishing. A link to their official site is in the above Wikipedia article.