Hack45.Generate Dial Tones
Hack 45. Generate Dial Tones
Use your PSP to dial telephone numbers. Since your PSP is a fully capable MP3 player, you can also use it to play back the different tones used by the telephone system to dial numbers. All you need to do is get your hands on some MP3s or WAVs of these audio files and either keep them in a folder inside your /PSP/MUSIC/ folder, or string them together into sequences of numbers to be dialed. Consider taking the complete numbers of your different friends and recording this sequence of tones as an MP3 file by the name of each friend. This way, whenever you want to dial your friend, just navigate to the MP3 called "Billy 555-555-5555" on your PSP and hit the X button to play the audio either through the PSP's speakers or the headphones that you hold up to a phone receiver. 5.6.1. Charting the TonesNow that we're in the 21st century, this trick won't always work, since the telephone system has changed somewhat, with more digital bits in the way that prevent dialing by tone. Nevertheless, given the right combination of a public pay phone on an older phone system, you should be able to use your PSP to dial a few numbers over a compatible touch-tone phone via DTMF (Dual Tone Multiple Frequency) tones. Table 5-1 shows the combined tones that make up the touch-tone dialing system. The four alphabet keys are sometimes used internally by the phone system. Table 5-2 shows what you'd use on an international system that supports CCITT.
If you don't want to spend quite a bit of time holding a microphone carefully up to your phone to record the proper dial tones, you can find sample audio files for most of these tones online. Search and you will find. You can easily find all the DTMF tones and CCITT tones. Alternately, you can generate audio files for the numbers you will be dialing, using DialABC.com's Generate DTMF Tones service (http://www.dialabc.com/sound/generate). Once you load all the proper tones needed in your PSP, all you have to do is find a public pay phone that will accept the tones. If you've created a complete string of numbers ready for dialing, using the previously mentioned Generate DTMF Tones service, or if you spent a lot of time (in an audio program like Audacity, Acid, or GarageBand) arranging the different individual tones in the correct order and converting them to MP3, you can simply turn up the PSP's volume to the max, hold your headphones or the PSP's speakers up to the receiver, and click Play to dial the number. This could be an effective way of keeping your address book [Hack #35] on your PSP. Another option would be to have all the relevant DTMF numbers saved into a particular folder on your PSP with a few extra seconds at the end of each file, or a separate file that is a few seconds of silence. Then, whenever you encounter a particularly dirty-keyed public phone that you don't want to touch, simply "play" the number you want to dial by mixing and matching the corresponding number files in the correct order. Hold the headphones up to the receiver and press the X button to play each tone, pause the tone, and then switch to the next tone you need to play. Theoretically, under the right circumstances, these methods should work; however, the phone system keeps changing and updating, frequencies are slightly different for different areas, and different model pay phones react differently to different tones, so the corresponding tones continue to change as well. 5.6.2. Hacking the HackThere are certain aspects of this hack that could get you into trouble depending on how you use them, and it's your responsibility to make sure you don't violate any applicable laws. Since this hack is a direct descendant of early hacker activities, I'm going to walk you through a basic history of phreaking. Besides, what can it hurt, considering that this entire hack will be irrelevant once the last analog pay phone dies, everything moves to digital, and we all communicate via VoIP rather than over traditional analog phone systems? Not to mention the implants that will allow us to communicate with others simply by subvocalizing. 5.6.2.1. An overly concise (and therefore inaccurate) history of phreaking.In the 1970s, there was a blind boy who could whistle a 2600-cycle tone. He discovered that if he whistled this note into a phone, he could make long-distance calls for free. Someone else discovered that a toy whistle included with Cap'n Crunch cereal boxes also produced a 2600-cycle tone. This tone was the same used by the post-live-operator phone company to access the system that controlled the network. This 2600-cycle tone unlocked the ability to make free long-distance calls, and phreaking (etymology: a mashed remix of freak + phone + free) was born. It was one of the earliest forms of hacking, and two of the 1337 early hackers and phreakers from the Homebrew Computer Club in California, infamous for building Blue Boxes, went by the handles Berkeley Blue and Oak Toebark. You are probably more familiar with them as the two Steves: Jobs and Wozniak, the founders of Apple Computer. Here are some definitions related to this topic:
If you want to find out more information about phreaking, you will need to spend a lot of time online researching which sounds do what and under what systems, and find out as much as you can about the internal workings of the phone system. Start with Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phreaking). But, hey, we all know the easiest form of hacking is social hacking. Make friends with someone who works for the phone company, show some interest in his job, ask lots of questions, and buy him a few beers. You never know what useful bits you might discover. |
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