Why radio receivers won’t tune 800-900 MHz (opens in new tab)

That was super fascinating. I had no idea these existed.

People are getting automated messages of Mozilla Mac builds being complete during the disaster.

I was 16 when this happened so I had no idea pagers were used like this. Sort of how push messages or chatops is used today. To aide developers or ops people with notifications.

> 2001-09-12 00:26:08 Metrocall [0134738] A ALPHA Frm: MSN Txt: Hotmail TheFreeStuffNews.com:Take a 5 minute Survey to Win $1,000!

I see that spam was alive and well back then

Lots of reboot NT machine and other IT looking pages. I feel sorry for those sys admins.

What is this?

There are some smart home devices that use DECT Ultra Low Energy to communicate with their base station. It's a pretty cool tech because DECT uses its own frequency band and doesn't interfere with bluetooth or wifi in the often highly congested 2.4 and 5 GHz bands. Even firmware updates are possible because the bandwidth is large enough to push some megabytes through.

"Let's see, my crystal radio only has this one diode but it can only receive AM. I bet if I cut it I can hear everything!"

At 15 cents per diode I don't think that would be a particularly expensive fix or worth throwing out an otherwise perfectly good scanner for.

Not a coincidence! I read this and wanted to share my two cents. Having recently mentioned the upper end of the old TV band didn't hurt, either.

I had a family member who used to listen in on phone calls on a modifed scanner (early 1990s). They commented that the conversations tended to follow a predictable pattern, correlating with basic human needs, as the day progressed.

Daytime: Money. People complaining about not having enough money, not being able to pay their bills (while talking on a $1000 cell phone and paying a per-minute charge).

Early evening: Food. "What are we going to eat tonight?" "Will you stop at the grocery store and pick up ___?" "What do you want for dinner?"

Night: Sex [use your imagination here]

Not op, but fun story to share.

The year was 1999, I had befriended a strange group of friends from an IRC support channel. We all lived within 250 miles of each other and one day decided to have a gathering with about 6-7 randoms from the channel. Hilarity ensued as we played games of command and conquer, Starcraft, and Serious Sam. I was yelled at for saturating the 1.5mbps SDSL line with my webcam, streaming views to our friends who were too far to drive in. Someone else was eating aluminum soda cans. At one point one guy happened to login and said “wait you guys are having a LAN party? I’ll hop on the PATH and be right there”. Then my life changed in front of my eyes.

In walks this dude that looked like he came straight out of Hackers. We all dap up and continue talking about random nerd things. The conversation goes to cell phones and how the fcc passed this law which OP talks about. Surprise someone has a grandfathered scanner that could scan 800-900mhz. Dude that showed up starts talking about how he knows a guy that knows a guy that took his code and runs an elaborate carding net. Dude then whips out a demodulator app that he wrote that takes beeper signals from the scanner audio and decodes it to text. He tells us we can pull livery and taxi beeper codes because they text headquarters with the credit card numbers on pickups. Then his app does it. One guy holding the scanner at an angle to one of those bend/squiggly microphones that were ubiquitous in the AOL era. Modem like beeping screeching through the air. Then messages and credit card numbers start streaming through this dudes app. The entire room does a collective holy s#%^ mainly because we can’t believe this would be streaming in “broad daylight” across the Hudson.

He went on to explain how he got into hacking almost just like in the movie Hackers. Dude was brilliant and got recruited into hacking groups as a programmer when he was 13. He was writing stuff like this for 5 years. We think we had crossed paths at some point because I was deep in the demo scene and wrote patches for hacking groups.. but that day blew my mind about how security through obscurity worked and led me down a black hat path that switched to white hat in the early 2000s

I once overheard a phone interview for a position so interesting that I wanted to apply for it myself.

The answer to "How did you hear about our company?" would not have gone well. :-)

When analog TV's with UHF were still a thing, I could rotate the UHF dial all the way to the top of the band and just begin to hear the unencrypted analog cell phones. Crazy.

Lots of similar stuff in the book The Best of 2600

Back when i was in high school in the late 90s/early 2000s there was a website, i think called cellphonescanner (.) com that had a realmedia stream to listen to analog cell conversations around NYC and Toronto or something like that. It was great entertainment.

One of my friends who was a huge scanner fan (did you know they had their own magazine?) worked in a boring mundane part of his family's business. Most of his day was spent waiting around for two or three loads of paperwork to come in to be filed. It was a make-work type of job to keep him employed and out of trouble. What he did most of his day was listen to the scanner. Mostly police and fire calls but he did modify the scanner to pick up cell calls. Most were short but there was a two hour long call that the radio tuned to one day I was visiting. Given the price of cell calls in the mid 90s, especially during daytime, this was highly unusual.

The call was a professor at the local state university talking to a woman whose identity I was not able to determine. Almost the entire conversation was about how much he hated Palestinians. That they were subhuman and should be wiped out. I grew up in the South and had heard hateful things before but this was the first time I heard someone advocate for genocide so openly. That conversation has stuck with me ever since, making me wonder what's going on in people's minds that they keep hidden from the public.

At one point in the conversation the woman asked if he was on a cell phone and if anyone could overhear them. Despite there being no way of them knowing we were listening, it still caused my hair to stand on end. He said it was unlikely. The quality of the signal didn't waver during the call and was strong the entire time was he probably was stationary nearby. So very odd that he didn't call using a landline given the cost of such a cell call.

Honestly I never heard anything interesting on either analog cell phones or cordless phones. Messing with drive-thru intercoms with our modified Icom W2-As was a hell of a lot more fun.

Reminds me a lot of reading old GameFAQs guides

I thought those were typos, accidental line breaks.

I think I did use Kuro5hin for a time, but if you have seen my writing elsewhere it is most likely LWN or some miscellaneous technical training vendors, both of which I contributed to for a while before my life got a little crazy. I'm actually currently getting back into freelance writing, so while I have fifteen minutes of fame... my first passion before technology was writing and teaching, and I write and develop training on technical topics I am interested in (there's a number of them). Contact info in my profile.

It’s not really “fine” it’s just “not quite as bad as some others”.

Yeah.

Let's put it this way: OKI900's and all that were around before 1992. And that phone was favoured because you could easily reprogram the ESN/NAM/MIN for cloning as well as turn it into a scanner by turning on it's speaker and had control of the frequency. It was a modder's dream to hack on. But the same could be done with Motorola phones with a few more button presses.

That was 1992.

1997: AMPS system is waning against D-AMPS and even that is getting pressure from a new standard - GSM - which is also digital and ENCRYPTED. Newt gets caught and to show what a great prick him and Bill Clinton were, they passed a law that was obsolete before it was even passed into law.

https://www.wired.com/1997/11/ears-of-the-airwaves/

---

This is why the election system, process of creating lawmakers (congress) as well as judicial system is retarded. The time lag doesn't stop the flash pan crime trends nor does it do anything to improve the situation due to the abuse of absurd laws like this one. This law is rendered null and void by technology long before it was ever enacted...

The 1990's were big on passing a metric fuckton of laws impacting technology as that is when most of the people started getting "online" as it were.

Wargames came out in 1984. It took about 2 years for there to be a law against computer intrusion (hacking). 18 USC 1030. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act

But it got most of it's teeth in the 90's. Newt and Bill pretty much ran the 90's. Along with Janet Reno and the rest of them. People may have happy memories of the 90's but for "hackers", it was a terrible time as people were passing bad laws with little info. It's only gotten marginally better over time due to people gaining better comprehension of technology - yet somehow we haven't caught up with our own privacy invasions as a whole. (ie: GDPR and data collection)

Signed into law by someone else.

Note that the rules require GPS receivers not to work when above 60,000ft AND at a speed higher than 1000kt. Some manufacturers made that an OR, but that's not required.

You're very very unlikely to ever make it above 60,000ft at a speed faster than 1000kt unless you own a fighter jet.

Yes. lol.

I worked for a chopper factory in the UK back in the day. We had Novell servers. NetWare CAs back then did as they were told and would only offer rubbish encryption. We used it for throwaway stuff and manually cranked out certs with OpenSSL for important stuff. We also watched firewall logs ...

Yep. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/56-bit_encryption

A large portion of SDRs have no FCC equipment authorization at all, and so don't necessarily comply with regulations---including the lack of an AMPS lockout. This makes them a little bit iffy for sale in the US, but there is generally a rule that allows "test equipment" to be sold without equipment authorization under certain conditions on its use. I (not being an expert on this, I am not a lawyer, etc) would describe most hobby SDR use as being a gray area, but one that is probably not of too great concern since most hobby SDRs on the market are receive-only and obviously these weird part 15 rules about scanning receivers don't really matter in the modern age.

SDR transceivers like the HackRF are probably still not being purchased by people who will cause any trouble, but I do worry a little bit more about unintentional disruption of important radio applications like aviation navaids or whatever. If I were to take a policy angle here, I think it might be a good idea to restrict such devices to people with amateur radio licenses since they are not especially hard to obtain (DE AE5JL). I'm sure there's a thousand people here who would vehemently disagree with me on that though.

SDRs don't have the 800Mhz restrictions.

Now, not only does someone not need to be actively listening, they don't even need to save the audio. Just convert it to text, keep it indexed and whatever three letter agency is doing the tapping has an easily searchable record of your communications should they ever feel the need to look into you without you knowing.

Many years ago, I worked for a guy who regularly monitored mobile phone frequencies and recorded conversations. He wrote screenplays and used the recordings for dialog study. At least that was what he claimed.

Our baby monitor uses DECT - it's basically a cordless telephone. While I wouldn't expect it to be encrypted to any significant degree, in most cases a baby monitor is either broadcasting silence with a little background room noise, or it's turned off. Once a monitor starts broadcasting noise, a parent intervenes.

You'd be wrong if you think that. We're all using Uniden SD200

See: https://www.bearcatwarehouse.com/Trunking

I went hogwild with this at the beginning of the RTLSDR era of SDR. I just started picking it back up after getting some better hardware and was kind of bummed at how little the quality of the voice decoding has progressed despite what appears to be a ton of energy invested.

If I recall correctly some of it is licensed and/or patented and people are just having to reverse engineer the protocols. I’d pay for a commercial demodulator to snap in.

"GOOD TIMING!"

My friends and I used to get piles of old Okis at First Saturday in Dallas. We'd leave Austin at midnight and drive 3 hours to get all the pre-dawn good deals. I remember we got a hold of some mobile data terminals and tranceivers too, though we never quite got around to the mischief we dreamed of using them for. POCSAG decoding was another good time. Ah, to be young again!

Well I really hope people aren't using video erotica while driving!

Here's what I get. 1980s BBSs didn't have wrapping this bad unless you were quoting.

  To start: yes, long time no see. Well, COVID-19 has been like
  that. Some days I
  feel accomplished if I successfully check my email. I finally
  managed to clear
  out a backlog of an entire handfull of things that needed
  thoughtful responses,
  though, and so here I am, screaming into the void instead of at
  anyone in
  particular.

I've read plenty of technical papers that have interesting ideas buried in tons of bad prose. Holding the interestingness of the central idea fixed, there is no limit to how boring a writer can make things.

In general, I don't understand why blogs (and HN) are allergic to abstracts.