I broke IKEA (2023) (opens in new tab)

Back when international phone calls were a real thing, messing with answering machines that had default settings was a typical fraud vector. People would change the message to say 'I accept' a couple dozen times. Then, they'd lace a collect call with a third party payer, pointed at said answering machine... which accepted the charges. Just not best done from one's home phone, as sufficient charges pointing to the same number would risk attention.

This is basically what Rupert Murdoch did throughout the late 90’s and into the 00’s, minus the message changes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_International_phone_hacki...

I remember there was a KDE application for KDE 1.44 allowing the same. It was called Kphreak, or something like that. This was end 90s.

I know! I thought all the jibberish was just to be silly, but no, it visually looks like the wave forms of the audio.

You can hear the windows XP message box sound right before that. Which surprises in two ways: a) they're still using windows XP (ok well we still do too at work for some appliance from the power company). b) it seems you're not hooked into the machine via some modem or virtual-something over lan, but something that connects to the sound card, otherwise I've no idea how system sounds that always play on the default card would end up in the phone call. That means there's one machine handling one call at a time.

There may be secrets in that audio - actual passwords and whatnot.

It’s really impressive how overbroad and subjective the cohost terms of service are with regards to what you’re allowed to post on your own site.

Why does every microblogging platform now feel compelled to insert moral and social commentary in their site rules? What happened to the poster being responsible for the things that they post? We don’t blame the telephone company when people say bad things on phone calls.

I dig the aesthetics of that website.

From a comment on the blog post:

> iirc it's generated from a script in asterisk, with the delay and tone durations set "short" (I think it was the minimum EIA/TIA DTMF mark/space numbers, not sure.)

> My phone system was Google Voice, through an SIP bridge with Obihai (now defunct/discontinued). Asterisk then made the SIP connection and rang my other phones, a Lucent Partner ACS for my landlines, cellphones, ATAs and forwarding numbers, also over SIP.

> Most of the hardware was lost in the housefire last year. This recording was from early-mid 2020 or so.

https://cohost.org/sirocyl/post/2891449-i-broke-ikea#comment...

I was thinking the same thing! I don't get spam calls often but when I do I really want to punish them for wasting my time.

The recording has got to be compressed on the voice machine itself, so no hope in getting the clean version — it (most likely) doesn’t exist. :(

Checkout the "css crimes" tag on cohost, there's some pretty cool stuff there! https://cohost.org/rc/tagged/css%20crimes

Is it too late to ret-con the name of john draper / captain crunch to bobby dials?

Little Bobby Tables strikes again!

I always sanitized my DTF inputs, as my last tests failed.

Working fine here with uMatrix (actually nuTensor), are you auto-blocking the first party content too?

Works for me. I enabled the 1st party and cohost.org rows plus the css and images columns. Maybe it's because of another addon?

Works fine here.

You're not wrong. I wouldn't be surprised if someone at Ikea got mad and pulled up some laws from the phreaking days.

I wonder if it makes a difference that Ikea called them?

If you call someone and yell at them to go fuck themselves, there's a pretty good case for that being harassment. But if someone calls you and you tell them to go fuck themselves, well, that's a different story.

Similarly, people who initiate dodgy requests to web servers are clearly up to no good.

But if you're a web admin and happen to host a zip bomb at `/wp-admin`, only serving it out to people who specifically ask to be sent whatever happens to reside there - even though you've never advertised that URL's existence - is it really your fault if they can't handle the resource they contacted you and asked for?

You're correct. At a minimum this would be a federal crime under the CFAA if you are in the US.