/////////////// /////////////// /////////////// //// //// //// //// //// /////////////// //// //// //// //// //// //// /////////////// Toll Phree Incorporated -=-=- Established 1996 -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Information contained in this file is intended for the purposes of dis- cussion and explanation. The practice of certain theories detailed in this and other files may be illegal. We do not encourage anyone to try anything illegal in real life, and will not be held responsible for wh- at somebody else does with information that we provide. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- TPI Magazine Issue #1 February 2002 -=-=-=-=-=-=- Contents: 1) Letter From the Editor 2) About TPI 3) I Needed the Money (An Unpleasant Tour of the World of Telemarketing) 4) Intercom Alternative: Telephone Access Systems -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- 1) Letter From the Editor -- kwik_mart --------------------------------------- I feel compelled to say a few words here at the beginning of a new zine. Firstly, I hope this magazine is informative for some and enjoyable for all. Obviously there's already been a great number of text files written on the subject of hacking and phreaking; I apologize if we sometimes go over the very basics of these trades. No, this won't be a source for such fine pieces as "How to build a beige box" and so on. Of course, everybody needs to start somewhere, so for the newbies out there, I'll point you to a wonderful source of info: http://www.google.com On this site is a magical box in which you type in the name of anything you want to find information about. If you're lucky, there'll be less than a thousand search results to scan through. Next, I'd just like to say that I'm often disgusted with the turns for the worse that the h/p community has taken in the last few years. Sure, it's always been bad in ways, but the amount of elitism and lameness I've been seeing lately is disgusting. The TPI site, and magazine, are just an attempt on hour part to go back to basics. I hope the oldschool look and feel of the zine and the site reminds some people of better, earlier days. I remember when I first got into this scene, and what drew me into it. Phreaking; telephones and communications have always interested me to no end. Phreaking is such a hands-on field full of tricks, gadgets, new things to learn and huge systems to explore. It was only about six or seven years ago that I found myself working in this field. I could go on forever about late nights of trashing, boxing, huddling in phone bo- oths in the freezing cold. It was how I occupied a great portion of my teenage years, and I guess that's part of why I miss the old scene. Hopefully TPI can provide resources and information that are contempor- ary and oldschool at the same time. We can't go back to those earlier days (though I often wish I could go back twenty years and see the real early days), but there's no need to let them fade away completely. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- 2) About TPI -- kwik_mart ------------------------- When you're a bored teenager in a small town who loves computers or any electronic device or means of communication, who has no money and too much time on his hands . . . you might be me when I was fourteen. Life was so boring, in fact, that in a town that had at least six decent BBSs to go on, every day I managed to use up all of my time on all of them. I'd then move on to the shitty systems, just for something to do. My family didn't get its first computer until I was thirteen. I'm still far behind most avid computer users and hackers, since they generally got a good head start on me. Even still, since I got that first comput- er, I've worked often to learn more about them, and I think my skills have gotten halfway decent. Long before I had a computer to use at home, I was always intrigued by telephones. I'd take them apart, put them back together, examine them and try to figure out which part did what and so on. I'd open up a jack just to see how it was wired when I was quite young, and I had reasoned out quite a bit of understanding of telephony before I ever heard of a thing called phreaking. So again, I was fourteen, and a friend, now known as pouvre, introduced me to the underworld of computers and communications. I knew it existed of course, nobody could've lived through the last fifteen years or so without hearing the term "hacker" being bandied about. I had no idea as to where information on this scene could be found, how any of it worked or anything like that. pouvre showed me a bit, and from there I began to learn on my own as much as we'd work together in our explorations & exploitations of the internet, the phone system, and anything else that seemed remotely interesting at the time. pouvre was and is an extremely knowledgeable person when it comes to computers. He also had a strong interest in phreaking. Myself, what had always interested me most about computers wasn't programming, wasn't in playing games; it was in communications. A modem, a BBS, ANSI graphics or text slowly creeping across your screen; the internet--especially as it was in those days, less media-intensive, full of text and informati- on, and designed for use with plain old 14.4k modems. Nothing excited me more about using a computer than hearing a carrier, a handshake, and seeing Telix flash up "Connect 14400" on the screen. So, of course, it was communications that became my most keen interest. Once I learned about all of the many-coloured boxes I became even more interested, learning about how payphones work and the phone system in general. pouvre and I started working on exploring the system, scanning and boxing, harassing operators, trashing, etc. We were joined by a guy known only as tom_erikson a short while later, and TPI (toll phree inc) was formed. It's something that I'll always remember, something that really defined my youth and my teenage years, being a member of that group. When a lot of people our age were wasting away in front of the TV or wasting their computer on nothing but games, we were working on expanding our knowle- dge of systems that a good percentage of people never even pause to co- nsider in the least. When other teenagers would get drunk and pass out, we'd get drunk and go boxing. When other people were doing homework, we were standing in a phone booth pranking someone or fucking around with some aspect of telephony. This might be part of why my highschool care- er ended so poorly, but one might never know. TPI is still around, and it's now nearly seven years later. I don't kn- ow if we qualify to be considered an h/p group . . . we aren't always up to date on the newest, 1337357 infoz, we don't even really give half a shit about being really good at what we do. We just want to pursue matters of interest to us and learn more. We're just a group, and I gu- ess that's all that matters. Me, I just want to learn, and to phreak, and to do what interests me or what I find fun. If that's not good enough for some elitist fucker type newschool hacker/phreak, I just don't give a shit. Hell, they might kn- ow more than me, but who makes a more positive contribution to the sce- ne? Someone who puts anyone down who doesn't know as much as he/she do- es, or just acts like they know everything, or someone who's just in it for fun and information? I won't rant anymore. I'll just say that TPI is a group that likes com- puters and telephones and just about anything related to those two thi- ngs. So concludes this article, about TPI. --kwik_mart -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- 3) I Needed the Money (An Unpleasant Tour of the World of Telemarketing) --kwik_mart ------------------------------------------------------------------------- When I finished highschool, I didn't have the money or the will to co- ntinue with my education. I left my hometown and moved to a new city, and moved from job to job for a while. About a year later, I moved on- ce again, to the city of Toronto, Ontario. I told myself that if I di- dn't find a job within a month, I'd move on to a last resort, to a job that someone who speaks fluent English (such as myself) would be near- ly overqualified. I set that ultimatum for myself: if I don't get a *good* job, I'll just have to settle for *a* job. A month passed unsuccessfully. Like many other people before me in si- miliar or worse situations than my own, I found myself working at a Toronto call-centre. Yeah, it might make you an absolute asshole, even a prostitute if you want to be really mean about it, but when you just don't have a choice, when you need to make money and make it fast, you pretty much have to do *anything* that'll bring in some cash. That was my only excuse, and that only thing that kept me going: I needed the money. If you don't know what a call-centre is, it's basically just a sleazy sales factory. It's the place where telemarketers work. You sit there all day calling one person after another, trying to explain the produ- ct that you're trying to sell to some idiot, or getting yelled at by another. You call people who think that this is your chosen career, as if you're sitting at home on your couch and you *enjoy* doing this sh- itty-ass job. Your bosses yell at you if you aren't selling enough. If you sell to much, they watch you like a hawk to make sure you aren't breaking any laws. If you aren't selling enough, again, they monitor your conversations and tell you exactly what you're doing wrong. The amount of time you work is logged by their systems. If you get up and go to the washroom, they dock your pay for it. If you spend too much time between phone-calls, they dock your pay for it. They teach you sleazy little tricks that basically allow you to fool someone in to buying the product you're offering before they even know what's going on. If you don't argue with the customer, try to *convince* them to buy the product, your bosses yell at you. You can't win. Well, I was able to sell quite a bit at first, without even trying. On the upside, selling over the telephone is a lot like social-engineeri- ng, so the job allows you to use the skills you may have already deve- loped elsewhere while honing your engineering skills for later on. Af- ter a while, of course, I just gave up. I had no respect for the comp- any, or for my job. I didn't try anymore. If I made a sale, I was hap- py enough, but I didn't go out of my way to try to convince anyone to take it. I'd get up and take a smoke-break whenever I wanted, and if they complained I just told them that they could go ahead and dock my pay for it. I ended up just hating the company I worked for. During my time there, I found a lot of interesting things out there in telephone land. There were hanging phone lines with nothing on the ot- her end, and every time you called them you heard the same thing, and a few loops whistling 1000Hz in my ear. I heard just about every defa- ult answering machine message in existence, cheesy synthesized voices saying "After tone, record message . . .". I called every province and territory in Canada. I probably called at least one person in nearly every town, city, village, and hamlet in this land. Most intriguing of all, I heard tones. Calling remote areas using old equipment, you can still hear the beeps and blips of MF signalling systems when someone answers the phone or hangs up. If you want to hear it for yourself, it would just be a matter of finding some fone numbers in some of the mo- re old and remote parts of the country. It was exciting to hear that, since it's so uncommon for such signals to be carried inband anymore. Interesting too, was that the PBX/Predictive Autodialer that the comp- any used was connected to the nearest telco CO by some massive pipes. I heard them talking about T1s and so on, which as far as I know only carry about twenty-four channels of voice--but then again, I wouldn't guarantee that the tech department of the call-centre was staffed by a dream-team of geniuses. Nonetheless, our PBX was connected directly to the CO, and half of the time when someone hung up the fone, I was sti- ll holding the line, and if they picked up the phone again, they woul- dn't get the dialtone until *I* chose to hang up. I heard a lot of pe- ople try to dial numbers (in fact, I heard a lot of people dialing the number of the call-centre that showed up on their CID screen to have their number removed from our list). I heard a lot of people get piss- ed and start bashing their fone against the wall as if that would help them get a dialtone. I wonder how many people ruined their phones that way because I was just taking too long to move on to the next call and hadn't broken the loop yet. The call-centre used a Lucent Definity PBX/Dialer (brand name Lucent is often interchangeable with Avaya) which, I must say, is a giant pi- ece of shit. The bloody thing dials a million numbers at once, expect- ing that ninety percent of the calls won't be answered by the customer on the other end. If it doesn't have enough operators to whom to route the calls to that *do* connect, then it just leaves the dialled party sitting on the other end screaming "HELLO!!!" into the phone for as long as it takes for an operator to become available to handle the ca- ll, or for the customer to hang up. Better still, when a customer asks to have their name and number taken off the calling list, it's the law that the call-centre has to comply with that and never call them agai- n. Unfortunately, the shitty visual-basic program we used to handle o- ur calls, including clicking on the dialog that was supposed to remove the customer from the list, didn't have the right effect. People kept yelling at me because we weren't supposed to be calling them again. I had no excuse. I simply told them that we were using shoddy or defect- ive equipment, apologized, and promised them that we'd never call aga- in. I had no grounds upon which to base that promise, since I obvious- ly had no control over whether or not we called again. The Definity is an interesting system, however, it's expandable, supp- orts many different protocols, including IP, it's a PBX and a predict- ive dialer (meaning that it will call only customers in a certain area code for a while, and during that while, it will start by calling all of the Adams, then Bills, then Chucks within that NPA), and even thou- gh it does an annoying job, it does it rather well. At the same time, I was amused to notice that when I wasn't on a call I could often hear other people talking if I turned up the volume on my phone and pressed my headset up to my ear. It was faint more often than not, but I'd of- ten hear fax machines, conversations, phones ringing . . . and we nev- er heard a line ringing, because the call was never routed through to an operator until the customer had already picked up the phone. That's why when you get one of those annoying calls there's almost always a delay before you hear a response to your "Hello". Once in a while I w- ould hear a line ring; it happened rarely, but always after the perso- n on the other end had hung up. You'd hear them hang up the phone, the loop would almost break (yeah it got so that I could even tell by the sound whether or not I was going to be holding the line or whether the connection to their line would be totally lost) but then it would ring again and I'd hear the person I'd just spoken to pick up the fone aga- in and say hello. Now, I'm only assuming that the PBX/Autodialer was a Definity, based on the phones we had at our workstations and some searches and reading I did on the web. If anyone has more info or insight on this, please feel free to drop an email to me. They used Intuity Audix for the VMB system there, and once again, I'd be glad to hear any information that is fairly recent about these things to. I'll probably be looking into this on my own, as well, but any help is always appreciated. In the end, it was an interesting experience in telephony. The rest of the job I could do without, and I'm not proud to say that I did it. In fact, the only reason I'm admitting that I ever did that is *because* I got to experience some interesting aspects of the phone system that the average phreak in this age doesn't always get to see. I still hate telemarketing, the whole industry. I have no respect for it, but I do pity the people that do it for a living. If they sound happy and chee- rful to you when they call you up, believe me, 98% of the time it's a fake. 2% of the people who work in that industry as telemarketers like what they're doing. The rest of them are only doing it because they h- ave no other choice. Believe me, those places are no better than swea- tshops, and when anyone yelled at me, I generally didn't blame them f- or doing it. It's a sacrifice you make when you take a shitty job like that. I only have one excuse: I needed the money. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- 4) Intercom Alternative: Telephone Access Systems --kwik_mart -------------------------------------------------------------- Once upon a time I lived in a scummy apartment building in the ghetto crack-rock neighbourhood of a city in the southern part of the province of Ontario. My apartment was lovely, renovated only fifteen years befo- re I moved in, with writing and crayon drawings on the walls when I mo- ved in, and an elegant yellow shag carpet. The screen door to the balc- ony collapsed one day when I tried to open it. The tiles on the bathro- om floor were cracked or missing. When I moved into the building, there was still an oldschool intercom on the wall near the door, the kind with three buttons: Talk, Listen, & Door. A few months later, the management of the building slid a form u- nder the door asking that I write down my phone number, since they were installing a new security entry system and it required the use of the phone line. Intrigued, I waited a long while to see this device when they installed it. It turned out to be a chunky unit with a stainless steel facade, a keypad resembling the average one on a telephone, a speaker, and a tiny hole in which the microphone resided. There was also a keyhole through which someone could open the panel to perform maintenance on the unit. The unit had a four line, 20 character per line back-lit LCD display. I was intrigued to find that when you punched in the code that buzzed an apartment, you could hear a dialtone come from the unit, and then a long string of dtmf dialing, then ringing. Once the called party answe- red, you identified yourself, they pressed "9" on their phone's keypad and the door unlocked to let you in. I never had a chance to decode the tones, but it sounded like my phone number, and an extra digit, probab- ly a nine or something. I was also interested to find that after calling up to my own apartment from the unit, then pressing *69 when I got upstairs, the phone number of the unit was read back to me. I called it one night, but to no avail since there was no automatic answer. Unfortunately I never had a chance to get someone to wait in the lobby while I called just to see if it r- ang or anything. An interesting thing to note is that one of the first things I tested was using my tone dialer from the lobby to see if I could get into the building. I entered the code for my apartment, and when the answering machine picked up, I held my tone dialer up to the microphone and pres- sed "9". The door unlocked. I was wondering if the unit had any way of distinguishing from which end of the line the tone came from, and that ability was obviously not included in its design. Thusly, I felt somew- hat less secure in my residence, knowing that the security entrance was not as secure as it could be. At the same time, I knew that if I ever wanted to get into a building that used this system or a similar one f- or security, all I would need would be my dialer. Many offices use sim- ilar systems, as I've seen them in lobbies and on the sides of buildin- gs here in Toronto. I've tested this tone dialer trick on a few differ- ent systems now, and it does work on many different makes and models of these units. I've since had the chance to do some research into these devices, havi- ng remembered the brand name of the unit that was in my old building. A company called Mircom Technologies Ltd. seems to be one of the leaders in the field of making these systems, and it was one of their Telephone Access Systems that had been installed in my former residence. Check o- ut http://www.mircomtech.com/ for more details on the company and their products. I've learned that the unit that was in my old building was t- he MUS-2000SDK Telephone Access System. It's capable of providing serv- ice with an "AutoDialer" (to dial the apartments' fone numbers) or thru "NSL" as they term it, meaning No Subscriber Line. The latter doesn't require you to have a phone line in your apartment for someone to call you to be let into the building. Obviously since phone lines are alrea- dy wired to the apartments, the system can just access the line and ca- ll you up without the telco needing to be involved at all. It was the autodialer system that was present at my old building though. As it turns out, this unit can also be programmed from its keypad, give keyless entry to residents thru PIN numbers, use tone or pulse, has a built in Real Time Clock *and* User Event Tracking for visitors and ke- less entries (so it must keep a log and timestamp these events). It can be networked with other units, and can have a modem (MDM-1000 for use with MirSoft TAS software) installed for programming purposes, which is optional. Unfortunately, the management of my building didn't opt for any extras. They took the bare minimum, and what ever was cheapest rig- ht away. The NSL system requires extra hardware and labour, so they ch- ose to pay for another phone line for the autodialer system to use ins- tead. My conclusion is that if you don't mind taking a bit of a risk, these devices are extremely hackable (however extremely public). They do not seem to be built to avoid exploitation, more likely than not only beca- use exploitation of these units hasn't been a large problem as yet. The ability to program the device from its keypad may prove extremely usef- ul. If you have a chance to find the phone number of an AutoDialer unit with a modem, you might be able to program it in privacy. When I have a chance, I will explore these devices more deeply. For now, I only want- ed to write a piece on them to draw some more attention to them and get people started on learning more about them as well. To me they seem li- ke just a shitty little PBX, probably very easy to screw around with. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- So ends Issue #1 of TPI Magazine, published February 2002. www.geocities.com/tollphreeinc/ | tollphreeinc@yahoo.co.uk | DALnet #173