[breput]

I had (and probably still have) a Radio Shack Pro-2006 scanner from the late 80's. Even pre-Internet, instructions on how to bypass the cellular band block were easily found on Fidonet and local BBSes, and all it involved was removing a single diode.

https://www.wentztech.com/radio/Equipment/Pro2006/pro2006mod...

It was really a golden time for snoop...er..listening to cellular phones because they were so enormously expensive, including per-minute usage fees, that only drug dealers, doctors, and the 1%-ers could actually afford to use them. So there was always interesting things to hear.

Ordinary cordless phones were much more affordable and fairly common at this time. They broadcast in the clear at 49 MHz (at least in the USA) and had no legal protections like the 800 MHz cellular phones.

[mherdeg]

Roughly in this genre, the 9/11/2001 pager text data ( https://911.wikileaks.org/files/index.html ) are an interesting peek inside people's putatively private conversations.

[INTPenis]

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.

[ryanianian]

Amazon used skytel pagers for oncall notifications until very recently. I had one in 2014.

[treesknees]

Hospitals and other facilities still use pagers for oncall duties. It's quite common. They're robust and last days without a charge.

[sevensor]

When I carried a pager as an engineer at a factory, it lasted for months on AA batteries. It's been almost a dozen years, so I'm starting to forget whether it was one cell or two. It took me years before I stopped reaching for my hip every time the lights flickered.

[coin]

> 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

[wil421]

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

[1f60c]

What is this?

[willstrafach]

Pager messages collected on September 11, 2001. They are also a type of communication which is transmitted without encryption.

[octoberfranklin]

s/is/was/

I miss the days when there was a messaging service you could buy in order to recieve text messages nationwide without transmitting your location.

RIP POCSAG

[JosephRedfern]

POCSAG and FLEX are still quite active, in the UK at least.

[LeCow]

I regularly stumble on POGSAG form hospitals/ are homes/logistics places. They throw a lot of credentials around.

[jcrawfordor]

Cordless phones are a whole different and rather interesting topic. The huge security issues with early cordless phones lead to DECT (or technically DECT 5.0) becoming widespread in the US, and it's actually a rather interesting protocol with a very complex and rich set of capabilities considering we normally only see it used for simple cordless phones. IP over DECT is an uncommon but interesting application.

[foepys]

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.

[jcrawfordor]

That's very cool. When I was a kid, a nearby department store (Fred Meyers on 39th and Hawthorne) used a large-scale DECT system for employee-to-employee and paging. Each staff member carried what was essentially a ruggedized cordless phone with an earpiece and they heavily used DECT's "intercom" handset-to-handset feature to talk to each other, and it was all on a PBX with their outside phone lines. I believe it was a Panasonic system. Panasonic seems to still offer such a setup that uses IP for coordination between the multiple DECT "cells," but I'm not sure what was in use at the time. I remember it giving me an overwhelming feeling that my home's DECT cordless phone was a disappointment to the technology's capabilities.

For that matter I once had a job where I had a WiFi IP phone that I carried around, but I think cellphones have gotten cheap enough for corporate users that the wind is out of those sails. I keep thinking about buying one of those on eBay...

[majewsky]

This sounds very similar to the phone network that the Chaos Computer Club uses at their events, the biggest one being the Chaos Communication Congress. Everyone who wants can bring a DECT or GSM phone and register a 4-digit extension, and each congress, several thousand people do. The whole venue, as well, as some nearby hotels, are littered with DECT and GSM base stations. There's also bidirectional interconnectivity to the regular phone network. It's always one of my favorite parts of Congress, but it has kind of ruined me since I have trouble taking tech conferences without their own phone network seriously. :)

(Cave-at: I'm not involved with the technical implementation. I just know the system as a user.)

[tim--]

DECT VoIP base stations are still very much a thing.

http://www.grandstream.com/products/ip-voice-telephony/dect-...

[FiddlerClamp]

The funniest thing was that people were convinced that you could cut more diodes (if only you knew which ones) and enable more hidden frequencies. They couldn't understand that this was a one-shot deal. I imagine there were quite a few that ended up destroying their scanners trying.

[grendelt]

"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!"

[MertsA]

Well funnily enough you can actually get some heavily distorted but still intelligible audio out of an FM channel demodulating it as AM if you shift the frequency over off of the center of the channel and decrease the bandwidth to only get half of the FM bandwidth. First time I heard that while playing around with a SDR I was so confused as to how that was working.

[jacquesm]

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.

[sokoloff]

The set of people who just cut away additional diodes under the theory that would unlock further features has minimal overlap with the set who can DIY replace that diode for $0.15.

[jacquesm]

I highly doubt that. Cutting away a diode means you have some tools, aren't afraid to 'void the warranty' and likely means that you know what you're doing. Those are likely people who also have a soldering iron sitting around somewhere and know how to use it.

Everybody else would have someone else cut that diode in the first place.

[lilyball]

Coincidentally, Rachel By The Bay had a post just today that included listening in on cordless phone conversations by neighbors.

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/12/12/scan/

[rachelbythebay]

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.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I used to work for a company that made “super Bearcat scanners.” These were “DC-to-light” scanners, with multiple demodulation methods (SSB, DSB, Phase, Frequency, Amplitude, etc.). They cost about 40 grand each, in the early 1980s.

Needless to say, most customers were military or TLAs.

We could listen in on mobile phone conversations without much difficulty.

Then frequency-hopping started to become en vogue, along with encryption, and made it a lot more difficult to eavesdrop. Most of that happened after I left the company.

[refurb]

Related to that, I can remember borrowing a friend Motorola cell phone in the early 90's, probably the 9800 model, still unencrypted analogue transmission.

Anyways, you could enter the service menu and select which tower frequency you'd like to receive or send on. I remember playing with it and selecting the same channel to send/receive and there was already an on-going call. I heard one of the people say "did you hear that?" and I pulled the battery, it freaked me out.

[gscott]

I worked at Radio Shack and a customer came in, asked to see a particular hand held scanner. He moved around the buttons a few different ways and showed me it had a backdoor to listen to cellular calls. A few months later Radio Shack recalled that particular scanner. I had spent some time listening to calls and they were really boring. No girlfriends or drug deals, completely inane conversation.

[ThinkingGuy]

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]

[2sk21]

I bought a RadioShack scanner in 1993. I found that even though 800-900 MHz was blanked out, reflections of cellphone signals were clearly audible! Back in the early 90s, sitting in my house, I was able to listen to cell phone conversions from cars on a highway near my house. You have to remember that early cell phones were so large that people mostly used them from cars.

[hinkley]

In college I worked at a place that was spread out over a number of buildings on the edge of campus. A friend of mine was living across the street from the main building, and I was over one day trying to watch TV in their common room. I don’t recall why I was flipping channels up near 90 but I distinctly heard a crisp clear voice as I was flipping between two channels.

The wireless headsets the receptionists had were using the same modulation as TV, and you could hear it by holding the UHF dial on the TV between clicks. And my friend knew about this. Awkward.

[wolco2]

I worked at radio shack outside the US in the late 90s.. we use to listen to cell phone calls. Most calls were drug dealers,some were affairs mostly it was call girls. The variety was great.

[ed25519FUUU]

Stories please!

[o-__-o]

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

[dmitryminkovsky]

> Someone else was eating aluminum soda cans

Huh?

[tomcam]

Well they had pretty much phased out steel cans by that time

[Lammy]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pica_(disorder) maybe?

[dmitryminkovsky]

Yeah pica but can you eat an aluminum can and not die? Wouldn’t that certainly cause internal bleeding?

[Lammy]

They were probably just chewing on it

[bitwize]

Did anybody in this group go to Stevens? Because holy shit, were there ever a lot of Hackers-type characters at Stevens in the latter half of the 90s. Some of them were into MOD music and demoscene stuff, warez, and even darker things.

[gaustin]

Serious Sam didn't come out until 2001. How did you play it in 1999?

[proverbialbunny]

That and in 1999, if you were writing cracks, very few people were doing that in the demo scene at that point. The demo scene and the scene split up. In 1996 RNS started this change. By 1999 pre nets were already up, as well as top sites.

I miss the 90s. I was 12 years old in 1999, but I started disassembling code when I was 8, so as you can imagine, people online thought I was an adult with all of illegal things I did. I even broke into PayPal and bragged about it. lol embarrassing today.

[koyote]

I too miss those days...

That being said, I feel like back then a most vulnerabilities were so simple due to lack of foresight/security that quite a few 12-year olds with a decent understanding of computing could perform them:

I fondly remember an IIS bug which allowed you to basically 'cd' into any directory on the host machine and execute cmd.exe remotely. I believe it was as simple as the server not sanitising '..\' when written using unicode escape characters...

[MertsA]

Even back in just 2012 I found one of our clients who had an ecommerce site came up with the "genius" idea of solving SQL injection by checking the unparsed URL for an apostrophe. Same self taught developer also decided to log the CC name, number, expiry, and CVV code for all orders instead of just storing the transaction ID from Authorize.net. There were 750,000 rows in that table when I found the SQL injection vuln.

[proverbialbunny]

Yah. There was a backdoor on all MS operating systems in net bios. As long as they were not behind a firewall and had not manually setup file sharing settings you could get full access / root.

All the way through the thousands there was a backdoor on OSX' remote desktop. As long as they were not behind a firewall and had not manually setup remote desktop, you could get full access as well.

And all the way through the 90s and the thousands, there was a backdoor on Motorola and Buffalo cable models, so you could remotely inject your own firmware and remotely reboot the router if you wanted. Everyone online was soldering those things to get hacked internet back then and I was just scratching my head as to why they were not using the backdoor instead.

I can go on. I haven't done anything infosec in a very long time. When I was 18 I got interested in certificate decryption and my passions took a more math heavy direction, eventually leading to quantitative finance.

edit: Oh, and to keep more on topic, regarding listening to cell phone chatter, the cell tower where I lived didn't change to digital until 2006, so in the thousands I knew you could listen in, but frankly I wasn't interested. I was more interested in making cantennas and injecting an 802.11 signal 2 miles away, decrypting their WPA. Surprisingly I did not find a single router that had a different admin password than its WPA password.

In the 90s all the way into the early thousands, to get online I had to get hacked internet, as my parents didn't really understand the internet and thought it was a fad. This may be what inspired some of the black hat stuff I did.

[icedchai]

Memory fades a bit over 20+ years.

[o-__-o]

Definitely meant to say counter strike, sorry

[mypalmike]

These were some hardcore hackers.

[kabdib]

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. :-)

[HPsquared]

"word of mouth"

[JKCalhoun]

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.

[giantg2]

Lots of similar stuff in the book The Best of 2600

[sroussey]

Oh, those were the days!

[RuggedPineapple]

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.

[Mountain_Skies]

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.

[raducu]

You are just describing every IDF soldier ever?

They routinely kill and maim palestinian teenagers with 0 consequences, so there must be a huge part of society that agrees with such ideas that they are able to do so with impunity.

[01100011]

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.