This is dedicated to all the hackers and the crackers, to the hackers and the crackers.
I see in binary, I speak source code, step on my toes, I'll post a million jpegs of you
in a fag pose, in your digital stance, getting firewalls hoes, cause I'm riding the net in
my six foes, I was a dick with my 56, now with my cable I'm able to get that stable,
on the out, my name is Ace and I'm a Leo, on the digital highway, my name is Neo and
I'm a hero, in a flash, I'll screw you on burning Dreamcast, you need some ISO, let me through
my hard drive rifle, our exchange you could never stifle, and a digital hug, you just caught
the love bug, I bootlegged your CD, I caused the fight between Un and Jay-Z, cause CG, it's
all gonna be free, whether we take it by force or we take it nicely, you feel that rattle
your bones, when I tell you we just hacked out Jones, and NASDAQ leaves your fight on
your back, cause I am he who loves to hack and crack, cause I am he who loves to hack and
crack, this is dedicated to the hackers and the criminals, their real phones, source code,
ISO, RAM, SIFC, good afternoon, and welcome to Binary Revolution Radio number 110.
Today's air date, August 23rd, 2005, and Strom is back with us, he's been released by North Korea,
for attempting to hacksaw their phone system.
Oh, is that where I was?
Yes, we actually had a couple of issues with you last week, I think North Korea is a new
one, right now I think we actually put you down, last week you put you down in Camp X3 in
Guantanamo.
Ah, I see.
Yeah.
I had a blindfold on the whole time, I really didn't know where I was, so.
Yes, he was with a national marionette version of Kim Jong Il, or whatever it is, I don't
even know how to pronounce his damn name, I just see it online all the time.
Yeah, so, this is another episode of Binary Revolution Radio, still alive and kicking,
and, you know, get Strom back.
No special guest this week, because we're just going to kick back and rehash our DEF CON
presentation, because more than a few people requested it, and we decided to give the masses
what they want.
Probably these ten people that said they wanted it are the only ten people that want to listen
to it, but, you know, we're going to try to, it's a hefty presentation, but we're going
to try.
Real clock, like the guy in those FedEx commercials from the 80s.
Yes, there we go.
God.
FedEx, or was that, yeah, no, that was FedEx.
That was FedEx, yeah.
Oh, God.
Actually, isn't he dead?
I don't recall whether that guy who talks really fast is dead.
I think he is, sadly.
Well, Moog died on Monday.
Oh, yes, yes, Moog.
Well, for, yeah, we can talk about this.
It's a little kind of news related, and it's, it's hacking related.
You want to go give a, not presentation, but a little introduction on him?
Yes.
Robert Moog, I think was Robert, was the guy who invented the Moog synthesizer.
The first synthesizer ever.
Which wasn't necessarily the first, but was, I think, the first commercially successful
one.
True, that could be it.
That could be the first.
I'm not sure.
He basically, he did a lot of work with it.
Basically, they really hail him as the founder of synthesizers.
I can't, that word never rolls off the tongue easy with me.
Synthesizers.
Yes.
Synthesizers.
That's right.
He's a cool, it was a very cool story.
I was reading something on news.pbk, news.bbc.co.uk about him, and he,
he, he was, he was a very interesting character.
Of course, he doesn't have any, you know, the other question is, I, I always wondered
what's up with these synthesizer people who have weird last names like Arp and Moog.
Arp, Arp was the, was the guy's initials.
It was Aaron Perlman or something.
Oh, really?
I thought it was his last name.
I thought it was something Arp.
Yeah, no, it was the initial.
I stand corrected.
Anyway, we're drifting already.
Boy, this is, this is going to get bad.
See, this is why, this is why we need like a third person here to keep us on track.
We have a couple of housekeeping things tonight.
Right, now we have CID, C-I-D, and he tells us the street name for the Denver 2600 troop
is Arapahoe, and he says, like the Native Americans, at which point I say, what Native Americans?
Also, like the county.
Well, if you live in Denver, well, Denver is in Arapahoe County, of course.
Oh, I don't know that.
I do.
I live in Essex.
I've been to Denver.
I live in Essex, and then I go into Boston, which is Middlesex.
I live in Los Angeles County, and then I go to school in Los Angeles County, and then
I go to work in Los Angeles County.
Los Angeles County is just amazingly huge, so, yeah.
As we established two weeks ago, didn't we?
Yeah, I think that was, yeah.
That's where I learned that.
And we have, I'm not, I'm going to butcher this name.
He included some type of pronunciation key, but I couldn't understand it.
It's RUACH.
It's E-capitalized U, so I guess where the emphasis is.
And he's our current leader for the Youngest Listener Contest, as he is 12.
So, congratulations, I guess, for being young or something.
Yes, congratulations on listening at such a young age and expanding your horizons and
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
All that stuff.
Do you have any housekeeping tonight?
I certainly do.
I would like to announce that I'm going to start doing a segment, or at least try to
start doing a segment on the show, where I review music.
And what I would like to do...
Completely unrelated to hacking, but we won't get into that.
Well, no, I mean, it is sort of semi-related, because this is Binary Evolution Radio, I
figure, and part of the Binary Evolution is the availability of all sorts of cool music
for free online.
True.
We kind of do this already with our closing music, but it would be nice to have people
actually send us songs and have us review them.
Indeed.
And actually, this is where it all sort of stemmed from, because we were running out of...
I was sick and tired of actually just randomly going around and picking out music from, once
again, epitonic.com.
It's a really fun site to play around with.
So, I just, you know, Strong came up to me and said, hey, why don't I do this?
And I was like, ah, it sounds weird, but actually, no, we need music, so go right ahead.
Yeah.
So, anyone out there, if you're in a band or you write music or whatever, and you'd like
to let us review it, at least, send it to...
Do we have a place for them to send it?
Just send it to you right now, I think.
Yeah, just send it to me directly, strongcarlson at gmail.com.
Or, yeah, radio.binrev.com.
Don't use that, because I don't think the space on it can handle the large amount of
files, so...
Or get in touch with me first, and we'll figure out a way to transfer the file or something.
Yes.
Well, we'll find a way to get your music, and we'll include it on the show if it's good.
Yeah.
If it's up to Strom's insanely high standards.
Well, I'll just do a review of it, you know, and my review, of course, is no indication as
to whether or not you should actually listen to it.
So even if I say it sucks, download it and listen to it, and Strom's going to be in a
little director's chair.
Yeah.
And you're going to say, it stinks!
A little balding.
It's going to sound like a...
Oh, God, what's the guy's name?
Jay Sherman.
That's what it is.
Yeah, Jay Sherman.
The critic, yeah.
Yeah, I forget who was the voice.
John Lovett, that's it.
Okay.
Also balding.
Yes, also balding, indeed.
Okay.
Is that it?
So, yeah, and preferably, you know, if you've got like a demo disc or something with a bunch
of songs on it, I'd love to review that, or if not, just one song will do, and I'll try
and review the one song.
Sounds like a plan.
All right.
I guess we should go into email now.
Do you think we should go into email?
I think we should go into email as soon as I put the pasta sauce on this pasta.
Anyway, our first email tonight is from DeBeave, from Telefreak.com fam, or Telefreak.org, whatever
it is.
He says, woo, go Perl.
There was one part of the show in which you discussed reporting with Perl.
Great thing to check out is PDF API 2.
This allows you to create PDF files on the fly.
Granted, it takes a bit of playing around to get with, to get, but it is nice.
Besides, we all know that managers love the PDF format, and I will fully agree with that,
that managers love PDF, and developers love PDF, too, so we'll go into this.
PDF API 2 is pretty cool, and I find it's a lot easier to use than PHP's PDF library.
I still have nightmares.
In reality, that's really not saying much that it's better than PHP, but we won't get into that.
Like being the tallest midget.
Yeah, exactly.
There we go.
So, one of the things I do like about Perl, and for PDF, that matter, is the forms function,
and I've been really fooling around with that at work, because, once again, managers love PDFs,
and I like to make little pre-created forms where it's just, you know, you just have to fill it out.
Basically, what you do is you create a PDF, and then you fill in all kinds of little text boxes that are assigned field names,
and you can fill all kinds of, you know, dynamic data into there, and it's a lot of fun.
I've been trying to automate a lot of stuff with that at work, and it's gone over amazingly well,
and with PDF, it can be basically faxed, emailed, you know, printed out, anything you want.
It's a whole lot easier than designing the form in your program, but it's a little less cooler,
because you do it, it's all WYSIWYG, that's the big plus about it, you know.
But, once again, you know, what else are you going to use?
Word?
I just have nightmares about that.
Our next email tonight is Chuck in Maryland.
Do you want me to read this one?
No, sure, go right ahead.
Okay.
Chuck writes,
Dear Black Ratchet and Strom Carlson,
I like the show.
Keep up the good work.
I'm glad that you spent last week talking about Perl.
Perl is one of our greatest weapons for automating tasks.
I love how you can write a little Perl code to piece together other tools and modules to do something fairly complicated.
One of my favorite features of Perl is the backtick syntax,
which will easily run any command line tool with any command line options,
and put the output into a Perl variable.
Then you can parse the output with Perl's powerful text parsing capabilities to determine if the command was successful,
and if necessary, pull out information needed for the next command.
In short, it rocks.
Anyway, I just wanted to point this out in case some listeners are not aware of this powerful feature.
Have a good one.
And I thought there was more to that, so I'm going to go edit out that gap right there.
Also edit out the part where I stumbled.
So, yeah.
Anyway, Chuck, one of the – it's cool with, like, the backtick syntax.
I'm just stumbling over words tonight.
It's cool with the backtick feature, and it's a cool feature,
but there are tons of tutorials online that just list, like, line after line of caveats about it.
But it's a whole, you know, sending – you've got to really watch your back
and make sure everything is scrubbed up if you're ever taking user input and putting it into a –
wouldn't that be really watch your backtick?
Yes.
Ooh, aren't we getting fancy tonight?
Oh, yes.
Yes.
Yes, watch your backticks.
Another – it's a – the safer way that people recommend is the system function,
which is, you know, it's basically system, and, you know, you put your – it's the same thing.
It doesn't actually write it out to a variable, but what I usually do in it
is I usually write the output to a file, at which point I can safely muck about
and rip everything apart and put it back together and grab what I need to it
and then run the next command, much like you would do in the backtick syntax.
So it doesn't actually – you know, it's not as simple as using the backtick,
but it's a lot safer, and it has a lot of more sanity checks with it.
And I'd just like to point out there are tons of powerful features in Perl.
You just need to find them.
Another thing I noticed in your email is how you were just saying how Perl just takes
all kinds of small bits, and you can string them together and make powerful utilities.
That's the entire Unix idea right there.
It's, you know, all just designed to have all kinds of small little utilities.
You string them together, and you make this giant thing,
and that way you don't need to include all the bloat.
So, what, bloat is bad?
No, this is a new concept.
Yeah, bloat is.
No, it was the old concept that apparently people forgot in the 1980s
when they were designing Windows.
Yeah, we won't get into that.
That's another show topic entirely.
Anyway, our homework assignment last week was to send in your Apple experiences.
And, boy, did we receive quite a few responses,
most of which varied from neutral to positive.
We didn't actually get a scathing review of Apple in the entire week,
which I was quite surprised about.
But for those of you who, yeah, Sue, well, you already did yours.
You kind of inspired this.
Well, no, I've got an even more scathing review now.
What, have you got a more scathing review?
Oh, yeah.
What happened now?
We'll have to go over that.
We'll do that in your personal hacking stories.
Okay.
Right now, out of the, we got like about ten or so,
and I picked the most two I'm using on the air.
One positive and the most negative one we could find,
which was not too negative in the first place.
And I just want to say thank you for everyone who wrote in.
I'll go read the, you know, Life Warped, who's our first email.
And he says, I've abused most of my products.
I had an iPod mini that was carried around for nine months.
I banged it up and drowned it in the sink at one point.
Finally, it died after being electrocuted in an accident while wiring an old house.
I swear, capitalized, exclamation points,
I turned off the breaker, and I did.
Only it was mislabeled.
I currently have a 20-gigabyte iPod and a 999 iBook, last series,
that was been dropped downstairs on a cement floor
and thrown out of a moving vehicle.
See the accident at hcdb.com slash tinyurl.com
slash charlie7 yankee Oscar uniform.
It also survived an aftermarket DL DVD plus WRW slash RAM drive.
Wow.
If you look at this URL that he sent in,
this iBook went through World War III almost.
I just want to wonder, what the hell happened to that car?
It was mucked up to no, like, it's almost irreconizable.
It's disgusting.
Let's pull it up and take a look.
Yes.
Oh, you haven't checked it out?
Oh, God, it's a hoot.
And I think it's hilarious that this person apparently took these pictures
right after the accident.
Well, I think that's what you do.
You pull out your camera and you take photos for insurance purposes.
Yeah, but he took all kinds of photos.
He was getting very artsy almost, I would like to say.
Well, I don't know.
That thing is upside down.
Mashed.
Yeah, I'm surprised the iBook survived,
and I'm more impressed that these people survived afterwards.
Please email us and tell us what the heck happened.
We will definitely read your email on air, because I am just dead curious.
Anyway, out of all the emails we got, you had the most abused equipment.
You seem to have the most unluckiest life in the world.
Seriously, I want to know, how the heck did your iPod end up being electrocuted?
Were you just shoving it in outlets for fun?
I mean, even if you did cut the breaker, what were you doing to it?
I'm not sure if I want to know.
Jeez.
So, well, LifeWarp, you win Gratuitous Kudos for the most entertaining story, at least, or something.
I don't know.
Congratulations, I guess.
And just be careful.
God, I don't want to know what's going to happen to you.
Well, you'll probably end up folded up like the iBook.
Yeah, goodness.
Actually, I'm curious how far that iBook flew after that accident,
because, boy, that sounds like a mess right there.
Yeah.
Our next email is from Sporty, and Sporty says,
Hey, guys, I've had a great and meh experience with Apple in the past three years.
And he goes on the list.
G4 GrabPipe, 450 PPC, rock solid, about three years old.
iPod, five gigabyte, first generation.
It died after about 3.5 or so years.
The Centronic connector broke internally.
The Centronic connector has a very small circuit board that is attached very nicely to it on the inside.
The tiny board is hooked up to a larger board and by several small connecting wires.
The small circuit board is attached to the case by several tabs.
After years of plugging and unplugging, those tabs snap, which caused the wires to only support the connector and the main board.
Sadly, they broke.
Fourth generation iPod mini, six months old, solid.
Third generation iPod, 20 gigabytes, present.
Won't remember, it hits audible click setting.
It won't stay off after a complete battery drain.
iBook G4, 12 inches, PPC 900.
After about a year and the circuit board died, got a blue line across the screen horizontally and pushing the CPU too much caused a freeze.
Wow.
Like, I got to say, you have a lot of Apple equipment.
And out of all your stuff that you said, I got to agree with Strom's opinion that he,
Apple has become a lot more craptacular recently, as he would say.
And I guess that's the point of this email I'd like to state is, this is very highly unscientific,
and as always, your mileage may vary.
But, boy, he has a lot of stuff.
I like to say that I have two pieces of Apple equipment.
I have, well, technically I have four if you really want to count the mouse and keyboard.
But I have a blue and white G3, which is probably about three and a half years old, maybe four.
I have no clue.
And it works fine.
And I also have my iPod, which I mentioned before.
And beyond the battery life that it's recently suffered, my second pair of iPod headphones are starting to fall apart.
One of the outside shells has started to crack, and it separates.
So it dangles by a wire, which is really, really annoying for an earbud because it just sort of falls apart in your ear.
But either way, well, I think you really should replace those anyway.
From what I hear, I don't know how true this is, but you're more likely to get mugged while wearing white earphones.
Honestly, at this point, they can probably have it.
Oh, my God, I got an iPod.
Wait a minute.
It only lasts like 30 minutes on a single charge.
Well, what about the aftermarket battery kit?
I'm actually thinking about sending it into Apple.
I've recently found out that they've dropped their iPod repair service thingy to like $60, $65 or something.
Hmm.
And that's something I'll consider because it's a whole hell of a lot cheaper than a new iPod.
Right.
But apparently the batteries online are even cheaper than that.
Oh, really?
Oh, yeah.
Well, I think it's like $65 for shipping replacement, and they'll send you a refurb out.
And one of the always fun things about refurbs is you never know if you're going to get something slightly better.
And even if they send me a different model, it's going to be better than what I have because I have the lowest-end model possible.
The very first one.
Yes, the first one.
That's where it is.
That'd be cool if I had 10 gigs.
I'd be like, yeah, 100% more storage.
All right, go me.
Actually, I was watching my local news station.
We'll go sort of segue into a story about this.
And they were talking about, you know, how Apple is a mean corporation because they do not send you your identical iPod back.
And I just looked at that and said, that's an RMA.
What did you expect?
And I was just shocked how the entire concept of the RMA system, which for someone like me who was a sysadmin for more than a few years, it's very intricately familiar with.
And, you know, I'm very familiar with it, and it just seems so odd that someone just did not understand the concept of RMA stuff.
Well, that's what we call a slow news day.
Yeah.
Well, it was part of their whole, you know, consumer awareness, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
You know, their slow news day.
Well, she usually has her stories on.
It doesn't have to be a slow news day.
They usually allow her five minutes every week where she reports something, and she decided to pick on Apple this week.
So, Susan Warnick, if you're listening, nice hair.
I don't know.
Nice hair.
Well, she used to have, like, this horrible 80s hair, and she actually got on –
And that's knocked into her?
Well, no, no, no.
She went on, like, Oprah.
I think it was Oprah.
Some talk show.
And because they have, like, bad hairstyles or bad looks from newscasters across the country, and she made the cut.
So they gave her, like, a remake or something.
It sounds Oprah-ish, so I wouldn't be surprised.
Yes, this has been Rev Radio.
We're talking about Oprah.
Can I pick A1?
Yeah, tell me about it.
So anyway, let's go into a personal show and tell here.
I spent most of my week watching our tech monkeys at work clean up the Zotob.
I don't know how to pronounce it, to be honest with you.
And that was fun, because about, oh, two years ago, I'd be doing that, and I'd probably be doing it a whole lot better than they were doing it.
I found it incredibly amusing that Microsoft released this patch a week before the virus came out,
and we have this, you know, quote, unquote, intricate patch release system in which, you know, it has to go through an approval process.
In reality, they tested it for about, oh, from the looks of it, about six hours, and they said,
okay, all you people apply this to your servers, and they never applied it to any of my department's servers.
And I just laughed when I found that one out.
I actually don't think we were owned by it, because we were thankfully running Windows 2003,
which is theoretically, it's not invulnerable, but it's a little more difficult to be infected by it that way.
And, yeah, so, I dodged a bullet, but I was enjoying watching everyone else run around, like,
screaming their heads cut off and just critiquing them.
It's fun to look on, it's fun to be on the outside and looking in.
Always.
Yeah, I also rescued Strom from North Korea, or wherever he was last week.
Yes, Ratchet personally came to laugh me out of the detention facility.
Yes, I called up Juan from South America, and I rented a Black Hawk, and it was really cool.
If you ever saw Rambo, it was a lot like that.
Except, you know, I was...
I thought it was more like the rescue scene in Brazil.
Oh, no, no, you were wearing a blindfold, how did you know?
Huh? Huh? Huh? How about that, huh? Huh? Huh?
Anyway.
Oh, yes, my big news story.
I don't think I actually ever told anyone this besides exclaiming it in the IRC channel.
So, Yappel has hit 2,000 phones.
Yay!
Yeah, 2,000 phones.
And that was...
I knew that was on the horizon, and I actually came to a shocking realization about, right after DEF CON,
that we have over 160 registered users, which is, wow.
That's a lot of people.
So, in accordance to that, I actually spanned out all of our, quote-unquote, top five lists,
and I now made them top ten lists, so...
Oh, Dave, let me...
You haven't thought on your heels now.
Oh, yes, you know, because top ten was just never around before he was there.
Of course.
Yeah.
What have you been doing?
You were talking about your Apple woes.
What Apple woes do you have this week?
Well, see, for those of you who aren't familiar with my Apple iPod disaster,
I had an iPod that just, you know, up and died on me.
It wouldn't charge.
It wouldn't play.
It was just all sorts of screwed up.
So, I went to Apple, and I said, hey, look, it won't charge and play at the same time.
So, it turns out the USB was fried.
After much argument, they finally gave me a replacement,
and all was good until my replacement stopped charging in the car.
And so, I figured, well, this is fantastic.
And I went back to the Apple store, and I said, hey, look, it's broken again.
I said, oh, no, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
It can't possibly be broken.
It's not our thing.
Our hardware is perfect, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So, he plugs it into the Mac and works perfectly there.
And so, at this point, I decide to go for broke,
because I figure I haven't actually tested it with my computer at home,
but I imagine that it's the same problem at this point.
So, I say, well, you know, it doesn't work with any of my equipment at home,
my charger, my computer, anything.
So, no, there's nothing we can do about it.
It looks fine.
So, he pulls up a diagnostic where it shows the USB power thing.
It shows a zero when there's no power on the USB, and a one when there is.
So, he plugs it in, and he says, it seems to be working fine.
The one shows up.
He said, let me take this back to my car and see if it does that.
So, I go back to the car, plug it in.
USB power turns one, but the iPod won't charge, which I think is kind of odd.
And, that's really weird.
Yeah.
So, I go back, and I say, hey, you know what?
The USB power says one, but it will not actually charge in the car.
He says, well, there's nothing we can do.
You're plugged it into a third-party piece of equipment in the car.
I said, well, do you have something here that you can give me that I can test it with?
And so, he says, yeah.
And then he walks off, and he comes back.
Oh, actually, I just realized that would be third-party equipment, too.
So, we can't do a damn thing.
So, at this point, I lose it, and I just glare at the guy, and I say, well, do you have any Apple brand lube so I can go fuck myself like you're asking me to?
And what did he respond to that?
He didn't quite know how to respond to it.
So, what is your current status of your iPod that works but sort of doesn't?
Well, it seems to work fine as long as I plug it into the computer.
That's really weird.
I actually was thinking about getting a FireWire charger for my car, since considering my battery only lasts about two hours or so, and that would be handy to have a charger in the car.
It would also be handy to have a charger.
Well, actually, yeah.
While I was on vacation, I suddenly needed to – my fun hacking story of the week is that I was trying to load a new album onto my iPod at my parents' house before we left for the lake.
I mean, North Korea.
North Korea.
Yeah, sorry.
Before we left for North Korea.
Yeah, and so I mounted the iPod –
The lake in North Korea.
That was it.
There it is.
Yeah.
My iPod wouldn't actually connect to my computer, so I figured, oh, something's wrong with the computer.
It won't connect, so I plugged it into the Linux box downstairs and tried to mount the iPod via NFS.
I sort of kind of succeeded, but only because this was the first time I had ever set up NFS, and I could read from the iPod, but any time I tried to write, I could create a file, but I wouldn't be able to actually write any data.
So I ended up hosing the iTunes database on the iPod.
Yeah, which meant that I went to go listen to music in the car on the way there, and nothing showed up on the list.
So –
Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.
But I did – so I figured, you know, okay, if I get a FireWire cable, I'll be able to use the iPod with my laptop.
So I eventually found a FireWire cable which came with a car charger in Page, Arizona, and I did actually get my iPod working, but I haven't tried that charger in my car yet, so I should do that.
Yes.
Right now what I have is I have a – I don't have something for my car, but my work –
I just – I have a workstation with FireWire on it, but unfortunately it runs Windows and my iPod is Mac, so I basically have to plug it in, and –
but because it's in the computer, it tries to mount it all the time, and I can't play the songs, and it just drives me up a wall.
I still need, like, a wall jack for it.
So for some reason I've lost mine.
I have no idea how I did that, but I did.
Well, you could always go to your friendly neighborhood Apple store and purchase some Apple brand lube – I mean, the FireWire plug thing.
Well, see, I'm not sure if they still have that because it's just so damn old.
They're all like –
No, I saw one at the Apple store.
I'll have to go over there, my Apple store in the North Shore Mall at Danvers.
Because I know, like, they have, like, all the docking stuff, but I don't have the docking port, and it makes me sad.
It's just, you know.
Yeah, no, they do have the AC adapter with the FireWire port on the back of it, so you just get the FireWire cable and plug it into both of them.
Oh, I guess I'll have to look at that then.
Damn them.
Damn them to hell.
We're Apple.
Oh, that's your money.
Yeah, it's going to be like 50 bucks.
And something that always ticked me off about Apple is I bought a keyboard and a mouse from them.
And normally a keyboard and a mouse would cost somewhere around $30, but because they're Apple-branded products, it cost me close to 70 bucks.
And it just drove – all right, before I go into this, let's just go straight into our top main topic tonight, which is basically –
Asterisk.
Asterisk Redux 2005 non-extended edition.
I don't know.
This is an abbreviated version of the talk we gave at DEF CON.
Yes.
This is – if you want – I'll probably put this up on my site, so if you want to follow along.
We're actually reading directly off the Power – not PowerPoint, sorry, OpenOffice slides that we did.
What is the OpenOffice presentation thing called?
OpenOffice Impress, I think.
No, no, I think it's Presenter or something.
Is it?
It's called Impress on my system.
Oh, really?
I thought Impress was – it doesn't say.
It just says OpenOffice.
Oh, well, whatever.
The OpenOffice PowerPoint.
Yeah, the OpenOffice PowerPoint clone.
So anyway, would you like to get started?
Sure.
All right.
This is How to Be Your Own Telephone Company with Asterisk.
Presented by Strom Carlson and Black Ratchet, DEF CON 13, July 2005.
This was rated a bullshit presentation by Alex.net.
Yes.
This is a website, AL3X.net, and they rated what's cool, what's okay, and what's cool, what might be okay, and what's bullshit, DEF CON 13.
And we were rated bullshit, along with 90% of the other presentations there, along with Stanks, which really took me off.
But we had fun, you know, with that, and we decided to put that right on our title slide.
All right.
Let's get started here.
Let me actually set this up so I can – there we go.
We're just going to skip the brief history of telephone switching because we –
Oh, we are?
Okay.
Yeah.
Basically, there's been telephone switching since 1890, and it's been culminated to such a thing as Asterisk.
Which is now this PBX – well, actually, what is Asterisk is the first slide.
Asterisk is a free open source PBX that runs on Linux, and it is, without question, the best thing since sliced bread.
Basically, it's a PBX you run on any Linux box.
You can run it, you know, under your desk, on your laptop, in Colo somewhere, wherever you need telephony.
And it's a great, great tool.
It was originally written by Mark Spencer of digium.com, and now has a large number of contributors,
though Mark is very, very healthily involved in the project.
I think he's more than neck deep into it.
Yes.
He is, in fact, suffocating underneath the weight of it.
I wouldn't go that far, because he's still doing fine, but –
Yes.
So –
He's working right along, but he's still intricately involved in the design process and the coding process.
Yes.
And, oh, for those of you trying to follow along with the slideshow,
we unfortunately don't have a thing like you had in the children's book,
where when you hear the tone, advance the slide.
So, we'll just tell you to –
Just follow along. It becomes incredibly obvious.
Yes.
So, why asterisk?
Well, first off, should we do this together?
Of course.
It's free!
How much are you paying your PBX vendor right now?
That's what I want to know.
The software itself is free.
I'm paying my PBX vendor, you know, countless amounts of money.
He and I have a very, very personal relationship.
We're not going there.
Anyway, asterisk is this totally free open-source PBX.
There is a version of asterisk called Asterisk Business Edition,
which you can pay Digium money for,
and it's a very, very stable, very, very well-supported version of asterisk.
But for the vast majority of circumstances, you won't need that.
You can just run the either stable version,
or if you want to be on the hemorrhaging edge of things,
the CVS head version.
Like Strom and I.
Yes, we're CVS head junkies.
We haven't touched stable in God knows how long.
Stable is for wussies.
Or for mission-critical applications.
True.
So, asterisk runs on commodity PC hardware.
Pretty much any PC you have lying around will run asterisk.
I mean, not if it's a 386,
but for the most part, we'll show you in a minute
how almost any PC will run asterisk.
It has broad support for VoIP protocols and hardware.
Pretty much the goal of asterisk is to work with almost everything.
Like Linux.
Yes.
So cute.
Got some piece of telephony equipment.
Chances are you can either have a talk with asterisk right out of the box,
or tweak it a bit and get it to talk to asterisk.
Indeed.
And we both proved that.
Mm-hmm.
It's very easy to interconnect with other asterisk boxes,
and you can form your own VoIP network, really,
and that's kind of what Ratchet and I have done.
This is all over our asterisk boxes right now.
We're actually recording the show on asterisk.
Yep.
That's how we always done it.
Mm-hmm.
We're both talking on Cisco VoIP phones,
which talk to our asterisk boxes,
which are talking to each other.
Mm-hmm.
And asterisk is configurable to do almost whatever you want it to do.
You can tweak it to your needs.
You can write your own code if you feel it's necessary.
Asterisk will, unfortunately, not do your dishes,
but we're working on that module.
We'll get the, what is it, the dish dial tone module,
or was it Chan Dish?
It's Chan Dish Wash.
Chan underscore dishwasher dot SO.
That's it.
Yes.
Okay.
Section, asterisk, and hardware.
So physical, tangible stuff.
In case you didn't know what hardware was.
Anyway, if you go to this wiki on VoIPinfo.org,
VoIP-info.org, sorry,
there's a page called Asterisk Dimensioning,
where people post, you know,
their stress test of asterisk
and what they have it running on
and how much it'll support.
Someone running a 133 megahertz Pentium 1
with 16 megabytes of RAM
got three concurrent calls going
before quality degraded.
Which is just simply amazing.
Mm-hmm.
Considering that I think
132 megahertz Pentium 1s
are borderline for playing MP3s even.
If you don't do anything else with it,
it'll run fine.
I mean, you, you,
just don't do anything with it.
And it will probably become painful
if it even thinks even a little bit.
Yeah.
But pretty much the upshot of this
is that any PC you have lying around will work.
A 2.4 gigahertz P4
with 512 megabytes of RAM
gets 790 simultaneous calls.
So your PC will more than handle
the load you're going to put through it
unless you are going to put
hundreds of calls through it
at the same time,
in which case you are insane.
I'm running my asterisk box
on a dual processor 433 Celeron.
So, and it runs fine.
I've never done it.
Yeah, I'm running my asterisk box
on a 1 gigahertz P3
with 300d4 megabytes of RAM,
and I haven't had a single
wimper trouble.
Mm-hmm.
So, let's get into the telephones
that you can buy.
You can either,
there are several options
for asterisk hardware
as far as the actual voice terminal goes.
You have the choice
of purchasing a VoIP telephone
that's plugged into your Ethernet network
and have it talk to your asterisk box.
Or you can purchase a terminal adapter
and plug an analog telephone
into the terminal adapter
and plug your terminal adapter
into the network
and have it talk VoIP to wherever.
Or you can get a card from Digium
which goes into your asterisk box
which you plug analog telephones
directly into.
So, we're going to go over
the various types of phones
you can buy.
The popular VoIP telephones,
the two pretty much generally
considered to be the cream of the crop
as far as these goes,
are the Cisco 7960
and the Polycom IP600.
Ratchet and I both have 7960
that we're talking on right now.
Yay!
And you can buy these used on eBay
for generally about $250 to $300.
Or so.
I mean, there's deals to be had.
I picked up my 7960 for $120 or so
at the MIT flea.
So, I mean, there's deals to be had.
You just have to look out for it.
We won't go into what biological favors
Ratchet had to perform
in order to get the Cisco 7960
that cheaply,
but I am still trying
to repress those memories.
The SNOM 190
is a more mid-range phone
that's $175 to $250,
although I think you can get them
cheaper these days.
And that's kind of, you know,
it's not as nice as the Cisco,
but it's a pretty passable VoIP phone.
I'm still waiting for the SNOM Carlson.
Yeah, I'm really in trouble
if SNOM ever makes a phone call
to Carlson.
And there's also the
Grandstream Budgetone, isn't there?
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, yeah.
The Grandstream,
not the Grand Scream,
well, maybe that is a better name for it.
But the Grandstream Budgetone 100
is the kind of very low-end
VoIP telephone.
It's roughly comparable
in quality to that
$5 telephone set
you buy at the drugstore.
And that's not
an exaggeration.
These phones are not
very high quality.
But I have sort of
a take-up on it
called a NetWeb 302,
and the dial tone
essentially sounds like this.
And it's disgusting to use,
and I'm really regretting
that I ever bought it.
Waste of money
unless you're really, really broke
or you're just, you know,
looking for some
cheapo VoIP phone
to play around with.
Yes, it's a cheapo VoIP phone
to play around with,
and I learned by lesson.
Yes.
But that's from $40 to $75
if you want to buy that online.
So, VoIP terminal adapters.
The one that you can buy
from Digium
is called the Eeksy.
That's the...
I-A-X-Y.
Yes, I-A-X-Y.
Although, I-A-X,
as it turns out,
is pronounced Eeksy.
So, it's not I-A-X.
But the Digium Eeksy
is a great little tiny...
It's absolutely,
ridiculously tiny.
It's got one Ethernet port
on the back
and one analog telephone port.
Of course, it's PowerJack.
And it speaks
asterisk's native Eeksy protocol,
which we'll get into in a bit.
And that's $100.
You can also
get third-party equipment.
There's the Sipporah SPA-2002,
which is also surprisingly tiny.
And that is...
Instead of speaking Eeksy,
it speaks SIP,
as you would gather
from their name.
Yes, we'll cover these later.
Yeah, we'll cover all this later.
And so that has
one Ethernet port
and two telephone ports
on the back of it.
And that's $70.
So you can do two stations.
And the Sipporahs
are surprisingly configurable.
When you buy them
unlocked,
they come with,
God,
an option
to do everything.
Like there was...
I plugged a Western
electric phone into one
and it wouldn't ring
correctly for some reason.
I looked on the
configuration page
and to my surprise,
there's actually a setting
to configure the frequency
of the ring voltage
that the thing sends out.
It was set at 25 hertz.
I set it back to 20 hertz
and my Western electric phone
rang beautifully.
Yay!
So that's what that was.
There's also
models you can get
where the...
you actually route
the rest of your network
traffic through
the...
through the terminal adapter
so that when
you...
when you place
heavy loads
on your network,
the terminal adapter
will act as some sort
of router, basically.
And it'll
give priority
to its own traffic
so you don't
degrade the quality
of your voice calls.
There's...
I forget which
model of Sephora
it is, but...
I think that's the
3002 or 3003
or 300...
3000 something.
They have all kinds
of weird model numbers.
Yeah.
Just go to
sephora.com
and check it out
for yourself.
Yes.
There's also the
Grandstream
HandyTone 286
which is a
SIP terminal adapter.
I think this one
only has one FXF port.
I think it actually
has two ports.
I think you were
wrong on that
and I believe
the 486 has four.
Does it?
I don't know.
I'm not sure
about that,
but I wouldn't
be surprised.
Yeah.
Anyway, I haven't
used it,
but I'm sure
the quality
is somewhat
better than
the actual
telephone itself.
Mm-hmm.
So, that's 65 bucks.
It's a whole lot
easier to make
adapters rather than
phones.
Yeah.
Because the adapter
is just little boxes
while the phone
has all sorts
of usability
and human factor
considerations
that go into it.
Yes.
And then there's
the granddaddy
of them all,
the Cisco
ATA-186.
This was the one
that Vonage
used to send out
way, way back
in the early days
of Vonage.
And it's made
by Cisco,
so you know
it has to be good.
Mm-hmm.
And that's between
50 and 125 bucks.
Ironically,
here's the funny thing,
at least the way
I understand it.
The group that
originally developed
the Cisco ATA-186
went from Cisco
and started up
Sephora
and started making
their own terminal
adapters.
And now Sephora
is being bought
by Cisco.
What a tangled
web we leave.
Weave.
What a tangled
web we leave,
of course.
Yeah, true.
It actually does
kind of work.
Oh, well.
And finally,
on to the really
cool things,
the Digium Zaptel
cards.
These are cards
that you buy
and you stick
inside your
asterisk box.
And you can
plug analog telephones
or telephone lines
directly into them.
So there's
the TDM-400P,
which is the
analog card.
that one
comes with
little modules
and you specify
which modules
you want.
So you can
either choose
modules that
connect telephones
to your asterisk
box or you
can choose
modules that
connect telephone
lines to your
asterisk box.
So in case
you have a home
phone line that
you want to share
among multiple
extensions,
you can do that.
Asterisk makes it
all easy.
asterisk.
Asterisk.
I forget if it was
no, I was going
to say about
Linux.
It makes
difficult things
easy and easy
things like
poking yourself
in the eye
with a white
hot sewing
needle.
All right.
Asterisk makes
everything easy.
We'll just leave
it with that.
Obviously, you're
not an advertising
major.
Obviously, I'm
not.
There's also
the TDE-405P
and 410P,
and these are
quad-span T1E1
cards.
So say you're
doing a larger
asterisk installation
and you're
bringing in a
channelized T1
or a primary
rate ISDN line
into your asterisk
box.
You get this
card, and the
thing just goes
right in.
It's a beautiful,
beautiful card.
The TDM-400P
fully loaded with
modules is about
$300, and the
TDE-405 and
410P are about
$1,500.
But if you're
going to buy a
T1, it's well
worth it.
Yeah, considering
how much you're
going to spend on
the T1, you've
got the pockets
for the 405 and
410P.
Since we're
moving on, you
know, we have
all these phones.
How the heck
do we interconnect
them with other
voice-over IP
things?
We're going to
go over the
various ways to
connect them.
Asterisk is fun,
but it's really
fun when you can
call outside of
your asterisk box.
Who says that?
No, I'm calling
my living room
repeatedly over and
over and over.
Hey, it's a
PBXSR, man.
Anyway, the
first major
protocol there is
called Session
Initiation
Protocol, which
is abbreviated as
SIP.
We've heard SIP
more than a few
times, and that's
what we need.
We're not talking
about drinking
drinks.
SIP is okay.
It's signaling
protocol only.
The actual media
transport is handled
by RTP, which is
a real-time
protocol.
It's another
streaming audio
protocol.
The protocol was
developed by the
IETF and not the
ITU, which is the
International
Telecommunications
Union, people who
essentially design all
the major standards
for telephone systems.
And instead of phone
numbers, it uses
something similar to a
URL, and it would be
SIP colon slash slash
strom at stromcarlson.com.
SIP is intended to be a
peer-to-peer protocol,
meaning, you know, we
don't have to connect to a
central server to find out
what's going on, which is
sort of true.
We'll go into that
later.
It's fairly ubiquitous.
Most VoIP phones,
terminal adapters, et
cetera, et cetera, et
cetera, they all speak
SIP because everyone
uses SIP, such as
Vonage, Packet H,
Broadvoice, et
cetera.
SIP does not play well
with NAT, Network
Address Translation.
If you're behind some
type of firewall, you
have to open about, oh,
15,000 ports to get
RTP working.
And the reason why
this is, is basically
when you're initiating a
phone call because it's a
signaling protocol only,
you talk to the
computer and say, hey,
I have a phone call
for you, connect to me
at this IP address.
And if it assumes that
it's a 192.168
address, the computer on
the other side is
going, what?
I don't know where to
connect to that to.
And it's lots of,
there's lots of
kludges and works
around for it, but
it's, it's not good.
It's, it's, it's very
much a kludge.
Another protocol is
H323.
It's developed, it
was the first real
voiceover IP and all
that stuff developed in
1996 by the ITU.
Uh, it's far more
similar to traditional
telephony signaling
protocols than SIP.
However, it does also
use RTP for media
transport.
Uh, used internally by
inter-exchange carriers,
which are people that
carry, uh, phone calls
between, uh, various
telephone companies.
Inter-exchange carriers,
yeah, are the long
distance companies.
So, yeah, long
distance companies.
That's what I was
looking for.
Yeah.
AT&T, MCI, Global
Crossing, and so on.
Yeah, exactly.
Great.
Um, H323 sucks and
therefore it's fairly
unpopular in the do-it-yourself
VoIP world.
It's, uh, difficult to
implement in software and
it's a major pain in the
ass to get working.
For example, the original
copy of Microsoft Net
Meeting uses H323.
Ugh.
And our, our quote that
we found, uh, Strom was
sitting in pound asterisk
on freenode.net, I
believe.
Mm-hmm.
That's one.
And it's, uh, was, uh,
major developer's, uh,
handle is Jerjer, and we
got a quote of, just
don't use H323 and all
your problems will be
solved.
And that is so true.
And very much so.
Uh, one of the other
major, uh, protocols out
there is the EECS
protocol, which stands for
inter-asterisk exchange.
And it's developed by Mark
Spencer of Digium, so
you know it has to be
good.
Uh, it covers both
signaling and media
transport.
It's a streamlined
simple protocol.
Essentially what Mark
did is he looked at,
SIP, he looked at H323
and said, both these
suck.
Let me go design my own
protocol that solves all
the shortcomings of
these.
And thus, EECS was born.
Um, does not suffer the
same, you know, NAT
traversal issues of, like,
RTP and SIP and all
that good stuff.
Uh, data and signaling
happen via UDP on port
4569.
Focus small single hole in
your firewall and you're
all set.
Considering it's called
inter-asterisk exchange,
it's very well supported
by asterisk, duh.
Um, support in the
terminal equipment is
rare.
Like, for example, the
phone I was talking
about, the reason why I
got it mainly is because
it's support EECS, and
it was one of the few
devices out there that
did that.
Uh, Digium EECS terminal
adapter seeks it, and that's
about it, besides my phone.
Uh, it's a protocol from
any, uh, public service,
public Swiss telephone
network, uh, termination
providers.
And, because it's just very
fire and forget, set it up,
and you don't need to worry
about configuring it and
fixing everything, and
suddenly it stops working.
It's, it's a very, it's a
fairly robust protocol.
Um, a couple other
protocols that are really not
used a lot is, uh, MGCP,
which is the Media Gateway
Control Protocol.
The only thing I've ever
seen this used for is one
of my ATAs.
It was previously used by
AT&T Call Vantage, and
that's the only place I've
ever seen it used.
Apparently AT&T used it for
a while.
I don't think they still use
it, but I could be wrong.
And I picked up a use
ATA, which I had to
reflash and reconfigure, and
that's the only thing I have
ever seen using MGCP.
Uh, the other thing is
Cisco's Skinny Client
Control Protocol, which is
SCCP, and with Cisco
phones, you have two
options.
You can use SIP, or you
can use SCCP.
SCCP.
Uh, Cisco's Call Manager,
which is their voice
solution, uses SCCP, and
they use SIP because
everyone else uses SIP.
So, uh, there's two
drivers for it.
There's Chan Skinny and
Chan SCCP2.
Uh, SCCP2, goodness, that
doesn't roll right off the
tongue, does it, uh, is a
third-party plug-in, which
has fairly better support
than Chan Skinny.
Uh, but, they're, but, if
you have a, if you have the
choice, use SIP.
Some older Cisco phones don't
use, can't use SIP, and
you're forced to use one of
these, but if you can get
away with it, use SIP.
Just save yourself some time
and effort.
There's two drivers for
asterisk for SIP for
Skinny, and they both kind
of suck.
Okay, and we're going to go
interconnecting asterisk with
Codex, and this is a
Strom's thing, and if you'd
really like to blitz right
through this, because we're
kind of running short on
time.
All right.
Well, in order to
understand Codex, you need
to understand how audio is
encoded on the, on the
telephone network, so we're
going to just kind of breeze
through this.
See if you have an analog
waveform, which gets sliced
up into a bunch of
different time slices.
It's still analog, but, you
know, just little slices,
little pulses of amplitude,
so this becomes pulse-amplitude
modulation.
It's still analog, but it's
sliced up into a little bit
of time.
Then each value is
quantized, and you wind up
with PCM, false code
modulation, which is what
happens on the phone
network, and also just raw
PCM at 44.1 kilohertz is
what you hear when you
listen to a compact disc.
So PCM is cool.
However, for the phone
network, you know, you
don't want to, you don't
want to use all that
bandwidth, because 44.1
kilohertz is kind of
unnecessarily wide band
for a telephone call.
And even if you go down
to basically, if you look
at the range of human
voice frequencies, the
vast majority of them
are under 4,000 hertz.
So using the Nyquist
theorem, we kind of just
realize that 8,000 hertz
is the best frequency to
encode voice at for the
telephone network.
So you do eight, you know,
if you want to do 16 bits
at 8,000 hertz, that
gives a fairly good, clear
representation of the voice
on the other end.
But 16-bit would be 128
kilobits a second.
And that's a little much
to send over the phone
network when you consider
that this specification was
kind of derived in the
50s and 60s.
So what happens is something
called mu-law
compounding.
And that basically uses a
logarithmic scale to
compress, to give a lot of
resolution to the voice
frequencies close to the
center of the amplitude,
close to the center of the
waveform at the lower
amplitudes where most of the
action happens.
And it still allows you to do
higher amplitudes, though it's
less resolution.
But honestly, at those
higher amplitudes, the
resolution doesn't matter
so much.
So basically, you get 16
bits of apparent audio
quality and 8 bits of
address space.
However, 64 kilobits a second
is quite a bit too much for
some people, especially on
low bandwidth connections or
in cases where a lot of
telephone calls have to be
put to your connection
suddenly that just doesn't
have enough bandwidth.
So there are various
compression schemes which are
used to further compress voice
and further encode the voice
into a smaller amount of
data.
The first one is called
adaptive differential pulse
code modulation.
It's a takeoff on regular
differential pulse code
modulation, which instead of
using an 8-bit sample,
uses 4 bits.
And what it does is instead
of encoding each sample
individually, it describes the
change from one sample to
the next.
So it uses 4 bits regardless
of the original source
resolution.
And that can kind of get
ugly if you've got a really
high-frequency sound.
So adaptive differential
PCM uses a varying number
of bits depending on the
complexity of the sample.
However, it's capped at 32
kilobits a second, so you
will lose a little tiny bit
of resolution.
LPC is linear predictive
coding.
What it does is it uses
bow coders to compress the
speech even further.
Instead of actually compressing
the speech itself, what
happens is it describes how
to regenerate that speech
on the other end, which
kind of works, although
vocoders are also used in
the singing synthesizer
effects in a lot of
modern music.
So if you listen to your
mobile phone or your
compressed audio really
carefully, you can actually
start to hear that sort of
stuff.
So those are the main types of
compression schemes.
So as we went over, on the
PSTN, it's 64 kilobits a
second synchronous bandwidth
for wireline telephones.
MU-Law companding in North
America and I believe Japan, and
A-Law companding in the rest of
the world.
If you're doing bit robbing in
band, it's 56 kilobits a second
instead of 64, but it sounds
roughly the same.
And essentially what bit robbing
is, is it takes a little, it
takes a bit every sample and
says whether or not the line
has been supervised or it does
other type of area signaling in
it.
Right.
So for mobile phones, which
are, which obviously sound
worse, you only get between 4
and 13 kilobits a second as
opposed to 64, you've got
another record of a telephone
network.
Yikes.
Yeah, there's all sorts of
crazy audio codecs and as I'm
sure many of you know, it
sounds like crap.
So what are the costs of speech
compression?
Well, first off, there's an
increased CPU load required for
transcoding.
If you're doing everything in
MULA, you know, the CPU doesn't
have to do any work.
It just has to switch the
packets and that's really easy.
I mean, even a 286, I think, or a
386 can route to Ethernet packets
fast enough to saturate T1.
So as long as it's just telling the
packets where to go, there's not a
lot of load that's required.
But if you've got to compress the
audio from, you know, MULA down to
GSM or something, then the CPU has
to do that work.
And so it cuts down on the capacity of
your asterisk box to handle calls.
That 790 call box we described
earlier, when you go to GSM, it drops
down to maybe 100 to 200 concurrent
calls.
That's pretty CPU intensive.
There is no guarantee that two pieces
of equipment will speak the same
codecs, and this is especially true if
using some sort of non-standard
bitrate or some weird variation on a
codec.
That may work well for you, but may be
completely incompatible with everyone
else.
Yes.
Some codecs require licensing, so you
have to actually pay money to use them.
The G.729 codec from Digium requires a
$10 license per box per channel.
So if you've got a box and you want to
have, you know, say you have two boxes and
you want to have, you know, five telephone
calls between them at any given time using
that codec, you have to buy five licenses
for each box at $10 a pop.
Yeah, well, that sounds expensive.
Yeah, it does.
And the other thing is that codecs don't
handle all sorts of sounds that well.
People will have trouble understanding
certain words, and it's difficult to
understand people who have poor diction.
And when you think about it, it's very
thin.
Your diction isn't all that bad.
I have, I stumble over words a lot.
I'm sure mine's just as horrible.
But if you think about it, you know, the
codec was designed to compress speech, but
you know, there are cases where, what was
I going to say?
The codecs are designed to compress
speech, but they're designed under the
assumption that people are going to be
talking normally.
And when they do, you know, tests, they
find people who enunciate, and they
enunciate and they speak in, you know,
perfectly standard English.
But the standard and the vernacular are a
bit different.
And so, you know, if you mumble or if you
have poor diction or, you know,
whatever, it's going to sound like
crap.
I think a very good, interesting way to
put this, it's a lot like handwriting
recognition.
If you have a person with perfect
handwriting, you'll work well.
If you have someone like me who looks
like, you know, a doctor writing it,
it'll fail miserably.
And the other thing is that, you know,
there are a lot of sounds on the phone
that aren't voice.
Background noise, and especially music on
hold.
In codec land, that's pure torture.
You can be like Oedipus and gouge your
eyes out.
And some of them are so absolutely
horrible that it'll even make you have
sex with your mother.
Someone actually came up with that during
our DEF CON presentation, and we just
absolutely loved that term.
We thought it was a hoot.
Thank you, whoever you are, if you're
listening to the show.
Anyway, Strom, what are the benefits of
speech compression?
There has to be one benefit.
There's only one bullet point on this
slide, and that's each call uses less
bandwidth.
That's the only benefit of speech
compression.
So, if you've got the bandwidth to throw
at your calls, please don't compress
them.
Use MULA or ALA.
So, what codecs are supported by
asterisk?
There's G.711, which is MULA or ALA
commanding.
There's G.726, which is 32 kilobits a
second ADPCM.
There's G.729, which is a kind of linear
predictive codec, which uses a code table to
regenerate the sound.
So, this is kind of the same concept as the
vocoder.
It says, okay, this sound sounds like code
number 35, so play code number 35 for two
frames.
And this one sounds like 72, so play 72 for a
frame.
And G.729 requires the license from Digium.
There's GSM, which is 13 kilobits a second.
Which is a predictive codec, and that's the
one that's used on GSM phones.
Surprise, surprise.
Wow.
So, if you want your desk phone to sound as
bad as your mobile phone, you can use GSM.
There's the Internet Low Bandwidth Codec,
which is the 13.3 kilobits per second LPC
used by Skype.
And it sounds passively okay, but for people
who rave about Skype's audio quality, it sounds
just like ILBC to me, and that's what it is.
So, sorry you lose.
There's also an open source codec called
Speaks, S-P-E-E-X.
It's also a 13.3 kilobits per second code excited
linear prediction, much like GSM.
And I think it's based on the Augvorbis stuff.
And finally, there is LPC-10, which is for you to use
in situations where you've got no bandwidth whatsoever
and you still need to get a phone call through.
This is 2.4 kilobits per second linear predictive coding,
and it sounds more ghastly than you can possibly imagine.
And he's not kidding about that.
And just to prove how ghastly it sounds,
I'm going to have up on my website,
blackratchet.org, a bunch of...
If you remember from our first episode, 105,
we had a song from this band called Red Eye Flight.
It was called Natalie.
And what we have done is we got permission from them
to use it, and basically they released it
at Creative Commons.
And what we've done is we've encoded them
with various old codecs we talked about.
So essentially, it sounds okay in some, like U-Law,
and it sounds like crap in a lot of it.
And actually, speaking of U-Law,
you're listening right now to U-Law
because we both use U-Law to record the show.
And it sounds like phones, but, you know,
it doesn't sound that bad.
It would sound a whole lot worse if we were using LPC-10.
Yeah.
No, it would just sound like robots talking,
and you would really, really want to go have sex
with your mother after listening to that one.
Yes.
Oh, yeah.
We should do.
We should re-encode this with LPC-10.
Yeah.
Anyway, let's get into interconnecting asterisk
because, you know, asterisk is fun.
You can talk to other people using asterisk.
You can talk to people using VoIP.
But what happens if you want to call your mom
who doesn't have some type of VoIP set up?
And presumably, you're calling your mom
not to ask her out on a date.
Yeah, okay.
Okay.
Let's just drop that, all right?
But it's so fun to talk about.
Oh, yeah.
What are you, from Arkansas?
No.
Not too many from Arkansas out there.
Sorry.
Anyway, let's go over various companies
that provide an ability to take your VoIP conversation
and forward it over to the PSTN,
which is the Public Switch Telephone Network.
First company we're going to talk about is NuFone.
NuFone is cool.
I like NuFone.
They have very cheap rates,
and they're essentially geared for asterisk.
They use asterisk exclusively, I believe.
Their caller ID is spoofable,
and they have insanely easy to provision 800 numbers,
or 888 or 866.
Essentially, you click a button,
and they send you an email saying,
here's your number.
Use it wherever you want.
And I never thought I'd have about five or six 800 numbers
ever to my name.
And with NuFone, I do.
Thank God.
NuFone's cool because they're very easygoing.
Essentially, when I first set my account up with them,
I said, what happens?
I PayPal them a bunch of money,
and they said, okay, well, that'll be fine.
So what happens when my PayPal money runs out?
Are you going to shut off my service?
Oh, no, we'll just send you an email.
Just send us some money, and we'll be fine.
Oh, okay.
They have proper call completion progress,
and we'll go over this later about why this is such a big deal.
But essentially, it allows you to hear rings, busies, and intercepts,
which for some people,
that's a major problem with their VoIP providers.
The problem with NuFone is they're Michigan DIDs only.
DIDs are phone numbers.
So you can only get phone numbers in Michigan,
which is good if your parents live in Michigan
or if you want to call actually has unlimited long distance.
But for most of us, that doesn't do very well.
They're also not too freak-friendly.
They disabled caller ID spoofing during DC12 with Lucky 225 and Strom.
I believe Not Theory got a cease and desist order from them.
And it makes me to believe that they don't trust us for some reason.
I think they also turned off all caller ID delivery during DEFCON 13.
I heard that.
I didn't actually get a chance to play with that,
so I can't say that.
Yes.
Astrolink is cool.
Astrolink is other kind.
You know more about Astrolink.
Yeah.
Well, we were really, really happy with Astrolink until DEFCON happened.
So for the most part, they're reliable,
although for some reason lately they've been really jittery,
even with my own box.
We set up a system for DEFCON,
which we won't go into detail here because we don't have the time.
But we set up an asterisk-based schedule of the convention,
and we decided to use Astrolink for our carrier
because they said they would be more than happy to handle that much load.
And all of our calls became jittery.
And so the jitter problem continues.
I'm sure it will go away in the near future,
but for the time being it's jittery.
But up until DEFCON happened,
Astrolink was nothing but reliable for me.
So I'll sing the praises there.
They do their inbound via toll-free numbers,
and they deliver class of service,
also known as ANII digits if you want it.
And they also do proper call completion.
The only problem is the account management interface
is a little kludgy on their website,
but it's actually gotten better.
Kludgy.
Kludge.
Kludgy, kludgy, close enough.
I can't stand that.
Voice Pulse Connect.
Well, you don't hear me insulting Orge.
Yeah, I got away from that.
Leave me alone.
Voice Pulse Connect is cool.
Their pros is they have unlimited incoming minutes
on inbound EECS calls.
They're inbound numbers.
They have inbound numbers everywhere,
and they're the only EECS provider
that actually does this.
They have proper call progress because...
Does Astrolink have proper call progress?
Yeah.
I just did that.
Oh, okay.
I forget.
No, no.
Voice Pulse is the one that we don't like.
We'll get to them next.
But the problem is with Voice Pulse
is that they are the most expensive EECS providers
for outbound call termination.
How much do they cost?
Two point...
Two point, like...
Seven.
Yeah, two point seven nine or two point eight
or something like that.
Yes.
And meanwhile...
They're only three cents a minute.
Yeah.
And a new phone, for example,
costs two cents a minute.
And the next provider, VoIP Chess,
is going to cost one point three cents a minute.
And that's their major pro.
They're cheap.
Actually, I think they don't...
We got corrected on that.
I think it's like one point two nine cents a minute.
Yeah.
One point two nine.
So, yeah.
You pay a whole mil.
Yeah.
Shouts to Avid for that one.
VoIP Chat, they don't have incoming service,
so you can't get phone numbers from them.
Their caller ID delivery is unreliable at best.
And they don't have proper call completion.
So, please be sure about this.
I think I tried spoofing with VoIP Jet recently,
and it started working.
Proper call completion or caller ID?
The caller ID and the proper call completion.
In fact, let's do a little test,
since I've got my asterisk box in front of me.
Okay.
Let me see.
Let me do a disconnected number.
508-995-9972.
I like 310-Gladstone-4-9999.
All right.
Oh, wow.
It's so busy now.
Please try your call again later.
So, yes.
VoIP Jet now does proper call completion,
so you can hear...
Hallelujah!
...and whatnot.
So, disregard that bit on the slide.
And I think they now also do caller ID correctly.
Okay.
And our final provider tonight,
and this is basically where we're going to wrap it up.
We have more of this presentation.
I think we're going to have to break this over two parts.
Mm-hmm.
It's Broadvoice.
And the cool thing about Broadvoice
is that they have cheap direct number dial numbers
in most rate centers.
I got one in Boston.
From what we can tell,
they're run by phone freaks,
which is always a plus.
In fact, when you order their service
and you buy the hardware that they ship to you,
they also ship to you a little pin,
which is the Bell logo
with the no-smoking cross through it.
Which is kind of sad, but cool at the same point.
Yeah.
Yes.
So, the other cool thing about Broadvoice
is they have a 24-by-7 phone support,
so you can call them up any time.
And the coolest feature, in my opinion,
about Broadvoice is they have caller ID with name,
which all of these other caller ID things
that we were talking about,
they only provide caller ID numbers.
But this actually has CNAM lookups.
Mm-hmm.
However, the problem with them is that they are SIP only.
They don't support EECs,
which is something I always really want to like.
They're actually based in Massachusetts,
and I really want to just send them a resume
and say, hire me and let me set up your EECs setup
so I can use EECs with you.
But I should actually do that,
just for the hell of it.
Broadvoice is prone to service outages.
They had a nice...
Gee, Strom,
have you ever had a service outage with Broadvoice?
Oh, well,
my incoming number doesn't work right now.
Wow.
Yeah.
See, how long has it not been working?
I haven't really tested it,
but apparently this has been out for several weeks now.
Yes.
What's their response to you?
Their response to me when I called on Sunday was,
well, we are getting engineers to look at it,
and they will contact you.
Yes.
I heard someone say Broadvoice,
when they say that,
they're essentially saying,
I'm going to hide under my desk now
and hope you don't call back.
I think someone said that on the asterisk,
one of the asterisk lists.
And for the most part,
they also had a weekend
where they got into their fight
with Global Crossing,
and Global Crossing cut them off,
and no numbers were brought,
inbound or outbound.
That's annoying.
How would you like it
if your phone service dropped out for a weekend?
Their phone support,
while it's 24-7,
is slow at best.
I've waited on phone for hours
at a very odd time,
like 1 a.m.,
when I would think no one would be calling.
Apparently,
the phone rings,
and the guy kind of wakes up from his nap
and decides,
looks at the phone,
says,
maybe I'll get some coffee and a snack,
and I'll have that first.
I assume they're hiding under their desk still,
or something.
And while they have caller ID with name support,
sometimes it's just very flaky.
You know,
the slide point says,
you know,
will CNAM work today?
Not always.
Sometimes it just gives me this strange number
that's six digits long,
and does the same number with the caller ID name.
Of course,
you know,
sometimes it also says,
you know,
617-555,
Boston,
Massachusetts.
Well,
yeah,
but,
all right,
555,
it gives you a number,
and it just says Boston,
Massachusetts,
rather than the actual name.
So,
it's flaky.
Unfortunately,
I haven't had a day yet
where all the numbers come up as cat sex,
but if they want to play that practical joke on me,
that would be amusing.
That would be amusing,
indeed.
So,
anyway,
we're just going to sort of blitz right through this,
and we're going to continue this at some later point.
We'll have asterisk part two.
We won't do this next week,
just so you know.
We'll have some other topic for you,
so you can get back to computers a little bit.
What are we going to do next week?
The future of telephony?
I don't know.
I think we should have a computer topic next week.
Do you feel like a computer topic?
Strom is in charge next week.
You know,
strap yourselves in,
because Lord knows what he's going to do.
I'm going to be on vacation on the weekend.
All right.
Well,
I will have to think up a topic for next week.
It's either going to be some sort of computer topic,
maybe,
you know,
odd computer hardware stories,
because I've been dealing with a lot of sun equipment lately,
which is not PC equipment,
obviously,
or the future of telephony.
We may have telephones.
Okay.
Strom is a phone freak.
We never deny that.
Well,
I'm just thinking of things that will actually go over well.
Yes.
True.
We don't want to suck.
Yes.
So,
do you have any announcements?
Hmm.
Again,
Strom's music review.
Send in your song.
Send in your demo album,
and we'll play it,
and we'll give you guys a review,
and we'll get you guys in front of some listeners.
Because we're cool like that.
Yes.
Let's see.
Boston 2600,
my Boston 2600 group,
is trying to start an up-to-date list of current 2600 groups,
and we want to start having a way of coordinating things
with the various groups for hope and other things.
We're calling the project 2600 United,
and I think in a couple of weeks,
you're going to have a couple of my good friends on,
and we're going to discuss the various projects we have planned for hope
and try to stir up some interest for them.
Oh,
and the other thing I totally forgot about.
Speaking of that.
Well,
let me get the email address out here.
So,
that would be 2600United at gmail.com,
or you can join us on FNET,
which is the IRC thing,
and we're either in pound Boston-2600
or pound Boston-2600.
Your choice.
People are usually there,
and I'm usually there 9 to 5 lurking.
Just give me a couple minutes to respond,
because I'm at work.
So,
just drop us a line,
or you can just email me,
and I'll point you into contact with the correct people.
And you were saying,
yeah,
I forgot about,
TORCON is coming up in San Diego in a couple of weeks.
Oh,
when's that?
Do you have an,
let me pull up the date.
It's at
TORCON.org,
T-O-R-C-O-N.O-R-G.
The Schmoo group should say you should go there.
So,
that's all I know about TORCON.
Mm-hmm.
Well,
it's a two-track,
it's from September 16th to the 18th at the San Diego Convention Center,
and I will be there.
And I think Natas is thinking about going,
so.
Yeah,
Natas is definitely thinking about going.
Run into Strom and run into Natas in San Diego.
Mm-hmm.
Anyway,
Shouts?
I have Shouts.
I actually went into the IRC channel and asked who wanted Shouts.
So,
I have a Shouts the Ponyboy,
Emmanuel Bobstein,
Centro...
I think that was Emmanuel Boobstein.
Boobstein?
I thought it was Bobstein.
Boobstein,
I don't know,
whatever.
He's new.
I haven't seen,
I think the first time I saw him was today.
And Kyle L.
wants me to say that he's lame.
So,
Kyle L.,
you be lame.
You're lame.
Let's say it together.
Yes.
Kyle L.,
you're lame.
Yeah.
Whatever.
That didn't work so well.
We're lame.
Yes,
we're lame.
We can't coordinate.
Our closing music is a group called Nordbeat,
and I got this back from when mp3.com was active,
dear God.
It's called Nordbeat's Him,
and I actually went to their website today,
and they call themselves Nordbeat Trance Music and Software Company.
So,
I thought that was a hoot,
and I'll just try to give them shouts out for that.
Email,
as always,
at radioatbinrev.com,
and I guess we'll see you next week.
Same hack time.
Same hack channel.
And I'll see you next week.
Yeah.
And I'll see you next week.
Thank you.