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 poem.
In your digital stance, getting firewalled ho, cause I'm riding the net in my six foe.
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. In a digital hug, you just caught the love bug.
I bootlegged your CD, I caused a fight between Un and Jay-Z.
Your CG, it's all gonna be free, whether we take it by force or we take it nicely.
You feel that rattling your bones when I tell you we just hacked out Jones?
And NASDAQ leaves you a 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 crew.
Serial code, source code, ISO, RAM, SIPC.
Hello everyone and welcome to Binary Revolution Radio episode number 134 for February 7th, 2006.
I'm Strom Carlson.
And I'm Black Ratchet.
And we, we, I'm not even sure who we have. We have, we have all kinds of guests tonight.
Yes, but our, our, our main guest is a very special guest for BINREV Radio.
The one, the only, well, Mark Spencer.
Actually, there are many, many other Mark Spencers as it turns out.
Oh yes, well, but, but, but see.
It's a surprisingly common name.
I can imagine, but see, the thing is, you're the, of all the other Mark Spencers out there,
you're the only Mark Spencer that matters.
Oh, thank you. That's very flattering.
Wow.
Who, who, who else do we have?
And we're, we're, we're, we're apparently talking to the, uh, Digium conference room tonight.
So, who, who, who else do we have in the conference room this evening?
Well, we have Junkie, uh, well, Claude Patrick, but he's generally, uh, at least until yesterday,
was known as Junkie.
And apparently, as of yesterday, is now known as Drunkie.
But, uh, also we have Matt Brooks, a.k.a. Chef.
Brookshire.
Or Brookshire, one of the others.
Uh, who is, uh, the, uh, main, like, internal development guy here for all the web stuff that
we have to have, order systems and all that.
Junkie, uh, is an asterisk developer that doesn't really work for us.
He's just kind of hanging out.
Well, I want to hang out at Digium.
I want to be cool like them.
Well, cool, we'll just come on down.
It's, uh, pretty cool.
Huh.
So, yes, we have all kinds of people this evening.
We're just going to talk about, it's going to be rather free-flowing.
We, the original rule of the episode was going to be, you know, we're going to try to stay
away from asterisk and stay away from, uh, game, but.
Yeah, because those are the, for those of you who don't know who Mark Spencer is, shame
on you.
Yes.
But, uh, for those of you who don't know who Mark Spencer is, he is the original author
of both Asterisk and Game.
Um, and I figured, hey, let's bring him on here, but since all he ever talks about everywhere
else is just asterisk and game, asterisk and game, let's talk about something which isn't
either of those two.
And, uh, so, the original intent, yes, is to try and do something which isn't asterisk
and game.
So, we'll start off on that, and then we'll see what, uh, what happens.
Judging from how we were talking before the show, uh, it quickly devolved into, uh, asterisk,
uh, game and, uh, voiceover IP.
So, yeah.
We, we, we don't know what actually happened, but it may happen.
Oh, and by the way, we are live tonight, so if you, uh, if you guys are listening and
you want to call in with your questions, our call-in number from the continental U.S., I
think maybe from Alaska and Hawaii, is 888-9-BINREV, 888-9-BINREV, and if you're calling from outside
the United States, you can reach us by calling area code 213, uh, country code 1, area code
213-415-1047.
And, and, and, yeah, we also have a new surprise for those of you listening live in the U.K.,
all three of you, because why are you listening to the show at 2.30 a.m.?
You, you, you're, you're pretty hardcore if you're doing that, but they are a dedicated
hardcore fan.
Do you have the number, or shall I?
Um, I think you have the number.
I don't have it in front of me.
Yeah, okay, I didn't know if you had it.
The, uh, the U.K. call-in line, uh, uh, graciously donated by, uh, uh, uh, I forget,
Sasser, Sasser, if you donated it, um, is a 0845-646-0102.
So, 0845-646-0102.
And he was, he was very courteous to, uh, give us one of our, his spare D.I.D.s, and, hey,
if you guys use it and he needs to call it for something else, we may just actually get
a real U.K. phone-in number for all your phoning-in needs from the United Kingdom.
Um, the, the one request that we do do, if you do call in, this, this, this is not
a show to diagnose your extension.com for your musiconhold.com for, how do I park calls?
Yeah.
No, ask, ask.
Troubleshooting, no tech support.
This is, uh, our, our 90-minute show, let's not ruin it.
We have the lovely, talented Dr. Zygman answering and screening our calls tonight.
So, hello, Zygman, wherever you are on the other end of our voice line.
Actually, Zygman's probably kicking himself because he didn't get the answer, he's not
going to get to ask all the questions he wanted to.
Well, he, he was, he wasn't, he, he was the one who was complaining about his, uh, lug
meeting that everyone was talking to Mark about their extensions.com.
Oh, yeah.
Sure, I'm sure, well, I'm sure Mark can tell us that story from his point of view, too.
Yeah, true, yeah, that's just, considering that he's right there.
Well, uh, I don't know, I mean, you go to different trade shows and you get different
kinds of, of, uh, questions that, that people tend to ask you, so, uh, there are a lot of
them that I, you know, it's kind of cool to get some technical questions every now and
then when, when I'm in that environment, um, because a lot of times, you know, you, you
kind of get the same standard set of, uh, of questions.
Actually, one of the, the coolest shows that I've been to recently was the Emerging Telephony
Conference.
Oh, yeah, the one up in San Francisco recently.
Yeah, exactly.
And, uh, and what really sort of set it apart was that, you know, I've always said, well,
if you build an open source, uh, you know, Asterisk platform, then, you know, there'll be
lots of people that'll come up with creative new applications for doing cool stuff with it.
Um, and at Emerging Telephony, it was cool to actually get to see that there were people
doing cool applications, like this guy that had the setup so that you could pay, uh, for
parking via your phone, putting in your credit card number and having little sensors underneath
the car that detect when you drive away and then it sends you an SMS with your bill.
Uh, that was the Spark Parking people.
Ooh, that's, that's neat.
Yeah, it was pretty clever.
And then there were some things where you could, like, leave these little audio blogs.
with a little sticker, so if you walked by somewhere and you had a story about it, you
could just leave this sticker that had a unique number on it, and then people could call a
main number and then enter in that sticker's number and then hear your story about that
place.
That sounds cool.
Yeah.
Oh, see, I, I just, I'm a great implementation stuff, but I just never have ideas, and I can't
think of these fun, exciting things.
I'm just a boring techie person, I guess.
Too boring techie person to you.
Yes.
And look at that, we're already talking about Asterisk.
Boy, that, that didn't take long.
So, how about that, let's, since this is rapidly devolving into nonsense, let's get into our
email theme.
Don't you think?
I, I think that's a good idea.
So, go right ahead.
Our first email tonight is from Anonymous, and Anonymous writes, Dear BinRev Radio, Episode
132 was quite enjoyable.
You guys are doing a great job.
Regarding Hawaiian telecom, Verizon Hawaii was purchased by the Carlyle Group, a loving,
caring, multinational conglomerate.
Verizon Wireless and Federal Services were not part of the transaction.
Again, great job.
Anonymous.
Anonymous, yes.
Ooh.
We've got anonymous people sneaking on here.
Yeah.
Well, thank you.
I did some search on this for a completely different reason.
I was, but I think, like, right after the episode aired, I was, I was looking at phoneswarm.com.
For those of you who don't know, it's, it's basically, it's a website that profiles a different
payphone that takes phone calls every week or so.
It's a different, a different payphone every couple of weeks or so, and it's, to the goal
is just get as many humanly, many people as humanly possible to call it, and just, you
know, talk to random people who answer it.
It's very interesting.
So, uh, phoneswarm.com, they're fun.
They actually link to, uh, Yappel, so I can plug them for that.
Um, and they, they actually profiled this phone in Hawaii, and I was adding it over into
Yappel, because that's what I, I like to do, and, uh, I, I couldn't remember if it was
Hawaii or Hawaiian telecom, so I googled the hell out of it, and I actually did find out
all about the, the Carlyle Group and Verizon Hawaii and all this approval nonsense and everyone
complaining that they're going to lose their telephone and everything's going to be horrible,
but so far, so good, I don't know.
Um, you, you were right on the money.
Interesting stuff.
Thank you so much for, uh, giving that information.
Um, and also, I just wanted to say to this anonymous person, uh, thanks for the compliment.
Um, you, you did sign anonymous, but I did see who it came from, and I'd just like to say
thank you.
It means a lot coming from someone like you.
Anonymous to our listeners, but not to the host.
Yes, exactly.
We know who you are.
We know what you did last weekend.
I actually know what you did last Tuesday, anyway.
We know what you did last Tuesday, yes.
I don't think it was last Tuesday.
He probably was listening in the archives, I assume.
Maybe he listened to live.
Hey, if you're, if you're listening, call on in.
We'll just, we'll just give you a shout there.
Yeah.
Anyway.
All right.
Our next email is from Ill Omen, and he writes, I assume it's a he.
Dear Black Ratchet and Strom Carlson, I've been, hello.
Oh, I think, I think, you know it's a bad sign, you know, okay, you know it's a bad sign
when, like, Digium just goes quiet on you.
Yeah.
Well, that's because I had to, I've got to run a quick test here, and so I was meeting
you so you wouldn't have to hear all this testing stuff.
Okay.
Well, yeah, the background noise went away, and I'm like, ah, what happened?
Comfort noise!
It's a comfort noise!
He's not feeling comfortable enough!
Sorry.
Okay.
That's the girls talking.
Never mind.
Dear Black Ratchet and Strom Carlson, I've been listening to the show for just over a month
now, and I love it.
Though I haven't had the chance to catch you all live yet, I hope to in the future.
During episode 127, Virtual Studio 2005 does not suck, you all, Black Ratchet and Not Theory,
talked about several phones, including the Sidekick, Q-Tec 8010, iMate SP3, and the now-released
Trio 700, and have a few questions.
Okay.
One, what's your thoughts on the BlackBerry device?
Two, what's your love-hate relationship with the sidekick?
Three, I've been thinking more on the Trio 650 or the Trio 700, both specifically on the
developmental features, the Trio 650 Java, Trio700.net.
For someone who tends to move from country to country, which would you recommend?
I don't want to have to purchase a new cell phone every time I move to a new country.
Four, overall, what is your all-time favorite cell phone?
Sincerely, Ill Omen.
Well, I fired this question off the Not Theory, but he's in the middle of some real-life things
right now, so he couldn't answer it, I guess, because he hasn't emailed me back yet.
Unless he emailed me recently, but I haven't checked it yet.
But I will attempt to answer your questions as best as I can.
Number one, your BlackBerry question.
BlackBerry's a nice, I talked to Natus, my resident BlackBerry expert, or our resident
BlackBerry expert.
He said, and I quote,
He then went on to say, apparently, that in CDMA, if you receive data and a voice call
at the same time, the CDMA gives a voice to the data, I'm sorry, gives data the priority.
So basically, the call would instantly drop to voicemail while you were doing some type
of data things.
I don't know exactly how that works.
He says that may have been fixed in the new version of the software, which is version
4.1, apparently.
He also said, if he had to find some type of fault with it, he said he didn't like the
free SecureShell client that it comes with, but the one that cost $90 rocks, apparently,
which I don't understand how anyone can charge $90 for a SecureShell client, but we won't
get into that.
Yeah, I know.
Tell me about it.
And the browser, the web browser, compared to the sidekick slash hiptop sucks.
As for number two, which is the love-hate relationship with the sidekick, both not theory and now
myself as well, I'm totally not digging the fact that the hiptop development process is
locked up tighter than a drum.
In order to develop on it, you need to get a developer's key, which is, I'm not exactly
sure what it is entirely.
I've never actually seen it.
It's just a string of numbers.
It is?
Yeah, there's like something you plug into your phone and there's some soft, you download
a different version of the software and I forget exactly what, but actually, I could talk to
one of my friends.
Apparently, he was a developer for the color sidekick.
He signed up for their development program, which was apparently very easy to get into
during the color sidekick, but when the sidekick two came out, that's when they started cracking
down on it because people started really messing with it.
Yeah, one of my friends who used to work for Danger actually gave me a developer key, but
I never used it because I wasn't sure whether or not.
I think I had just switched phones and I wasn't sure whether the radio software was working
correctly and I didn't want to void the warranty or whatever.
Hey, Strom, you still got that key?
Hey, hey.
Yeah.
Well, no, the thing is, I think it's tied to your device's IMEI.
Now that I've replaced the phone, I don't think it's going to work anymore.
Oh, that sucks.
That sucks.
As stated, it sucks.
It's incredibly horrible.
You have to sign your soul over to them with the official one.
I guess if you know someone who works at Danger, it's kind of easier.
Mm-hmm.
And also, if you do become a developer, you can't release your software unless it's through
Danger, the manufacturer, or the cell phone provider, like T-Mobile or Suncom or whatever
your cell phone provider is.
Now, if we compare this to, say, like a Windows mobile phone, or I assume BlackBerrys are like
this as well, although I'm not sure.
Basically, I can bang out a program after the show tonight, put it up on my website by
midnight, and at 1201, as soon as it's done uploading, you can grab it and install it on
your Windows mobile phone.
And it'll, you know, everyone will enjoy it and use it, and I'll become a hero, and I'll
be more famous than Mark Spencer.
Um, it's basically, the process is annoying, and basically, I never really started, I never
really started noticing it.
I mean, Not Theory pointed this out a year ago, and I just was never really into the whole
mobile development thing, but when I started really messing around with Visual Studio 2005
and mobile development, and just really mucking about with it, it was like, wow, I really wish
I could do this on my sidekick, but no such luck.
Um, as for number three, about the whole international country thing, um, I don't know, ask Verizon.
I don't think CDMA is supported at all over Europe or any other foreign country.
I know the sidekick, actually, you can take it to every country I look at it.
It's a tri-band GSM.
Um, well, yeah, but, I mean, GSM, but the, I believe the current, or at least the 700W
that's released now is, um, whatever it is, it's, it's, it's CDMA only.
Yeah.
I could be wrong.
Yeah, no, I could hear it.
There's, there's, there's one that's coming out with GSM.
It's coming out with, uh, Edge, and that, that's what they're trying to push for it, but.
Yeah, who cares?
I don't know.
Talk, talk to Verizon.
I, I don't think it'll support it, but I'm, I'm not going to go on either way on this.
I think if you might get a Trio 650, it could be supported better, because I think some
of those support GSM, but as of now, the 700s, I believe, only support CDMA.
Um, number four, favorite, uh, cell phone.
Um, I like my Sidekick, maybe because it's the best one that I've used, because it has
all the PDA stuff in it, and it's got a very bitchin' form factor.
Um, the phone that I previously had was a, uh, Nokia 5165, the candy bar phone.
Dude, those things rocked.
Oh, yeah.
I love those.
Those, those, those are like a nice, those are very nice, just like, it felt like a phone
when you were using it.
The only thing I didn't like about it is that if you, like, over, like, a year, the
battery would start to become so loose, you couldn't use it anymore.
Yeah, I hated that.
Yeah, and I, I, I went to, like, two batteries, and it truly drove me about batty.
Um, my also personal other favorite phone is a nice, one of the original Motorola StarTACs.
Um, those, those are, those are just, they just have a very nice tactile feel to them.
I had one of those in the late 90s.
Yeah, on, on the analog Verizon network.
Yeah, I, I don't think they ever made digital ones, did they?
No, they did.
They, they certainly did make digital StarTACs.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
I didn't know that.
Well, only the ones that I've seen were analog.
Um, so I, I guess if they're digital, I guess you can use them, but good luck finding them
now.
I, I don't think you'll really find any.
Well, I think also the major carriers are all moving away from TDMA in the first place,
so.
Oh, true.
Yeah, they're all TDMA, aren't they?
Yeah, they just think so.
So that's what I was thinking of.
Um, Tom, what's your favorite cell phone?
You know, I'm with you, Ratchet.
I love my Sidekick.
It's, uh, I mean, like, what's, what's interesting is my philosophy on phones for the longest
times has, has been, you know, simple as possible.
I don't need any extra features, except in the case of the Sidekick where it's all really
integrated really well and the interface makes sense and it's just really easy to use.
It's, it's, the, the only, uh, problem I have with the Sidekick is A, no Bluetooth, and
B, dialing is a smidge awkward.
Yeah, dialing, dialing's annoying.
But a Bluetooth does occasionally grab, yeah, yeah.
But apart from that, I mean, it's amazing.
I can't wait to see what to do with the third generation, or the Sidekick 3, not necessarily
third generation.
I don't know.
Personally, I'm going to seriously consider looking, whenever I get my new next-view phone,
which will probably be in about a year or two, honestly, um, I, I'm going to look at
something that's Windows Mobile-based, or Windows, Windows Smartphone.
And I'm sure people are cringing right now in the audience, but who cares?
I can just hear that, Windows, ew!
Yeah.
But, Mark, what, what, what do you use for a cell phone?
That, that, there, there's a question that's interesting.
If he's still there, he's still running his diagnostics.
Mark, wow, our guest switches were dropped off the map.
Oh, no.
Is anybody there at Digium?
Over.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, I'm back.
I'm trying hard!
Okay, so the question was, which, uh, phone do I use?
Yeah, which cell phone do you have?
I use, uh, the, um, Nokia 3650, also known as the birth control dispenser phone,
because of its unusual arrangement of buttons on the bottom.
Oh, yeah, it's got a, like, the numbers are arranged one to zero in a, in a circle.
Mm-hmm.
Right.
But not in the same place you'd expect to find them on a rotary phone, so that's like...
That is correct.
It, it, it kind of sucks.
And, uh, but I, I have to say, I also, uh, have a very surprising tendency to drop my phone.
True.
Yeah, I, uh, my, my, my, my sidekick one, my color, my color sidekick, not a sidekick one,
I don't think they actually ever called it one, um, was, was remarkably tough.
I dropped it, like, you know, two or three times from my, when my, my holster started
to go for that I had on my belt, and it would fall, it would fall out and hit the pavement.
And there, it was, there were some good gouges on there, but it continued ticking up until
the end, so.
I, I gotta say, it was pretty, it was pretty tough.
Yeah, I, I just had mine replaced because it stopped charging and started shorting out.
And, um, I am treating this thing like a baby.
So far, I haven't dropped it yet.
I haven't even scratched it.
I, I gotta say, I, I haven't dropped mine without it not being in the case, so.
That, that's what I'll say that as.
Um.
Next email?
Do, do, do you want to take a break from email?
Because we had a, we had, we have a call that's been waiting for a little bit.
Yeah, why don't we take this call, let me go grab this call, and you talk for a second.
Oh, yeah, I, I, I love when you just sort of drop off here and have to brother screen
the phone call.
So, do, do, do, do you, do you find the, uh, 3650 awkward to dial, or did you,
did you just have to get used to it?
Um, even as long as I've had it, it's still somewhat awkward to dial, but the biggest problem
is that it's very difficult to send SMS driving, messages while you're driving a stick shift
using that phone.
I, I would think that driving, sending SMS messages while driving a stick shift would
be difficult with any phone.
It's just especially difficult with that phone.
All right, we have, uh, Lord Drakkenblood on the line.
Hey, how's it going, gentlemen?
Hello, hello.
Pretty good.
Doing well.
You had some questions for Mark, didn't you?
Yes.
Uh, I was curious what the coolest hack you've seen using Asterix has been.
Um, ooh, ooh, that's a tough one.
Ooh, deep mystery time with Mark Spencer.
Hmm, yeah.
The, the, the finger motions here.
Um, sort of the Dr. Evil.
Um, the parking thing was kind of cool.
The whole idea of, like, leaving little stickers and being able to call in is kind of cool.
Um, there's some people that have done some voice changers for Asterix, so that you can
call somebody and change your voice.
Um, which is a heck of a lot neater than all these silly Ford Your Color ID stuff.
Um.
What else?
Uh, what else?
There, there's just a lot.
I mean, the parking thing was cool.
Um, someone had, I made Zork work using Sphinx 2 and, uh, and Festival.
It, I, I wouldn't say it was, was flawless, but it was still kind of cool that they tried
it.
Wait a minute, wait a minute.
Does this mean someone actually got Sphinx 2 working on Asterix?
Uh, well, not exactly.
What they did was, uh, they, they just, uh, how can I describe this?
They took, they recorded what you said and then used the options for the record so that
when, when you stopped talking, it would just finish the recording.
And then they would run an AGI script which processed that using Sphinx.
Uh, and then came up with a response which was then, uh, they called, uh, uh, I think
they used either Festival or Kepstrol to then re-render the audio to send back to you in
the prompt.
I gotta say that, that, that, that, that's a pretty good, that's a pretty good hack right
there.
That, that's, I'm gonna, I'm, I must actually look into that.
That, that's pretty neat.
That was a good idea.
I would not have thought of that.
Lots of people would not have thought of that.
Yeah, for, for, for, for those of you who don't know, Sphinx, Sphinx 2 is a voice recognition
technology and it's, I, it's open source, I believe.
Sphinx 2 is, yes.
No, I haven't actually used it, so I don't know how, how well.
I, I, I tried, I tried to get it working with, um, Asterisk and failed miserably, but then
I felt good when I actually started researching it and found out that no one has gotten it working
with Asterisk.
Or like one person in southern Indonesia.
Yeah, I, I, I haven't tried it yet.
What we should really do is, like, I should get on my friend at, at, at Tell Me Networks
and get him to give me some sort of access to their voice recognition stuff.
They should, they should open source Tell Me.
Yeah.
So, hey, when are you gonna open source Tell Me?
Uh, what?
So, do we have any other questions, Lord Dracom?
Um.
Whatever it is.
I'm, I'm sorry, I can't pronounce your name.
What?
Blood.
That's okay.
A lot of people have problems with it.
The other one is, where can I dig up some information on that audio blog the guy's running?
I've one, been wanting to hook up something like that similar, and if I could track down
some information on it, it'd make my life a little easier.
The, well, um, it was, it was at, uh, NYU, uh, I don't remember their URL, but they've got
a special, um, program there, which I'm trying to remember the name of now, which is basically,
uh, uh, they called it a, uh, uh, um, a study program for the recently possible, which I thought
was kind of an interesting description.
Um.
Um, there were some other projects there, like, uh, one called, uh, Gum Spots, where they
were, they have a setup so that you can send, um, like, take a picture of the sidewalk around
NYU with your cell phone, and it will use the location of the Gum Spots to identify where
you are.
Oh, interesting.
Wow.
That, that's...
Wow.
Uh, but that one didn't involve asterisk.
But I don't remember the name of this other one.
Well, what we can do is we can, we can either search for it and have it towards the end of
the show, or we can just announce it on next week's show, so.
Yeah.
We can actually have some real honest-to-goodness housekeeping.
Holy God.
Yeah.
Instead of just, like, uh, yeah, I beat off six times this week, and, uh, uh, uh, uh,
uh, yeah, we don't, you know, I don't want to know that.
Ah, la, la, la, la, la, la, la.
Only six?
Oh, come on, you're slacking, man.
Yeah, yeah, usually.
I've already done nine in the last hour.
Usually more like 14, anyway, um, what's, uh, any other questions for Mark?
Or for us?
Um, I was just curious on your guys' take, I guess, of, uh, one of the hacks I saw using
asterisks, where a guy could call his asterisk box and would dump his,
call, call him back and then dump him to a dial tone to where he gets pre-calling through
his cell phone.
That's, uh, actually surprisingly common.
That's called, uh, callback.
Um, so, yeah.
I think more of the X10 stuff and dialing MP3 is a little more unusual, but callback systems
have actually existed for a fairly long time and surprisingly actually predate asterisks.
Cool.
Well, it's become, it's become a lot more, I mean, a lot of the stuff that you do with
asterisk is new to a lot of people because a lot of people just didn't have the platform
to do this, ever.
I mean, the entire, the, it, it, it, it, it's allowed a lot of people to really level
the playing field with, um, like, like, they, they don't need to like, you know, drop like
$2,000 on this killer PBX system that can do all this.
It's, you know, I have a Linux box, I have a network connection, ooh, let's go get into
VoIP.
Which is basically how I got into asterisk, which was really scary.
I'd have to say, uh, asterisk has definitely sparked my interest in freaking, so, I'd have
to definitely say thanks for that, for opening a new realm of interest for me.
Okay.
Cool.
I'll, uh, uh, there's no right answer to that.
There's no good answer to that, so I'm just going to not say anything.
Um, uh, gosh.
Oh, don't tell, don't tell me Mark Spencer doesn't like phone freaks.
Uh, well, no, I mean, I, I wouldn't quite go that far, but, but there's certain things
that, uh, I mean, well, let's see, I'm certainly not a proponent of, of stealing, uh, service.
So, yeah, I suppose I could get there.
Well, most of the stuff, most of the stuff that I see it with, it's, um, like, the person
I was helping out with this actually just this week, he has a free inbound on his Nextel,
so what he wanted to do was just, you know, call a phone number, have it hang up, and
then have it call him back so he gets free incoming, which technically isn't stealing,
it's just being a system.
Right, so I, I have no problem with people who find clever ways to utilize services that
they have, uh, appropriately, you know, paid for and negotiated, right?
I mean, that's, if you think about it, voice over IP is, a lot of that is really about doing
toll bypass.
It's just, I mean, I think, when people say phone freakers, sometimes that, you know,
I, I guess people think of more like blue boxes and, you know, systems like that where
you're, uh, discovering vulnerabilities within, uh, the telephone network.
Wow, so we just, we got, we got heavy and deep here with Mark Spencer on Bind River Radio.
Yeah.
Sorry, I feel like I was a little downer, you know.
Oh, no, I mean, everyone's entitled to their opinion.
I mean, it's, it's, you're, you're very much in line, I think, with most of the other people
who are listening, so it's no big deal.
It's kind of like, it's kind of like the term hacker.
Don't feel like you're a horrible person.
Hmm?
Yeah, it's kind of like the term hacker.
It's just been kind of, it's, it's been damaged to the point that, you know, I, I can't even
go out and, and call myself a hacker because people misunderstand what that means, um, sort
of getting back on slash off topic, you know, KEOPS was one of my other programs that I wrote
that, that never really gained a lot of traction and got a maintainer, but, um, it isn't in
several books, but it is apparently called a hacker tool, even though that was not what
it was intended to be.
I mean, it was intended to be a cool tool for discovering your network, but of course you
can also use it to discover random networks, especially back in 98 before firewalls were
particularly prevalent.
Oh, God, I remember when, like, you know, there was basically just this giant, just vast
expanse where everyone just had no clue about security.
It was amazing.
Just, just, the, the, the stuff that the internet has become, oh, well, we're, we're, we are kind
of drifting, so we're, we're drifting on topic, but we're drifting off topic from email,
so let's just address the last two, two or three emails that we have.
Right now.
While you're doing that, I'm going to try and experiment, and if I lose you, I'll call
right back.
Okay.
Look at that.
We're doing asterisk hacking right on the radio show.
That's, that's how hardcore Mark is.
All right.
Thanks, Lord.
All right, gentlemen.
Thank you for calling in.
All right, gentlemen, you have a good day.
You too.
Have a good evening, man.
Yes.
All right.
To be honest, I, I, he, he was, he was very quiet.
I didn't even know he was still there.
Yeah, well, seriously, if you're, if you're, if you're on the, if you're on the talk, just
feel free to talk in.
You don't need to, you don't need to, you can interject, you can talk, you can do whatever
you want.
I mean, we're, we're, we're, we're very, we're very, every, when you're calling in,
you're, you're very much an equal.
Don't, don't just think you have to sit back and listen.
Oh, yeah.
If you're, if, you know, just interject, talk, you know, you just interact with the show.
That's what the dial, that's what the dial, that's what the call in is for.
Mm-hmm.
All right.
Email is from Stacksmasher, and he says, I used to love it when you played stank audio
drops, like nothing wrong with a protein shot to the face, yakety yak yak balls, and my
first, my personal favorite, e-motherfucking-leet.
Thanks, and keep up the good work, Stacksmasher.
Well, Stacksmasher, you know, do you, do you want us to do that some more?
I mean, we're, we're always looking for new stank sounds.
Mainly, much the chagrin of a stank, I would assume.
Um, you know, hell, if you, if you want, make your own soundboard of, uh, just clips from
the show, you know, if you really want to have, you know, Strom and I and, you know, various
forms of guests, you know, Dr. Zygman, Not Theory, whoever.
However, just, you, just hack them on up, hack the shows up, and email them on in, you
know, just, the one thing that we do request is, uh, don't send it to radio at binrev.com,
um, just email them directly to me, and that would be blackratchet at blackratchet.org.
Or Strom Carlson at gmail.com.
Oh, yeah, or Strom Carlson, yeah, I didn't even think of that.
Ha, ha, ha, yeah.
Um, we, we can both handle larger attachments than, um, radio at binrev.com can, so please,
K, thanks.
So, guys, since, uh, Allison, by the way, I, I, I talked to her, and she couldn't call
in, I, I do have some new Allison prompts that, uh, have just gone into aster sounds that
I, I thought I could share with the, uh, with the group, so whenever you want me to
insert a random Allison sound, just let me know.
All right, cool, yeah.
We, we'll do two more emails, and then we have, um, we have a caller holding on the line,
so.
Okay.
Let's see.
Hello.
Or if you want, just sort of, just fire the random, uh, stuff back in.
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
Our next email, our next email, our next email is from someone named F, and, uh, he says,
hello, bin revolutionaries.
Your show brings me great joy on a weekly basis, and the most interesting aspect, apart from
hearing the insults and puns, is discovering new and old programs with an in-depth perspective.
I wanted to tell you this in person,
so I tried your call-in line from a Canadian payphone
to test out your number yesterday while waiting for the bus.
It sounds like it won't go through from here
unless your number is only active during your showtime.
Can you guys get a Skype or other form of VoIP access to call in?
You would hope number six this summer, F.
Well, okay.
Strom, I think this is thoroughly in your jurisdiction,
so I'll just let you answer this one.
The 888 number does not work from Canada.
That's why we have the 213 number for you guys to call in.
I'll actually fetch at my IP provider
and see if I can't get them to open it up to calls from Canada.
And as far as a VoIP call-in, I guess I can experiment with those,
but I guess what I'll end up doing is we'll have, like,
the main call-in number for our listeners in the continental U.S.,
and then we'll have a page you can go to
to see all the other call-in numbers or all the other call-in options.
We should, like, get, like, a call-in number from, like, every country.
You should get, like, one from...
Because there's, like, free...
There's free DID providers in, like, all kinds of crazy countries in Europe.
If you're in a Zergevon, come home.
Well, like, how many does...
You know who we're talking about.
The man with the 15 numbers.
I guess we can drop his name on the air.
You know, how many numbers does Bill have on his computer?
Oh, I forget how many numbers Bill has.
Yeah, he has, he has, like...
A friend that we know has about...
I gotta say, he has probably around 20 free DIDs on his asterisk box.
And it's from...
He has, like, stuff from Italy.
He has a number from Poland, one from Germany.
I believe he actually has one from the UK, if I'm not mistaken.
But, um, just...
He has, like, phone numbers from everywhere.
It's amazing what kind of DIDs you can get.
So, I assume one from Canada has to be around there from someplace.
Our, our, our wonderful neighbors from the north.
Oh, yes.
All right.
Next one.
Hey, guys, I have two things to say.
In the chemistry portion of episode 133, you mentioned BR.
It's bromine.
It becomes bromide when it forms a compound with a metal element.
That is called binary molecular compound because it consists of two elements.
Without chemistry teachers, my chemistry teacher is great.
I suspect that he is an alcoholic because he has a box of Smirnoff in his room.
Nice.
Woo-hoo, Smirnoff!
I, I like Grey Goose, but, uh...
Anyway, on episode 132, you guys mentioned a Yugo.
It was very out of context, but I was surprised that anyone outside of Eastern Europe would know about them.
Of course, I know about them because I grew up in Eastern Europe and my family actually had one.
It was a pretty good car.
I also have one question.
I have heard that some people give away hardware such as hard drives, servers, cameras, etc.
for people in the scene.
Do you know if anyone is interested in donating hardware to people who do free media,
such as your show, Hack TV, or my show, Broken Floppy TV?
If so, can you please hook me up with some links?
Thanks, guys.
Keep up the great work.
Not signed.
Personally, I've heard of you.
I think you've heard of a Yugo, right, haven't you, Strom?
I think I, yeah.
I actually saw one on the street in Vegas one time.
I've never actually seen one in person.
Well, if you want to see what they look like, go rent Drowning Muna.
Yes, yes, that's the only place I have ever seen one.
I've seen it in that movie.
I wasn't going to admit watching it, but I guess if you brought it up, it's okay.
I mean, I've never actually seen one in person, but they're very infamous for just sucking.
They're sort of like, you know, the Eastern European version of the Pinto.
If I remember correctly, I was making the case that, basically, I just think I made the case that
something sucked and I used the Yugo as a comparison tool.
Still, people have heard about them.
It's not too uncommon.
Yeah, they were sold in the U.S. from, like, 86 until the early 90s, I think.
Exploded.
Yeah, they did explode, didn't they?
I think they did.
They definitely weren't known for their fine workmanship.
As for the free stuff, personally, I would recommend the free stuff portion of Craigslist.
That would be craigslist.org.
You can go to your various, it's basically, it's an online WAD ad, and if you haven't heard
of Craigslist, you know, come out of your cave.
Craigslist.org.
Yeah, it's all over the news now.
So, everyone's there, and it's really sad, because it's really going downhill, but we
won't get into that.
Since it's free, it won't be grade A material, but it still will be free, so free is good,
right?
Also, I mean, dumpster diving is always overlooked when people want free stuff.
Just keep an eye out of company dumpsters, colleges, your CS department at your school.
Dumpster diving is always a good place to find stuff.
It's going to need some tender, loving care, but you can definitely do it.
I mean, I picked up a nice little Deck Alpha out of my university, and various forms of
other pieces of interesting hardware that I really don't remember much about now, but
at the time, they were very cool.
Of course, this was 1999 or so.
Yeah, well, I love using the free stuff section when I have something that is too nice to
dump, but too crappy to sell, and I don't want to take it all the way down to Goodwill,
so I just put it on Craigslist, and then they come to me.
It's awesome.
Yes.
All right, we've got...
I always do the Salvation Army route myself, but I don't think we have a Goodwill up here.
Oh, yeah, what's your caller?
The Goodwill is closer to me than the Salvation Army, so...
Anyway, we have MDCowboy on the line.
Hello, MDCowboy.
Hello, Strom, and...
Yeah.
So you had a question for Mark, didn't you?
Yes.
I was wondering, do you actually...
I suppose...
Do you actually get down and dirty with Asterisk and game, or do you just lead it, or what?
Well, I haven't worked on games since, like, 98, 99...
Yeah.
...as a developer, but I do...
I still do development on Asterisk, certainly.
And...
I do a lot of the driver stuff.
I still do some of the features.
I did the video voicemail stuff most recently.
I did support for H.264.
I did a bunch of Meet Me stuff.
And a lot of people don't know it, but I'm actually very involved in the design of the Digium hardware, too.
So, like, the TDM 2400 was sort of my brainchild.
Yeah, I remember you told me about that card, like, months before it came out, and I wasn't allowed to tell us all.
That's right.
So, what, you do hardware hacking, too?
Yeah.
Yeah, but mainly digital stuff.
I'm not really an analog guy.
So, I tend to...
My hardware designs tend to be very indicative of the fact that I'm a computer programmer,
because they tend to be very software-centric.
And I'm a big fan of VHDL, and use it very extensively to really do sort of odd things.
I'm sorry to say I have no clue what the heck you're talking about.
VHDL.
Oh, VHDL is this hardware description language.
And there's also Verilog, which is also very popular, kind of a Python versus Perl kind of thing.
And, basically, it lets you describe a circuit in something that looks sort of like a programming language,
and then you use special parts called CPLDs or FPGAs.
And then it creates this digital circuit that you've described inside of the part.
Ooh, I'm looking at that.
But, that sounds...
Maybe I can design hardware.
Maybe there's hope for me yet.
Just sort of make it as a programming language, and you can do it.
Well, I've been working on my solder foo recently, so...
Yeah.
I can't solder for the life of me.
I never used to be able to.
I guess it's a learned art.
I don't have steady hands.
That's my issue.
Ooh, yeah.
That'll kill you.
Didn't you have another question, Cowboy, about the...
Please listen carefully, as absolutely none of our options have changed.
I couldn't resist.
Yes, uh...
There was a moment of silence, and I thought I would break it.
Nice.
Very nice.
Okay, Cowboy, I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
What was your other question?
Yes.
My other question was, since you do actually do programming, I suppose you use some kind
of Linux distribution.
I was wondering what you use.
Oh.
You're going to be so disappointed.
I can already tell.
I hope you're sitting down for this.
No, I am a proud Fedora user.
Uh, and I am about the only technical person at Digium that runs Fedora.
Everybody else basically runs Gen2 or something other than Fedora.
But, but I'm pretty much a Fedora person.
Yeah.
I tried that Fedora junk.
That's all I can say.
Well, no, Bill uses Fedora, too, so.
Yeah, well, he does.
He's pretty Linux-y, so.
Well, the thing that, you know, Gen2 is real popular here.
And when I was in London, I took out the, a bunch of Gen2 developers, and we got rather
trashed on, not very much sleep.
But anyway, so, you know, I have nothing against Gen2.
But personally, if I'm watching something compile, it better be asterisk, zaptel, or libpri.
You know what I mean?
Those are the things that I want to be watching compile.
Are, like, the Red Hat asterisk, or no Red Hat, Fedora RPMs for asterisk, like, bleeding edge,
because you're just constantly checking it out of CVS and compiling it?
No, I'm not really involved in any of the packaging.
I just use it as my desktop.
Another sort of bizarre thing, those of you who have ever used any of my graphical applications
know that I always write code in using GTK, and that's because I am a big C fan and not
a particularly big fan of C++.
But I actually do run KDE as my desktop.
Really?
See, that's something I didn't expect.
Yes.
So I run my GT, I love writing GTK apps and running them under KDE.
You just like pain, don't you?
Yeah.
You like Fedora.
You like running GTK under KDE.
Hey, maybe we can bring them to the bondage ball this weekend in Los Angeles.
Oh, God.
I can bring that cat of 25 pair.
Oh, the cat of 25 pair, yeah.
Yeah, I'll bring my cat of 25 pair.
Oh, man.
You heard it here for us.
Not only does Mark Spencer run Fedora, he also runs KDE, but develops GTK apps under it.
That's correct.
These are the good questions.
These are good questions right here.
How do I make asterisk answer in my phone?
Oh, hey, Mark, how do I make asterisk answer in my phone?
Yeah, I knew that was coming.
No, I'm just kidding.
All right, cool.
Do you have any more questions?
Goodbye, Digium Tech Support.
Wink, wink.
Do you have any more questions for us or for Mark, MDCowboy?
Not really.
Well, sweet.
All right.
Well, hey, what does the MD stand for in your name?
I have a question for you.
Well, yeah, I was kind of thinking about that, too.
I don't know.
I was just kind of like modern-day cowboy because I live out on the couch on a farm and whatnot.
I thought you were a giant mini-disc fan.
No, I'd rather go with the CD.
And I like Mountain Dew.
I just got this image of him now, you know, riding on one of those automatic bucking bronco things and going, yee-haw, 8-track 3.
Actually, when I was at Linux World out in, I guess it was in San Francisco, the last one, I was amazed to see that there was a company there that had like a 20-by-20, and there was not actually a booth.
All there was was a mechanical bull and some pliers.
That was Black Dog.
Yeah, it was Black Dog.
But I guess it worked because Matt remembers them.
Hey, that's what it is.
I mean, that's what marketing is right there.
Mm-hmm.
You've got to get people to remember you.
Yeah.
Well, we'll give MD a nice little prompt here, you know, so for thanks.
All our agents are busy reprogramming the phone system to make sure you can never actually reach them.
I love that one.
Asterisk is fun.
I didn't even remember that.
We've got to send that clip, Hello, Noobs, back to the gym.
Oh, man.
Oh, that would be awesome.
Yeah.
Oh, no, I don't think I ever told you this, Mark.
No.
During our asterisk talk at DEFCON, we had a demonstration of the different ways you can get voice prompts into asterisk.
So we had the three ways were record them yourself, do some sort of text-to-speech, or have Alice and Smith record them for you.
So we had kind of like the, what was it, the speak-and-say?
Yeah, I called it speak-and-say-A-G-I.
Yeah, speak-and-say-A-G-I.
Okay, so the first one, it says, Black Ratchet.
Yeah.
So the first one, it goes, Black Ratchet says, Asterisk is cool.
Yeah.
I think an asterisk is fun.
Yeah.
Asterisk is fun or something.
Yeah.
And then the second one says, Cepstrol says, Oh, baby, give it to me.
Yes.
And the third one is, Alice and Smith says, Hello, noobs.
I'm trying to find it.
I used to have it.
Yeah.
Actually, one of my ideas was actually, I always wanted to make a Cepstrol sex hotline.
And they'll have like, you know, 1-800-Cepstrol.
Oh, no.
It's like just Iron Bay.
Oh, that's so awesome.
Well, you know, they've actually just released a new version of their stop,
and we're hoping to have some official asterisk packages of it soon.
Oh, cool.
But they've got some new voices in there.
They've got a whisper voice and something else.
They have some other new voices that are available, so.
That's cool.
Awesome.
Well, hey, MDCowboy, thanks for calling in.
Indeed.
This is your first time listening, isn't it?
Oh, yes, it actually is.
I'm kind of new around this BinRev website.
Awesome.
Well, we hope you...
Where are you located, if you don't mind saying?
I am in Indiana.
Sweet.
Okay, cool.
Gary, Indiana.
We're in Alabama.
Alabama.
That's what everybody says.
That's how much fat is in here.
Hello, noobs.
There we go.
You've got to send me that.
That's awesome.
I have to ask someone permission, because that's where I get it from.
And I'd just like to send a shout-out to Doug once again for sending that to me.
Thank you, Doug.
Well, sweet.
Thank you, MDCowboy.
Thank you for calling in.
Hope to hear more from you in the future.
Yeah.
Sweet.
Have a good evening, man.
Yeah, man.
You too.
See ya.
All right.
So, we're moving on to personal hacking stories now.
Is the other person still there, or...
Which other person?
Oh, on the call-in number?
Yeah.
Yeah, let me take a look.
Well, I guess you guys talk amongst yourselves for the time to be.
Yes.
I'll give you a topic.
A guinea pig is either a guinea nor a pig.
Thank you, Strom.
Yes, the entire point of the Hello Noobs was...
We partially...
We wanted...
Not we.
Doug wanted to get Allison Smith to say that,
and basically he had to come down, write out the text,
and then had to write it out all phonetically for her.
Which was very interesting on my thing,
because, you know, we're just used to all saying all these type of crazy terminology,
but when you actually get someone who's not used to speaking it,
it's kind of interesting talking about it.
But Allison Smith came through and recorded this wonderful intro for the voice bridge that we were on.
That was running on asterisk.
Cool.
Yes, and apparently, uh, Strom is interviewing the heck out of these people.
Yeah, I guess that other caller hung up.
Oh, what a shame.
All right.
Hey, personal hacking stories time.
We're, like, never going to get to our main topic.
We're already, like, almost an hour in.
We're only on personal hacking stories.
Well, this is sort of very, we're getting Collins,
this is sort of, like, you know, free-flowing with Mark Spencer and the rest of the Elite Digium crew.
Yeah.
You guys are so 31,337, it's not even funny.
You will be connected with the next available agent.
However, if they don't feel the connection, don't expect it to work out.
I love Allison.
Yeah.
And she will say everything.
Well, except for one word.
Except for one word.
Except for one word, yeah.
There is one word.
All right, Strom, what have you been doing this week?
Oh, boy, I have been playing with my new logic analyzer.
You have a logic analyzer?
Yeah, I bought a logic analyzer, a USB logic analyzer,
that I've been using to analyze the connections between a smart card and its reader.
Oh.
So that's been kind of a fun learning experience.
It's like, I've never used a logic analyzer before,
so I've been kind of bashing my head against the wall trying to figure it out.
Last time I used a logic analyzer was 2002 when I was in college,
and I still don't know how to use it, so.
Last time I used a logic analyzer was last night, actually.
About this week.
But I have one of the HP ones.
Oh, HPs are nice.
Yeah.
That was like the best buy I've ever made, actually.
The best buy we've ever made was we bought like a color HP logic analyzer off of eBay
for like $350.
It's like 50 grand new or something like that.
It's like unbelievable.
That's a pretty good skill.
Awesome.
Oh, yeah.
And after we got it, we found out that it actually can connect up to an X Windows server,
and like you can run it entirely remotely.
That was sweet.
That's amazing.
If you're working on something in the lab, like, you know, next building,
you can safely do it from your office.
So when you have that bomb coming in, you know,
you can just sort of hook up the logic analyzer to it,
then pull up an X term from across the street?
Well, yeah, something like that.
Just roll with it, man.
Just roll with it.
Thanks to our friends at the NSA, this call may be recorded or monitored.
In the interests of national security.
Okay, it's time to do that one.
Okay, just these are going into the asterisk distribution, right?
They're already in the asterisk sounds out of SBN trunk.
Oh, I am so grabbing them right after the show.
Yeah.
I feel another one coming on.
Yeah.
Well, just pretty much whatever there's silence.
But I'm trying to, like, let us have a conversation in between
so they're not totally, like, you know, just one after another.
Oh, yeah.
I have to go in for the not funny enough.
So, Mark, what have you been messing around with this week in your personal stuff?
In my personal stuff?
I don't know.
I'm, like, it's so blurred between work and play.
He doesn't leave.
I rarely leave the office, yeah.
Yeah, every time I talk to him, I pull up his webcam, and it's like,
you're at the office?
Yeah.
I'm, like, you're in the conference room.
You can't look at your office right now.
Darn it.
I thought it would be cool that everyone could, like,
look at the Mark Spencer webcam right now and see him live on the radio.
Well, I can walk in there, but the phone would have to stay.
Oh, wait.
No, I can do it.
Hold on.
Wait, is he walking in there now?
Yes, he's in there.
Oh, actually, what's the URL?
I don't even know.
It's marcocam.com.
Marcocam.com, yeah.
Marcocam.com.
There he is.
I see the side of his body.
Yep, I'm right here.
Woo!
There he is.
Yeah, be sure to change the face on the robot.
Let me, let me, re-center it.
Hey, he's wearing his Linus is my homeboy shirt.
He's smiling.
As everyone just sort of flocks to marcocam.com.
Yeah.
Yeah, there you go.
I wonder how many people we actually have listening to our show right now.
That's a good question.
Let's find out.
It's GDP hacking.
So, what have you been working on?
Well, let's see.
I've been working on, let's see, one project that we haven't announced yet, so I can't really
talk about that one, and I've been doing some hacking on the VPN100M, which is part of the,
it's the hardware hacker cancer for the TDM2400P.
And that's been my project so far for the last few days.
And, yeah, that's about, more or less it.
How about hacking on the TDM400 so it's cheaper, so people like I can afford it?
Yeah, I said it.
One of these days.
Oh, man.
Not soon enough.
Well, give it some time.
Nah.
I've been giving it tons of time.
It's been like a year and a half.
Damn it.
Everything's supposed to halve in price every 18 months.
That's what more is.
As for myself, I talked a little bit last week about Suitsat, and also they talked about
it on the, off the hook on 2600.
Suitsat, Suitsat, I wouldn't say it failed miserably, but it definitely did not function.
But it failed happily.
It failed happily, yes.
It was a learning experience.
That's how people try to pass off failure.
Oh, it was a learning experience.
Suitsat got shoved out of the airlock on Friday, I'm not sure what the date was, last Friday
at 5 p.m. Eastern, and for two orbits, it worked like a charm.
And fortunately, I believe those two orbits really, it was a majority of ocean when it
went over.
And after those two orbits, they couldn't hear it anymore, which was very disappointing,
and they thought it died.
But as of right now, actually, I'm going to go pull up the website, and I'll just make
sure that it's still working.
It's transmitting, however, it's transmitting very weakly, and unless you have a very good
antenna, you are not going to hear it, or you are unlikely to hear it.
Yeah.
And actually, you can...
Hey!
Get your hand out of the Red Bull fridge!
Right.
Okay.
We're going to have a Mark Spencer soundboard after this.
It is still orbiting.
Apparently, what it is, is I'm just going to...
The original frequency you're supposed to listen to it on was 145.99 megahertz, but actually
what they're doing on the International Space Station is they are rebroadcasting it on 437.8
megahertz, which is the downlink for the International Space Station.
So, you are going to be able to hear it, hopefully, maybe, we hope.
Just listen to it over the next couple of days, because I believe the actual time frame was they
expected it to last was about a week, but we don't know exactly what's going to happen
with it, because everything's sort of gone out the window, because it started failing.
So, they expect to have another one out in 2007, so hopefully that one will work well.
Uh, they actually think what happened was the batteries froze, or possibly something came
loose inside this, uh, space suit.
Are they going to try and retrieve it and do, uh, forensics on it?
Um, no, it's going to burn up in the atmosphere.
Oh, charming.
And if it lands in your, um, front yard, hey, you get to keep it.
Yay!
Free Russian space suit.
Or a pre-Russian space cinder.
Yes.
No, as of two hours ago, it is still transmitting, just so you know, and this was, uh, that would
be 8.31 p.m. Eastern, and it was picked up by someone in Europe, I believe.
Um, suitsat.org is actually, they have, they've plotted it all out on the, uh, on the map, and
who's here in it, and who hasn't, and all that kind of wonderful stuff.
So, and it is.
Um, the other thing that I've been working on is I've been working on, um, wonderful GIS
mapping with, uh, on Windows, which is always fun.
And I, I just want to plug this project.
It's, uh, tinyurl.com slash 876bravo7.
I, I lightly mentioned it last week, but we were sort of rushed for time, so I, I plowed
right through it.
Um, it's called Sharp Map, and it's basically, it's this, it's this one guy out in Germany,
and I believe, I, I believe actually he's younger than me, which is kind of depressing.
Um, and basically he has wrote, written this open source GIS, uh, library for .NET and C
Sharp, uh, for Windows all by himself, which is just absolutely amazing.
And, and it's, it's, it's just a wonderful project, and it made a lot of things that
I needed to do insanely easier than I thought they would be, and I, I just want to send shouts
out to them.
And I've actually, I, I, I've sort of become the default op into their, uh, IRC channel,
because I'm the only one there 24-7.
So basically I'm the one who keeps the, uh, little at symbol by his name the entire time.
So, that would be, uh, it's, uh, Sharp Map, uh, take a look at it.
If you're very interested, if you ever want to map in Windows, or do some type of mapping
or statistical analysis via GIS, uh, just look at that library, it's pretty good.
And those are the two things that I've been doing.
I actually need to, uh, listen to a suitsat pass on that other frequency, Ian.
Cool.
So I think in the...
So now, now we're actually getting into specific show topics.
Yeah, with only 25 minutes left to go on the show.
We've only weaved in and out of it the entire night.
Yeah, we have.
Uh, actually we have, we do have one more phone call, which is completely off topic.
So do you want to take it?
Can we take it out of the way first?
Yeah, sure, why not?
Eh, okay, I'll see if it's still there.
See, and run.
So yeah, suitsat's fun.
Um, I, I, I'm, I'm really hoping that I'm going to hear it before it actually, you know,
goes dead.
Because I, I, I basically got out at 10 a.m.
And I listened to, uh, I had to wake up early on Saturday.
I was very disappointed.
And, um, I, I sat out in my car with my, my mount antenna and I listened for it and heard
nothing.
And I was very depressed.
But if they're, um, what, but what basically the, the new frequency that I gave out is the,
uh, International Space Station is listening for it and also retransmitting it on a different
frequency, so their transmitter is more powerful and they're only like two miles away from
it in space.
So they should be able to hear it better than anyone off on the ground could.
Um, good stuff.
So, in the interest of better customer service, this call, ah, hell, listen, if we were interested
in better customer service, you wouldn't be listening to a recording.
Ha, ha, ha, ha.
I wonder if anyone actually uses these out in the field.
Well, actually, that was the topic of one of my, my talks.
Because, um, we didn't used to use Voice of IP for our incoming 800 number.
We used TDM for that because, like a lot of people, we were just afraid of using Voice
of IP across the wide open internet in a real business environment.
And then one day, someone discovered an extension, uh, on our, on our phone system.
Uh, and, actually, let me see if I can play it for you.
I, I hadn't planned on it, but, I'll play it for you.
Hold on.
And then, it'll be like, you know, Mark, Mark Spencer's Pornhouse After Hours.
Let's see here.
Hold on just one sec.
I'm going to try to do this.
Let's see here.
Hmm, oops.
It should be two.
You're listening to Typing Radio Live.
Thank you for holding.
Your call is very important to us.
Please stay on the line.
You are the, I'm sorry.
You're not the next caller in line.
In fact, you are so far down the list, it's actually likely that we won't get to your call
today.
The next human voice that you might hear on the other end of this line is probably going
to be the cleaning lady at 11 o'clock tonight, noticing the phone is off the hook.
She'll pick up and go, hello, and that's, that's the best we'll do for you today.
I'm sorry.
I have to be honest with you.
You are not the next caller in line.
Hang up now.
Live your life.
Spend time with your children.
Don't stay on hold.
You are not the next caller in line.
I love that one.
I was mouthing the words along with that as you played it.
And so, with that prompt, someone sent out one of those emails that people on ALL tend
to forward to, like, everybody.
And those people would, in turn, call their friends and tell them to call our toll-free
number and dial that extension.
And so there was this massive number of calls that was coming in, like, you know, several
hundred an hour, coming across our toll-free line with, you know, PRI with all these people
calling this extension that had this message on it.
And we basically had to move to Voice RIP, and then people didn't really mind, and so
we kept it.
That's awesome.
This is Behold the Power of the Internet, right there.
Oh, yes.
Exactly.
Into our web.
All right, so since we're actually going to get on to it a little bit, so, Mark, tell us
about Cheops.
The entire, okay, let me preface this, actually.
The entire point of the show was, I was just amazed at the sheer fact of the amount
of software that I used in my, I guess you could say, Linux career that Mark wrote, which
was, I was going through your website, and I was going, oh, God, I remember that.
And I remember that, too.
Oh, wow.
And it was just kind of, I always knew him as the person who wrote game, and now I knew
him as the person who wrote asterisk.
And it was just, like, kind of weird how much stuff you actually wrote that I remembered.
So, one of the programs that, at least I always thought it was cool, was Cheops, or how do
you actually pronounce it?
Che-ops.
So, so, so.
It's like Cheops.
I don't know.
I always picked it up at school, Cheops.
Che-ops.
Yeah, exactly.
So, so what is, what is Cheops?
It was a network user interface, or a NUI, with the idea that what you could do with Cheops
was to give it a range of IP addresses or a domain, and it basically would either go out
and LS the domain, get all the hosts, or go with the IP addresses, and then would go identify
all of them with KSA, which was a precursor to NMAP, and it would put up little icons
for each of the systems based on the operating system that was there, and then you could
right-click on it, and it would port-scan it and give you the services that were available,
so you could, like, just right-click and go SSH, or, like, right-click and go web, and
it would bring up a web browser pointed to that particular machine.
So it made it very easy to see your network.
And then you could hit Control-M to map it, and it would use TraceRoute to show you how
all the machines were connected together.
So it was just a really convenient tool for exploring your network and being able to access
machines real easily.
And people used it a lot.
It was even, in the early days, it was more popular than game in terms of the number of downloads,
but game garnered maintainers, and KEOPS really didn't.
And when I moved on to Asterisk, KEOPS really didn't go anywhere, and there was a lot that
needed to be done, like the SNMP support could be improved, and, you know, it needed to be
updated to use NMAP instead of KSO, and, you know, a lot of other stuff like that that
needs to happen.
But fundamentally, I think it was kind of a cool concept.
I got a bit, but when I first stumbled across it in, like, you know, 99, 2000, to be honest,
I don't remember when I did, like 99, 2000, thereabouts, I was just like, wow, this is
the coolest thing ever, and I, back in, like we said before, back in the days without network
security, no one actually knew what the hell was going on in their network.
I did wonderful works of the entire, my entire corporate network where no one knew what the
hell was going on.
Oh, that's fantastic.
In fact, one of the people that I work with here, Malcolm Davenport, KEOPS is how I found
him, because I was running KEOPS on the local LAN network at the dorm I was in, and I was
like, wait a second, there's another Linux box.
How is that?
And so I went running around looking for a Linux box.
Actually, to be honest, I, I, we, we met somebody like that at my dorm, my freshman dorm, who
was running Linux as well, and like, I just got into Linux, and I got, I, one of my friends
also just got into it, and we were doing all this kind of stuff, and we were playing with
Samba, and when you did the Samba client, it would say, um, you know, Windows NT, whatever
it is, or like, it's a, you know, Samba, whatever, and we connected to the server, and we said,
oh my God, this person's running Samba.
So we tracked this person down to say, wow, you're running Linux, and he said, wow, you're
running Linux too, and.
And it was lovely.
It was, it was wonderful.
We actually, we stayed in touch during freshman and sophomore years, but then he dropped out,
and we never really heard from him again.
Then my friend dropped out, and I never heard from him again, so.
So I have a funny Samba story.
When I was a co-op at a fairly large telecommunications company with about 1,500 employees, okay, one
day we came into the office, and nobody in one entire wing of the building, so like half
the, half of the employees, right, 750 people, could not log in to the Windows network.
It would just immediately reject their login.
Oh God, I didn't know what happened.
And the entire staff of, entire IT management was running around with this little fluke network
meter, trying to figure out the source of the problem, and came running into my office
saying, hey, it's your Linux box, isn't it?
And I was like, uh, no, I'm not even running Samba.
But then I ran an SMB client, and I was able to track down that there was a machine.
That was running Samba, and went and found it, and it was that, one of those old, do you
guys remember those little alpha 533, or not 533s, the alpha like 133s that were really
popular for a long time?
So someone was running one of those, they were basically like a 486, and he had Samba running
on it.
And his little alpha, his little miniature alpha, was answering.
He had configured it for the same domain, which would have been okay, except he also turned
on domain logins.
And it was answering all the requests faster than the multi-processor Windows NT server that
they had.
So before the NT server could authenticate, then he was saying, nah, nah, you're not a user
on me.
So it was pretty funny.
It's amusing.
Yes, I do actually remember hearing stories about that.
As soon as you said, no one in the entire wing of this building could log into the Windows
network.
It's like, oh God, somebody turned on domain logon support and made themselves a domain
master.
Yep.
Exactly.
Please select your home music.
Press 1 for Led Zeppelin.
Press 2 for Kenny G.
Press 3 for Eminem.
Press 4 for Weasels.
Press 5 to hear me endlessly lifting digits you could press.
Press 6 for fingernails screeching down a blackboard.
Press 7 to hear a click.
Hum, a ring back, and that bell woman saying, if you'd like to make a call, please hang up
and try again.
If you need help, hang up, and then dial your operator, followed by really loud beeping.
Oh God, she talked about corn breath.
That's our nickname for her.
We're sorry, the number you have reached has been disconnected.
Or, telephone service has been disconnected from this number due to telephone being disconnected.
Yeah.
Yeah, Evan Norbell had some master tapes of her, and he sliced her up to say that.
But yeah.
Ms. We're sorry.
We're unable to personally answer your call right now.
We call her corn breath.
Lacking a better name for her.
Because no one knows who she really is.
Yeah.
Do, do, do, do.
Yeah, but she was the voice.
When AT&T was re-standardizing all the recordings in the early 80s to get the SIT tones on everything,
they used her.
So that's why she's bloody everywhere now.
Wow.
So, let's think, oh, that'll be Allison one day.
You just watch.
Oh yeah.
I'm hoping, we're hoping.
That's our dream, to be honest with you.
Because we're phone freaks and we have strange dreams.
That Allison becomes the next Jane Barbie, as it were.
Cool.
If I ever get an AIS machine, I should make Allison say all the digits.
Well, unless, of course, the original magnetic drum is intact with Jane on it, then in which case...
Oh, of course, yes, yes, at which point you won't do anything.
That's funny.
All right.
Well, we just sort of lightly touched on geops, which was really going to technically be our main topic,
but I think this was a relatively good show.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
I guess if any of you listening out there are interested in maintaining geops,
Mark, why don't you pitch this?
Oh, yes.
If anyone out there wants to be maintainer and, like, seriously has some skill,
then, well, like, send me a patch that does something interesting, like convert it over to end map,
and then if it works, then you can be the maintainer, and I would be very happy and would go, yay,
and maybe I'll get Allison.
Oh, and I bet we can get Allison to record your answering machine message.
This call may be recorded and put up on our website for other customers to laugh at.
Oh, good old Allison.
That's what people should do, I think.
These prompts, by the way, were inspired by Brad Templeton, who sent a list of these,
and Allison was kind enough to do them all.
You've seen Allison in business, don't you?
Yeah, well, she certainly gets a lot of business through the Voice website.
Because you can buy prompts with basically anything you want,
and actually have Allison record them through the Digium website if you go through to the Voice.
Like saying, hello, noobs.
Exactly.
All right.
Announcements.
I still have the old announcements from last week, and I deleted those, so...
I don't think there's any announcements.
Well, SCALE is going to be this weekend in Los Angeles, Southern California Linux Expo,
and actually, not only will I be there, but Mr. Spencer will be there as well.
That's correct.
From what I understand, yes.
Are you going to be at Linux World Boston, Mr. Spencer?
Mr. Spencer.
That sounds so weird.
I don't know.
I think I might be.
I have to look at the conference calendar, but I think I might be speaking there, actually.
I don't know.
I think I might be speaking there.
I don't know.
Oh, no.
I wish.
I can't wait until I'm that popular, and I can say that.
You can look on it.
It'll be on the digital book.
One of the things is that I sort of transitioned to this point.
At first, the way it starts out is that you have people that kind of help you with things
like figuring out where you need to be and so on, and then at some point, that whole relationship
changes, and you realize that you basically have handlers that tell you now where to go
and where you have to be, and that just, you know, I sort of come into work, and I'm like,
okay, where am I going this week, you know?
Where do I have to be?
So it's a very different kind of relationship than the way it starts out.
Yeah, it was so weird.
When I scheduled Mark to be on the show, I just hit him up on AIM, and I said, hey, do
you want to be on our show this week?
And he's like, yeah, I'm pretty sure I'm available, but email my assistant instead and have her
verify everything, because I don't even know what my schedule looks like anymore.
Right.
We're trying to get Zimbra up and running, though, so once we have Zimbra up and running,
then hopefully I'll get to have a little bit of say in my own schedule, because then I
won't have to conflict with whatever everybody else puts down for me.
Hmm.
Have you guys seen Zimbra, by the way?
Zimbra?
Yeah.
Z-I-M-B-R-A.
No, but I had a coworker once named Zimbra.
No, not exactly.
It is actually an Exchange drop-in replacement, protocol-level compatible with Exchange with
an AJAX Web Outlook look-alike.
Free as in B or free as in speech?
Free as in speech, and it's really pretty amazing.
Of course, it's AJAX, so if you have a slow web browser, yeah, you'll want to use POP and
IMAP to connect up to it.
But it's got calendaring, it's got email, and it has a pluggable interface where you can do
cool things, like it can recognize a FedEx tracking number or UPS tracking number, and
when you mouse over it, it'll, you know, tell you what its status is.
So it's pretty nifty stuff.
You can mouse over an address.
If you go to Zimbra.com, they have an online demo you can go through.
That's Z-I-N-B-R-A?
I'll have to check that out.
Correct.
Z-I-N.
Let's see if I can remember.
Z-I-N-D-I.
Zebra, indigo.
Mike.
Bravo, Romeo, Alpha.
Bravo.
That's R.
Romeo.
Romeo, I just said.
Romeo, yeah.
Zulu, India, Mike, Bravo, Romeo, Alpha.
Thank you.
Oh, here's a question for our listeners.
I would love to find out.
We were debating about whether or not you could create the entire phonetic alphabet using only expletives.
And I could get no farther.
I couldn't come up with a good one for E.
So with that thought, we can let our listeners work on it and see what they come up with.
If we get that assembled, we will read the whole thing on the radio show.
I guarantee you.
Who will?
I will.
I will personally read the whole thing on the radio show.
All right.
We'll have a swearing episode.
We do nothing but curse the entire time.
All right.
So, Scale, do we have any other announcements?
Because they're just kind of running out of time.
Not that I can think of.
There's OSBC in San Francisco, too, the very following week, which I'll be at.
But, so, yeah.
That's the open source business conference.
Other than that, I don't know what else beyond that.
Eventually, there's Vaughn in San Jose.
Lots of stuff out in California.
Yay, California.
Well, because it's winter up in there.
I just can't understand why there aren't more voice over IP conferences in Alabama.
It just blows my mind.
Well, what drives me nuts is there's no hacker conferences in Boston.
I mean, heck, that actually kind of makes sense.
Yeah.
Ooh.
MIT, we've got all the smart people up here.
But, no, no geeky conferences up here.
Hell, we just got Linux World.
We've got five minutes left.
And we have Vaughn coming up in the fall.
Yes, we have Vaughn coming up in the fall, too, which I'll be attending.
Site of the week, we're going to go with the Sharp map again, which is, hold on.
I completely lost my URL.
I said it early in the episode.
Just go there.
Email radio at binrev.com.
Mark, do you have any shouts out to people?
All of the Asterisk developers out there.
Thank you.
I really appreciate all the help that we get.
For people that go and develop with Asterisk and post their patches
and put up with how long it takes us sometimes to get the more complicated ones in,
I just really can't express enough my appreciation for all the help that we get.
How long it takes to get into fights with JerJer on the Mantis system
about saying that my patch does work, yet he doesn't believe me.
And it was his fault that he wasn't downloading it correctly.
But we will get into that.
And I especially want to say I'll throw out some greets to BJ from Birds of the Word
for sending us that awesome Red Bull fridge.
And then I think, let's see, Matt, do you have any greets you want to get?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, we definitely want to thank the makers of Red Bull.
And girls.
And not so much the girls.
All right.
Well, I'll send shouts out to you, Mark.
Thank you for coming on.
It was a very interesting episode.
I'll give it that.
Yeah, well, it was fun.
Yeah, it was fun.
It was interesting.
We get to hear all the new asterisk prompts.
Their premiere party on BinRev Radio.
Shout out to Allison Smith for recording all that awesome stuff.
Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely.
All right.
Live agents are ready to assist you.
To reach one, enter the 53rd through 69th digits of the cube root of pi.
We got to have her on the show at some point.
Yes, we totally should.
All right.
Do we have any Spanish speakers out there?
I'm sure we do.
Because I do have one Spanish one, which he did.
Play it up.
And then we'll go into our closing music.
All right.
If you don't want to talk to anyone, do not press number two.
As I understand it, the translation is, if you speak Spanish, you know I'm really not saying anything.
Press two.
All right.
So our closing music this week is something from OC Remix you downloaded.
Mega Man 3 something or other?
Yes.
Mega Man 3.
Oh, shoot.
I'm completely drawing a blank on the title.
I'll figure it out.
It's somewhere in my bookmarks.
Mega Man 3 something or other.
Yes.
Mega Man 3 Remix something, something, something.
So we will see you next week.
Same hack time.
Same hack channel.
I'll be right back.
So we will see you next week.
See you next week.
cleaner pens molto.
Thank you.