Posts by Paul Campbell
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Hard News: The other kind of phone tapping, in reply to Gregor Ronald,
After the big Chch quake, our POTS landline with analog handset was our lifeline. Cell tower batteries died after 12 hours, phones died in a day or so, but the old school phone plugged on…
It used to be the cellars of telehone exchanges were lined in lead, and were in effect giant lead acid batteries - a really bad earthquake and you're going to see a particularly evil toxic spill. (I once worked in the old Palo Alto telephone exchange, it had been co0nverted to office space, thebasement was a colo space, the F DNS server lived there back when there was just one - we had to go through there to move stuff occasionally, it wasn't encouraged because of the lead residue)
Historically the 50v that comes down your phone line to power your home phone is called "battery".
Now days it probably just comes from your local cabinet, I have no idea how it gets there, once all the cabinets are fed with fibre, there are probably some batteries in there but not a whole cellar's worth
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just about everything use to run on relays - I remember being able to change street lights to "cross" by bumping the box the relays were in really hard ...... (in retropect that wasn't a smart thing to do)
Similarly back when we took the train to school we noticed that there was a rubber insulator between the rails at the stop/go light, when the train came there were sparks and the light changed .... one day we shorted it out to see what would happen - the lights changed, and all the trains stopped (not just the school train) all of them - we were late for school - next day there were railways people all over us asking questions ..... (in retropect that wasn't a smart thing to do)
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These days I actually make home telephone (VOIP) exchanges for a living, most of our customers don't realise that' what they have, 10 years ago I put one in at home (on the household web/mail server) and gave everyone a 1 digit extension, if you dial in you have to type the number of the person you want to talk to.
It's great because that stops 99% of telemarketers, we get one every other year or so.
It also solves the "what phone is ringing?" problem, (we kept our US number when we moved back to NZ) since the exchange answers NZ and US calls. I have a secret code that lets me bridge from one line to the other if I'm travelling
Before the kids went off to Uni I wired up their extensions to first ring in their bedrooms then to ring on the common areas of the house, and I gave everyone unique ring cadences - at one point my daughter was getting 90% of the phone calls, she had the short cadence so we could just tell her to answer the phone - everyone got personal voicemail too
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Living in the US kiwi visitors would often turn up with a bag of 1c pieces ... they were the same size and weight as US dimes but 1/20 the value ...... one visitor almost got arrested at the local BART station ("oops, I must have put the wrong coin in, I just arrived in your wonderful country yesterday") .... this is why parking meters used to have those little windows in them
I also remember Captain Crunch getting arrested for forging BART tickets, he'd simply recorded the mag stripe of a high value ticket on a cassette tape recorder and played it back a bunch of times .....
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I used to live in Waitati north of Dunedin in the 80s - we still had a mechanical exchange, and 3 digit numbers - to talk to Dunedin you could dial 2 followed by a Dunedin number, in Dunedin 22 got you to the Waitati exchange, 222222222222... quickly used up all the trunk lines between the two exchanges.
In (I think) 1982 the geriatric (alzheimers) hospital at the end of the street closed, one day we woke up to find soldiers marching up and down our street, and blocking off traffic at the end, the English SAS were in town for a terrorist training exercise (the Commonwealth Games were about to be held across the ditch), there were apparently 'terrorists' holding 'hostages' in the hospital at the end of the street ....... it was a full out exercise, they practised everything, they went into the local exchange and tapped all our phones .... how did we know? they weren't very good at it, we could hear them talking
some things never change I guess
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A friend who used to work in telephone exchanges told me that they could tell the noise that a manually dialled call made on the steppers that connected the call were different – it was common practice if you heard a stepper being manually stepped to poke it with a stick so the call was taken down
The same friend also claimed that the reason we have backwards dials is because some cheap-ass bureaucrat back in the 30s got a bunch of phones cheap back in the 30s because the dials were on backwards, it just wasn’t an issue until NZ got electronic exchanges, and STD to the rest of the world (all our numbers were backwards)
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Legal Beagle: The Northland by-election;…, in reply to BenWilson,
Yes, there is a new King In The North. Now, can he survive a season?
Winter is coming John
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Today's Tremain
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I don’t understand Manahiki or Tongareva being there but NZ or the Cook Islands not – maybe they’ve decided that if they send more stuff to low lying atolls it will hasten their sinking below the rising waters
(or maybe it just costs a lot more to get stuff to islands that only see a boat every 3 months – or simply dealing with “why hasn’t my parcel been delivered yet?”)
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Envirologue: 1080, "eco-terrorism" and agendas, in reply to Steve Barnes,
Really can’t figure this
neither can I - dollar bills?
