I broke IKEA (2023)

[twothamendment]

Long ago I got a Psion Series 5. One feature was that it could dial a phone number (output the DTMF) for you. Messing around I've day I realized a contact could have a very long phone number. This was also back in the day when answering machines existed and many had a 2 digit code you could punch in to get into the menu from the outside line.

My contact called Answering Machine had a very long phone number that got me into more than one answering machine. Once in, it was fun to change their outgoing message. One friend was convinced that I must have climbed the back of his apartment building to get in the open 3rd story window to change the message. That would have been cool, but a string of DTMF was much easier!

[hibikir]

Back when international phone calls were a real thing, messing with answering machines that had default settings was a typical fraud vector. People would change the message to say 'I accept' a couple dozen times. Then, they'd lace a collect call with a third party payer, pointed at said answering machine... which accepted the charges. Just not best done from one's home phone, as sufficient charges pointing to the same number would risk attention.

[greggsy]

This is basically what Rupert Murdoch did throughout the late 90’s and into the 00’s, minus the message changes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_International_phone_hacki...

[Fnoord]

I remember there was a KDE application for KDE 1.44 allowing the same. It was called Kphreak, or something like that. This was end 90s.

[skykooler]

I read the text first, then listened to the audio, and was shocked at how good that transcription is.

[buffington]

I know! I thought all the jibberish was just to be silly, but no, it visually looks like the wave forms of the audio.

[wrs]

As someone who’s had some incidents with DSP code, the end of the recording sounds like it may be playing some part of memory that isn’t an audio buffer. I wonder if there’s actually a “DTMF injection” possibility here…

[iforgotpassword]

You can hear the windows XP message box sound right before that. Which surprises in two ways: a) they're still using windows XP (ok well we still do too at work for some appliance from the power company). b) it seems you're not hooked into the machine via some modem or virtual-something over lan, but something that connects to the sound card, otherwise I've no idea how system sounds that always play on the default card would end up in the phone call. That means there's one machine handling one call at a time.

[jensenbox]

There may be secrets in that audio - actual passwords and whatnot.

[isoprophlex]

That Windows alert sound in between the glitching binary-dump-as-audio sounds was just too funny.

[darkwater]

Off-topic but TIL about CoHost and Anti Software Club [1]

[1] https://antisoftware.club/

[sneak]

It’s really impressive how overbroad and subjective the cohost terms of service are with regards to what you’re allowed to post on your own site.

Why does every microblogging platform now feel compelled to insert moral and social commentary in their site rules? What happened to the poster being responsible for the things that they post? We don’t blame the telephone company when people say bad things on phone calls.

[sva_]

I dig the aesthetics of that website.

[throwanem]

I'd love to know how that PBX is set up.

[buffington]

From a comment on the blog post:

> iirc it's generated from a script in asterisk, with the delay and tone durations set "short" (I think it was the minimum EIA/TIA DTMF mark/space numbers, not sure.)

> My phone system was Google Voice, through an SIP bridge with Obihai (now defunct/discontinued). Asterisk then made the SIP connection and rang my other phones, a Lucent Partner ACS for my landlines, cellphones, ATAs and forwarding numbers, also over SIP.

> Most of the hardware was lost in the housefire last year. This recording was from early-mid 2020 or so.

https://cohost.org/sirocyl/post/2891449-i-broke-ikea#comment...

[0xC0ncord]

I was thinking the same thing! I don't get spam calls often but when I do I really want to punish them for wasting my time.

[Severian]

Haha, awesome. Would be good to get the uncompressed audio, I bet you could decode that binary stream into bytes.

[volemo]

The recording has got to be compressed on the voice machine itself, so no hope in getting the clean version — it (most likely) doesn’t exist. :(

[hoc]

That modem comms sound is IKEA's backhacking attempt. Much more advanced than touch tones.

Beware!

[Kalabasa]

I like how they can animate their posts in this cohost social networking site. (See the transcript section)

[SigmundurM]

Checkout the "css crimes" tag on cohost, there's some pretty cool stuff there! https://cohost.org/rc/tagged/css%20crimes

[jakedata]

...and I hope you've learned to sanitize your DTMF inputs

[baby_souffle]

Is it too late to ret-con the name of john draper / captain crunch to bobby dials?

[jasonjayr]

Little Bobby Tables strikes again!

[bandergirl]

I always sanitized my DTF inputs, as my last tests failed.

[apimade]

I wonder if those sounds are they sounds of bits/byte data. There’s some regularity to it so it’s likely somewhat structured.

[wackget]

Website doesn't like it if you block third-party content (using uMatrix). It loads and then disappears a few seconds later.

[Dwedit]

Working fine here with uMatrix (actually nuTensor), are you auto-blocking the first party content too?

[pmontra]

Works for me. I enabled the 1st party and cohost.org rows plus the css and images columns. Maybe it's because of another addon?

[BlueTemplar]

Works fine here.

[RichieAHB]

The last 15 seconds sounds like it hit the runout groove on the IKEA phone system vinyl!

[pavel_lishin]

I'd love to know what actually happened back there.

[iAMkenough]

Brilliant. Thank you for sharing.

[bowsamic]

This feels extremely legally risky

EDIT: I'm getting downvoted. I think people have gone to prison for a lot less than this, at least in the US, please be careful and playfulness is not a legal defense

[MSFT_Edging]

You're not wrong. I wouldn't be surprised if someone at Ikea got mad and pulled up some laws from the phreaking days.

[Karellen]

I wonder if it makes a difference that Ikea called them?

If you call someone and yell at them to go fuck themselves, there's a pretty good case for that being harassment. But if someone calls you and you tell them to go fuck themselves, well, that's a different story.

Similarly, people who initiate dodgy requests to web servers are clearly up to no good.

But if you're a web admin and happen to host a zip bomb at `/wp-admin`, only serving it out to people who specifically ask to be sent whatever happens to reside there - even though you've never advertised that URL's existence - is it really your fault if they can't handle the resource they contacted you and asked for?

[sidewndr46]

You're correct. At a minimum this would be a federal crime under the CFAA if you are in the US.