He's plugging the handset from an old school telephone into some sort of device with handset shaped grooves! it's like seeing someone patch a cable in some old movie with operators, or in something you'd see in a hacker movie. I have no idea how this works, is it based on tones that come through and there is a mic that interprets those tones into bytes of code? Is this just maybe for the dude to remember not to hang up the phone and lose his internet connection?Either way, it seems surreal and as a computer scientist I'm curious to know how the hell that thing works or what the purpose is, because it seems awfully inefficient!
I originally saw this on Jeff Pulver's blog post here.
It used to be illegal to plug in unlicensed telephone equipment on the Bell network in the US. This is a hack to get around that. It works the same as any modem, except it uses speakers and microphones rather than using the analog signal directly.
ReplyDeleteSee also "The Carterfone Decision".
haha wow, that is something! Thanks for letting me know! And thanks for subscribing to follow me on Postrank :D
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