8 Bit Underground

… well I sort of hate that I have posted TWO things now that I haven’t been able to wrap the post around the header image. I thought the rectangular image looked pretty good though and no a gob of glare so i figured i would leave it be.

2023 sure didn’t bring much to the blog. I have to admit that’s out of pure laziness as i have actually done more that i could have shared that i didn’t.. this is 1 part, i lost my co-hort in -breaking, binjinx. Pretty sure he just got tired of me and ditched me and changed his shit, though for all i know he could be dead. Hope the later is not true. Secondly i kinda like the idea of the juicy stuff being shared with others who i know without a doubt are doing the work too.

Enough about all of that nonsense though. 2023 is halfway over and i have several projects at hand.

All of that being said, this is a continuation post of my pre-summer post with the kewl header graphic. As you can see, I have the artillery at hand plus several things you don’t see (One made by Novation, one made by Dialogic), and one little nugget in white that I am pretty excited about seeing what all it can do.

So while this is really just another tease, if nothing else I wanted to make sure you fuckers knew i was still out here running my fingers across your pairs with the buttset up to my ears – hearing all of yer 411!!! 🙂 muahhahahahahahah

More soon.

In a bold, shocking new move b.8bu.com, we create a message post that does not conform to the typical text wrapping of the message around the image as every single other post has up until today. why? because I thought the header image so cool that I did not want to make it so small as to be unreadable. where did it come from you may ask – i will leave your googling skills to make that determination.

this post is simply being shown as an appetizer on an upcoming series i will be doing that discusses various devices and how they work as far as telephone number analysis (scanning, call progress detection, dtmf creation/generation, etc). most interesting to me at least is that the review will include several “telephony devices”, not just modems. i will use the first device reviewed to develop the framework for te others. hopefully real life stuff will allow me to do this before summer gets here.

as an added bonus i will be.doing these reviews using several methods of connectivity (magic jack, sip providere, aix providers, etc).

so i’ve been a busy little bee lately. 3 sip accounts, 1 iax account, my always present magicjack account, gvoice, and skype. i installed a usrobotics usb voice modem which parrot linux (surprisingly) picked up and iwar works just fine with it i’ve got my cnam provider all picked out for pre-scan recon, blah blah blah….

it occurred to me this evening that i do not have an analog phone… i mean i do, but of course i cant locate the power supply nor the cradle to handset curly doo cable either. so i started noodling around on ebay – hopefully i was going to find a cheap siemens giga-set like i used to have but no such luck. of course after browsing for a bit i found a few things that looked like they would do – and then my head came back around to the modem.. why do i need a speakerphone if i’ve got a modem? not just a modem but one that will work just fine going through my *bluetooth* speakers via parrot os linux? of course – I couldn’t find a phone cord to make my dreams come true with proof. thats what tomorrows are for! stay tuned *mothafuckaaaaaa*.

well time most certainly flies when you’re on the run.. bonus points to whoever can tell me who said that line and what movie its from…. yes for the one or two of you who still may check this blog or perhaps stumble across it, i am still alive. quite a few things have changed as of late – my long time hacker buddy binjinx went off and disappeared which kinda left me stagnant for a bit until i stumbled into a bunch of like-minded people who run some super cool systems. lots of hand scanning going on via multi-user campaign. pretty much everything i could have hoped for and i’m learning some things i didn’t know on top of it all. wardialers.org will be fleshed out with further content very soon.

as far as the blog goes – i’ve gotten a bit of a burning sensation to start writing a little bit again so the blog may come alive “again” (like it was ever really alive to begin with) with some old school nods and text pr0n galore. hah! if anyone truly does see this blog anymore drop me a note saying so – it will make me feel like updating it often and sharing my witty banter if i know someone else is seeing it.

welcome to not only 2020, but also welcome to warm weather 2020 which will surely also lead to miserable heat and potentially deadly thunderstorms. just my kind of weather.

some things have transpired over the past year or so in a positive manner as far as subjects relevant to the 8bitunderground. first of all discord and reddit have both been good places to meet like minded folks – search and ye shall find!

wardialers.org has gotten a few cosmetic/organizational updates this month and i will be adding more items to it in a big way. with covid-19 keeping us all at home i figured i will take the time to update 8bu related things so here we are. i’m very hopeful that 2020 will find me in a mindset to really get wardialers fleshed out with content and also hope the blog will be a bit more updated over the coming year as compared to the previous. all of you can help immensely by dropping me feedback.

so for now…

— eat your cereal with a fork, and do your homework in the dark.

summer 2019… siiiiigh….

so a few things actually going on. http://www.wardialers.org will be growing as of this weekend – make sure you check out the update.

I’ve also gotten into reddit a bit as well as discord and have phone a few cool sections as they pertain to the subject matter of this blog. i will be adding those morsels to the links section of both sites before this coming Monday as well.

more than that, a few folks and I are working on a couple of interesting projects that I think the *community* lol will be happy with. sorry to be so vague but until I start seeing some fruits of the efforts I’m not going to reveal too much……

again, check back in a few days for more updates both here and on wardialers.org.

So here we are the month of the Turkey and on the cusp of the month of the tree. As usual I’ve been kinda bummed out and since reading “Exploding the Phone” I’ve really wanted more Phreaking related stuff to read. 

So I stumble upon this… 

First of all its a book about Draper. Secondly it mentions “The Charlie Board” which sort of seems like the super early predecessor to the much lauded (and rightly so) Apple Cat.. This is good. Its very good as I am extremely interested in “The Charlie Board” and possibly seeing some of that early code written for it.

The writing is not unbearable by either Draper or Fraser. Its actually very passable.

Some of the content though… The whole “someone found the plug and wrote code for the Charlie Board while I was walking in the woods with kids and it scanned 10,000 exchanges” or whatever.. No.  I guess with the drugs that were going on back then it might make sense that memories would not be clear and I have had a bout or two of that as well myself… There were just a few “Lets get this over with” moments.

The other thing that bothers me a little bit is that it seems like that about the same time this book came out we started seeing the Cap’n Crunch whistles on ebay for $33333,30… It would really make me feel ashamed if I found out that there was some kind of money making scheme put in play by Draper… 

Other than those few quirks, its phreak candy and just really interesting going back in time sort of like Exploding the Phone did. 

I think if I were to vote between the two books I would probably call it a tie. Exploding the phone went way more technical – but BTLBB was more entertaining. Reading the two right in a row would be a wonder weekend in phreak land.

Regardless of any comments thank you John Draper and C Wilson Fraser for the book. 

Just a link…and a pic…

as we approach the month of extreme sunburn, fireworks and hangovers, i will be approaching all of you with something new. at this point the most i am going to say is that there will be a new/parallel domain name, push to get the forums more active and a reveal of the hard work i have been doing research wise on many fronts. the past few months have been relatively bountiful, but it has also been about me being a bit more focused on this project than i have been in quite some time. i don’t really see much communication from people showing interest in 8bu directly, but there are signs in many places that lead me to believe that my words and efforts truly are getting to the hearts and minds of a few people.

regardless of interest from others – visible or not – its way past that now. this has become bigger than me needing to see that others are interested. if nothing else this site and its resources have become my personal notebook. a way to keep a past that i treasure alive and kicking.

as time progresses, we get further and further away from dial tone and in-band signalling…. as time does progress, I will regress.

light fuse and get far, far away.

.: 8bitunderground (elite)