telephone

Unlocking Ma Bell: How phone phreaks came to be

Imagine a day when it cost an arm and a leg to use the phone, especially for long-distance calls. Then imagine that buried deep within the telephone network infrastructure was a flaw -- a hole that allowed those who were aware of it, and capable of exploiting it, to make all the free calls they want.

These days, phone calls are free -- or nearly so -- and hackers put their energies into computer networks, jailbreaking iPhones, and other more modern pursuits. But back in the 1950s and 1960s, a new group of people emerged, people who were fascinated by … Read more

The 404 1,203: Where we do not pass Go (podcast)

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Hasbro let the Internet choose the new Monopoly token and this is what they picked.

- Pebble watch gets growing pains.

- USPS to stop Saturday mail delivery.

- "Walkie Talkies" are shoes you can use as phones.

- Beyonce's publicist desperately wants these removed from the Internet.… Read more

Lobster iPhone case is delightfully impractical

What are you willing to sacrifice to make your iPhone really stand out from the crowd? How about the use of its camera? OK. How about your dignity, too? Great, I have just the case for you. It's the Lobster Mobile Telephone Case from Noddy Boffin.

Way back in 1938, Salvador Dali created a piece known as the "lobster telephone." It involves a lobster attached to the handset of a rotary-dial phone. Flash-forward to 2012 and Australian designer Elliot Gorham channels the ghost of Dali into an accessory for modern smartphones. … Read more

Papa John's pizza up against $250M lawsuit for text spam

What looked like an easy shortcut to earn some extra cash could now ending up costing Papa John's millions. The pizza chain is being targeted in a $250 million class-action lawsuit in which customers allege that Papa John's sent out hundreds of thousands of illegal text messages.

"After I ordered from Papa John's, my telephone started beeping with text messages advertising pizza specials," one of the plaintiffs in the case Erin Chutich said in a statement. "Papa John's never asked permission to send me text message advertisements."

Apparently, in 2010, Papa John'… Read more

Phone history, full of steampunk designs and rotary dials

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.--Standing in front of a row of rotary telephones, a volunteer at the Telephone Museum of New Mexico tells me most kids have no idea how to use them. Most have never even seen a rotary phone before.

I'm familiar with rotary phones from my childhood, but there are even older phones here I've only seen in old movies.

This museum is the place to go to see how we got to modern smartphones from Alexander Graham Bell's cone-shaped devices that carried the first sentence by telephone in 1876: "Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you." Bell's utterance to his assistant allegedly came as a result of spilling acid on his hand. All these years later, we still use our phones to summon help.

The Telephone Museum of New Mexico is one of those little specialty places that most people who live in Albuquerque have never heard about. It has four stories full of phones, switchboards, maintenance gear, and scale models of Telstar satellites. Be still, my geeky heart.… Read more

'Smart screens' to replace pay phones in NYC

New York City is looking to replace its public pay phones with Internet-connected touch-screen tablets.

The city will start a pilot program next month where it will install 32-inch "smart screens" with broadband Internet connections in 250 old phone booths throughout the city.

The hope is that eventually the city will replace its 12,800 outdoor pay phones with these new tablet-booths, according to a story by the New York Post. The franchise for the public pay phones in the city is expiring in October 2014.

The new touch-screen tablets will be free to access and will generate … Read more

Skype 5 beta for Mac adds group video calls

Skype's VoIP calling is by now well known to most Mac users, and the ability to make computer-to-computer calls anywhere in the world for free is already extremely popular to international users. Skype's official version on the Mac is 2.8 and is still a bit behind its Windows counterpart (Skype 5 for Windows). But a beta release today brings the software to version 5.0 on the Mac, and the Skype team has added some great new features to get excited about.

Sporting a familiar, more iTunes-like interface, Skype makes it easy to search through contacts and … Read more

Global broadband subscription growth on the rise

Propelled by demand for high-speed Internet in China, worldwide broadband subscriptions should show a healthy jump for the third quarter, says research firm iSuppli.

The number of new broadband subscribers in the quarter is expected to rise by 5.8 percent to reach 16.5 million, according to figures released yesterday by iSuppli. That's a rally from the second quarter when the number of new subscribers actually dropped by 6.6 percent to 15.6 million. It also means the third-quarter numbers are catching up with the 16.7 million new subscribers captured in the first quarter of the … Read more

Hands-on with Microsoft's translating telephone

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--One of the hits at this year's TechFest in Redmond was the so-called translating telephone.

The effort combines speech recognition, machine translation, and text-to-speech technology to let two people who don't share a common language nonetheless carry on a phone conversation. As part of a regional TechFair at Microsoft's Silicon Valley offices on Thursday, I got a chance to try out the technology, conversing with Frank Seide, one of the researchers behind the project.

I asked a few questions in English, while Seide answered in German. As one can see from the video below, … Read more

Telco tool

Managing telecommunications and data services to reduce costs is critical to any business, but small- and medium-size businesses frequently find themselves at a disadvantage when it comes to tracking and analyzing telco expenses. Access Business Communications' Telco Manager, or TelcoMgr, can cut business costs by monitoring and recording telecommunications and data services for reporting and analysis. It includes extensive and powerful database and reporting features that not only help a company track telco expenses but also use the data to maximize returns on services.

TelcoMgr's main interface and other windows are a bit busy in appearance, thanks to copious … Read more