Win10 Auto-Janning

[JCSwishMan33 35]

So the title says a lot...

 

I broke down and am getting POTS service to my house via Windstream for funsies. Well, not just for funsies, there's some influence in the name of 'research'. *snicker snicker*

 

So I want to get some software to jan hundred groups with audio (for sure) and call progress detection (would be nice), and was wondering if anyone had any recommendations. Yes, I will accept "Don't use Win10" as advice if someone can give me a better solution.

 

Also, I'll need a good modem solution for a laptop so I can do this.

[chronomex 9]

I've looked in this direction, and it's a thing that apparently many people are interested in but none of them are motivated enough to make it happen.  It's pretty disappointing.

[tekio 117]

Why not buy an older laptop off eBay with a builtin modem? What is Auto-Janning?

 

You may need to figure out what software you want to use and what modem chipsets it supports. Pretty much forgot everything I knew about modems. But if you use the search feature BinRev contains a lot of information about modems. I've made a few posts years ago... 

 

 

EDIT: there are now USB modems, but these may not work with older software that expect a standard serial port. There are libraries that convert these to something that will work through USB. But it may be easier to just get an older laptop with a builtin modem or real serial port.  

Edited October 8, 2016 by tekio

[scratchytcarrier 105]

"Auto-Janning" explained: http://download.evan-doorbell.com/production/Early80s01.flac

"Janning" = older term for "exchange scanning", apparently named for a British phreak. I was a bit confused too when I first heard the term since "scanning" seemed to be the word around this part of the country since maybe time immemorial. When I heard Evan's older tape of him talking about "janning" a selector group on an old step somewhere I initially thought he was saying "jamming", as in somehow mechanically blocking the selector up! Early80s01 cleared up that confusion. It must have originally been just regional jargon on the east coast since I had been unaware of it until very recently.

Why not buy an older laptop with a builtin modem?

This. Grab an old beater laptop somewhere like a late 90s-mid-2000s laptop e.g. a Toshiba Tecra or even a Thinkpad, stick 98SE and/or 2K on it and do your thing. Remember to check the laptop manufacturer's support/downloads site first to see if the modem is supported in the OS you plan to run, if it's old enough and you're running say XP, Windows may already have drivers built-in for it which could save you a step/potential point of failure. (hint: look around locally too; try your local independent computer repair shop, they may have some ancient but serviceable beaters in the junk bin that they might let you have for free or really cheap if you ask! Try not to pay more than $30 anywhere if you can avoid it.)

You might also want to think about getting an inter box and putting it between your line and modem, this lets you record the telephone audio straight off the line to an external recorder, or play audio into the line from e.g. an MP3 player. The Rat Shack #4300421 (a.k.a. #43-421) is a good starter in-line inter box, I would advise putting some ferrite chokes on the telephone and audio lines since that box will pick up inductive hum if used near mains wiring, a wall wart or an outlet.

[tekio 117]

Oh... War Dialing? Hahaha..

 

Yes - he wants an older laptop or one with a serial port. Make sure it doesn't have a "win modem". A cheaper one where the modem manufacturer left a lot of functionality to the operating system and software.

 

 

When I was doing this stuff, used an IBM thinkpad t30: http://www.ebay.com/bhp/ibm-t30-laptop

 

 

EDIT: my favorite was iWar on Linux: https://sourceforge.net/projects/iwar/

 

I just installed Ubuntu (I think Ubuntu 9 or 10) or Debian Woody natively on the T30, did an apt-get update && apt-get install iwar and it just worked. Much easier than playing with Windows Micro-Kernel drivers. :-)

 

 

Edited October 8, 2016 by tekio

[scratchytcarrier 105]

Sort of. Wardialing is related but a more specialized activity of scanning/janning, in that usually one is concerned specifically with finding carrier tones and things like that. Scanning/janning is usually more broad in scope and generally encompasses mapping all the numbers on a particular exchange or a specific thousands/hundreds group (subscriber answers, recordings, carriers, test lines, weird noises, etc.)

[tekio 117]

OH... I see. Now I understand why scratchy was always looking for WinXP. Haha

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[JCSwishMan33 35]

Perfect! See, I knew I'd get good opinions. Heh.

 

Now I never thought of the "old laptop" route... Frankly I'm trying to not spend a ton, as the phone line itself will be enough of a cost. But I'll look into it.

 

Software wise, it sounds like old Win or a flavor of -us, kind of like I figured.

[ThoughtPhreaker 174]

'kay, so I wrote a ridiculously big reply for this and binrev logged me out for inactivity. Also, for some reason, the clipboard seems to insist I have a link on it, even when I just pasted my whole post (this one. I didn't think to try this on the old one :/) into notepad. So, er, I'm going to rewrite this fast. Let me know if you thought I left anything out.

Anyway, if you're looking to do a small exchange with not a lot of subscribers, you could just record the whole thing and manually look at the waveform with some editing software; http://thoughtphreaker.omghax.ca/files/waveform_713scan.png . The caveat is it really isn't practical for things with a lot of variety, like toll-frees or big exchanges and such, since the idea is to just look for patterns in the waveform. I understand Chronomex did something similar with a spectrogram a while ago. Under the right circumstances, this is sort of ideal since it's a good compromise between the efficiency of something automatic and the precision of manual signal detection.

And that's sort of the catch 22 here. There's so much detail to look at (imho, anyway. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, have a look at this; http://thoughtphreaker.omghax.ca/switchid.txt ) that you're always going to miss something - like IDing the switch you're calling, the PBX/auto-attendant at the other end, what brand of answering machine, CO test recordings, telco voice response systems, etcetera. As I see it, wardialers as they are sorta were designed in an era when people mostly just gave a shit about finding other modems. One thing I'll say as well is if you want to learn how to listen for small details in the network, hand scanning is really the best way for that.

Before I come off as too preachy though, I get it; nobody has time to do all this crap by hand. If someone is up for helping build/adding to a wardialer though, and we can find some sort of signal detection library (the two big things are something that can detect repetition in waveforms, and the shape of one), we can at least get stuff like switch detection down. A lot of auto-attendants and whatnot are identified by the voice prompts on the system. I'm not really sure where to start with that, but I know it's possible. My voice is my passport or something.

Anyway, JCSwishman, as for a modem, this would probably be a good bet; http://www.ebay.com/itm/3COM-U-S-ROBOTICS-56K-VOICE-FAXMODEM-PRO-0525-/140638215413?hash=item20beb0dcf5:m:mz5g-P-5j__2fS9NovRoCwg

It's got a built-in USB to RS-232 converter, though the drivers can be sorta hard to find. The basic signal detection (voice, tone, etc), or so I've heard, is actually fairly good; it isn't cringeworthy (SIT tones? Voice! Milliwatt? Ring! Fax tone? Voice!) like on the Couriers. Finally, being a voice modem, you can more than likely make it directly send/receive PCM.

 

EDIT: This page explains Fast Fourier Transform techniques. Wow. This does not look fun to implement in software. Maybe some of the audio fingerprinting programs designed for music can do it. https://www.dataq.com/data-acquisition/general-education-tutorials/fft-fast-fourier-transform-waveform-analysis.html

Edited October 8, 2016 by ThoughtPhreaker

[scratchytcarrier 105]

Modem drivers...

Can you get a serial modem going without installing any drivers at all, i.e. by just hooking it to COM1 then logging into that port using Teraterm and controlling it manually in Hayes code? This may be a potential way of implementing an Autojan script, especially if drivers are unavailable (and they will become harder to find eventually as companies go out of business or decide something is no longer of value to keep on their FTP server).

But it may be easier to just get an older laptop with a builtin modem or real serial port.

Actually you can buy PCI serial boards with usually 1 or 2 ports, so even modern so-called "legacy-free" PCs can use serial modems.

[JCSwishMan33 35]

On ‎10‎/‎8‎/‎2016 at 2:37 PM, ThoughtPhreaker said:

Anyway, if you're looking to do a small exchange with not a lot of subscribers, you could just record the whole thing and manually look at the waveform with some editing software; http://thoughtphreaker.omghax.ca/files/waveform_713scan.png . The caveat is it really isn't practical for things with a lot of variety, like toll-frees or big exchanges and such, since the idea is to just look for patterns in the waveform. I understand Chronomex did something similar with a spectrogram a while ago. Under the right circumstances, this is sort of ideal since it's a good compromise between the efficiency of something automatic and the precision of manual signal detection.

And that's sort of the catch 22 here. There's so much detail to look at (imho, anyway. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, have a look at this; http://thoughtphreaker.omghax.ca/switchid.txt ) that you're always going to miss something - like IDing the switch you're calling, the PBX/auto-attendant at the other end, what brand of answering machine, CO test recordings, telco voice response systems, etcetera. As I see it, wardialers as they are sorta were designed in an era when people mostly just gave a shit about finding other modems. One thing I'll say as well is if you want to learn how to listen for small details in the network, hand scanning is really the best way for that.

Before I come off as too preachy though, I get it; nobody has time to do all this crap by hand. If someone is up for helping build/adding to a wardialer though, and we can find some sort of signal detection library (the two big things are something that can detect repetition in waveforms, and the shape of one), we can at least get stuff like switch detection down. A lot of auto-attendants and whatnot are identified by the voice prompts on the system. I'm not really sure where to start with that, but I know it's possible. My voice is my passport or something.

 

Well, now that I have the line at least... Heh.

 

For smaller chunks of numbers, I absolutely plan on hand-scanning. Obviously you get so much more out of it (both in 'pride' and in info). Being able to record directly is kind of a big deal, because I'm not good with switch identification just yet. I can pick up on obvious things, but not everything; I'd love to be able to record so I can bounce things off people here.

 

I was planning on setting up autojanning for things like 0xx and 1xx codes, but since those don't seem to work, my need for it is reduced.

 

Quote

Anyway, JCSwishman, as for a modem, this would probably be a good bet; http://www.ebay.com/itm/3COM-U-S-ROBOTICS-56K-VOICE-FAXMODEM-PRO-0525-/140638215413?hash=item20beb0dcf5:m:mz5g-P-5j__2fS9NovRoCwg

It's got a built-in USB to RS-232 converter, though the drivers can be sorta hard to find. The basic signal detection (voice, tone, etc), or so I've heard, is actually fairly good; it isn't cringeworthy (SIT tones? Voice! Milliwatt? Ring! Fax tone? Voice!) like on the Couriers. Finally, being a voice modem, you can more than likely make it directly send/receive PCM.

 

EDIT: This page explains Fast Fourier Transform techniques. Wow. This does not look fun to implement in software. Maybe some of the audio fingerprinting programs designed for music can do it. https://www.dataq.com/data-acquisition/general-education-tutorials/fft-fast-fourier-transform-waveform-analysis.html

 

Definitely looking at that modem when I have a spare $20 or whatever the total would wind up being. My first Windstream bill is sitting at nearly $90 (!!! Fuck your initial fees and shit, man...), I have an outlet not working (which is where I'd have a computer plugged in), and still want to get an older carbon-mic'd phone... I'd love to get a rotary AND a touch-tone...

 

This is an expensive hobby... Ah well.

 

EDIT: Also, I was thinking about the detection and identification aspect... Would the voltage crossings technique that Evan explored for his autojanner still work? If we're looking for basic detection, maybe we can digitally detect the crossings and identify patterns?

Edited November 6, 2016 by JCSwishMan33

[scratchytcarrier 105]

Duknow, MMTTY has a zero-crossing strategy so I suppose it might also be doable in a modern autoscanner. (I'm sorry; I guess I'm so stuck in my ways that calling scanning "janning" is just, umm... awkward.)

Rotary fones: comb the local Salvation Army/Savers/Value Village (same thing)/Humane Society/estate sales etc. I haven't bought a proper WE fone in any of those places for more than $15, YRMV. The ITT/Cortelco 2500 clone (at least all that I've encountered) has a really decent carbon mic and an alright DTMF keyboard (it has a fairly light touch which is ergonomically preferrable to the WE board, useful for all-night scans or rapid dial-a-thons for which a WE DTMF board is probably the last thing you'd want to use) but as a fone it's a total piece of shit. Good source of compatible spare parts for a real WE fone and that's about all they're worth. The Cortelco 25000 is an identical body type and electronics to the WE, but way way way lower quality.

Being able to record directly is kind of a big deal, because I'm not good with switch identification just yet

Personally I would use one PC for dialing/logging and a second PC (or even a tape/disk recorder) connected through an inter box for audio recording. It's bulky and way more complex but it works.