---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message-ID: <87muapn0he.fsf@bogus.nodomain.nowhere> Date: 14 Jan 2020 18:21:01 -0400 From: "Mike Spencer" <mds@bogus.nodomain.nowhere> Subject: Re: How to spot a Photoshopped image, or, The Problem with the Internet HAncock4 <withheld@invalid.telecom-digest.org> writes: > Interesting, but darkroom work has always been a factor in pho- > tography. Sometimes it's just simple cropping, other times it's > rearranging a photo to appear that people are together whey they > weren't. Back about the time that the National Geographic demonstrated that a photograph was thereinafter no convincing evidence of anything by moving the Great Pyramid several yards in its cover photo, The Whole Earth Review (or maybe it was at that point the Co-Evolution Quarterly) did an article on the subject. One amusing example was a B&W shot of the most important people in the (then) USSR from which one deprecated individual had been expunged. Limited to non-digital darkroom techniques, the toe of the now-unperson's shoe remained, detectable but barely noticeable. > A point of trivia, "Photoshop" is a brand name for a software > product, although it has taken on general usage like the word > Xerox for photocopying. As a matter of personal curiosity, is it obvious to {every,any}body that this photo has had significant digital alteration? http://www.mit.edu/afs/athena/user/b/h/bhdavis/www/VCG.html Or for any hard-core image analysis mavens reading here, are any alterations detectable with maven-level tools? -- Mike Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada ------------------------------ Message-ID: <580bd3c8-f829-4f11-b59f-12dbf3da6252@googlegroups.com> Date: 20 Jan 2020 05:57:13 -0800 From: rove@swbell.net Subject: Re: Does anyone remember this payphone trick? [Telecom] On Thursday, April 23, 2009 at 10:24:00 AM UTC-5, Phluge wrote: > I appreciate the response to my earlier question -- this looks like > a great newsgroup. > > Whenever I meet a telecommunications techie I ask them about this > old trick --I have yet to find anyone else who ever used it: > > Somewhere around 1953 when I was a teen, you could get all the free > payphone calling you wanted from a phonebooth by using a > bobby pin. The mouth and earpieces of the always-black plastic > (bakelite?) handset were a filled-in circle of perforations - you > spread the bobby pin, poked one end into a center hole in the > mouthpiece, the other end into one of the perimeter mouthpiece > holes, then touched the other end of bobby pin to exposed metal on > the phone body. It would usually produce a small spark, and then you > got the dialtone, made your call. All of the booths near the teen > hangouts had bobby pins lined up ready to go. > > I always wondered why AT&T allowed that to work, and why(?) the > coin-collector or service man wasn't wise to this openly used > rip-off but did not even take the bobby pins away. > > I would love to hear from someone who used to service these and get > some feedback on that crazy phenomenon. > > Thanks, pflu Never heard of that. I worked at SBC for 35 years (till 2003) [as an] outside cable splicer [doing] installer/exchange repair [and] finally [as a] comm tech special circuit tester. The old 333/335 had the relay isolated from [the] chassis. The relay got trigger from the CO to setup loop once coin was dropped. I remember testing all relays with [a] testcenter tester as he sent proper volts/amp ([I] don't remember which) to the relay to trip and release. We had to [do] all line test/relay tests, and made sure we had a good ground when we installed or repaired all coin phones on our service orders or tickets. Later, these phones were replaced by the 1A and 1C [types, which were] all Western Electric coin phones which had "dial tone [first]" service and then people tried to hack them using "blue boxes" for LD calls. Most of [the] US coin phones are now in other countries or [were] sold as home conversation pieces: I was lucky and have several 333's and an old wood pay phone booth complete. ------------------------------ Message-ID: <20200120213739.GA9717@telecom.csail.mit.edu> Date: Mon, 20 Jan 2020 21:37:39 +0000 From: Moderator <telecomdigestsubmissions@remove-this.telecom-digest.org> Subject: Re: Does anyone remember this payphone trick? [Telecom] On Mon, Jan 20, 2020 at 05:57:13AM -0800, rove@swbell.net wrote: > On Thursday, April 23, 2009 at 10:24:00 AM UTC-5, Phluge wrote: > > Whenever I meet a telecommunications techie I ask them about this > > old trick --I have yet to find anyone else who ever used it: > > > > Somewhere around 1953 when I was a teen, you could get all the free > > payphone calling you wanted from a phonebooth by using a > > bobby pin. The mouth and earpieces of the always-black plastic > > (bakelite?) handset were a filled-in circle of perforations - you > > spread the bobby pin, poked one end into a center hole in the > > mouthpiece, the other end into one of the perimeter mouthpiece > > holes, then touched the other end of bobby pin to exposed metal on > > the phone body. It would usually produce a small spark, and then you > > got the dialtone, made your call. [snip] > > Never heard of that. I worked at SBC for 35 years (till 2003) [as an] > outside cable splicer [doing] installer/exchange repair [and] finally > [as a] comm tech special circuit tester. > > The old 333/335 had the relay isolated from [the] chassis. The relay > got trigger from the CO to setup loop once coin was dropped. I > remember testing all relays with [a] testcenter tester as he sent > proper volts/amp ([I] don't remember which) to the relay to trip and > release. We had to [do] all line test/relay tests, and made sure we > had a good ground when we installed or repaired all coin phones on our > service orders or tickets. > > Later, these phones were replaced by the 1A and 1C [types, which were] > all Western Electric coin phones which had "dial tone [first]" service > and then people tried to hack them using "blue boxes" for LD calls. > Most of [the] US coin phones are now in other countries or [were] sold > as home conversation pieces: I was lucky and have several 333's and an > old wood pay phone booth complete. I never saw anyone using a bobby pin to get dial tone, but it was technically possible, at least for very early types of "3 slot" payphones. There's a scene in the movie "War Games" where the protagonist removes the microphone cover on the handset and uses a soft-drink-can tab to ground one of the leads, thus getting dial tone. As with most Hollywood portrayals of phone hacks, I doubt that was possible in any actual payphone: when I started working on them about five years ago, and all the mouthpiece covers were glued on. Dial-tone-first payphones routed all "0 plus" calls directly to a TSPS tandem in the New England Telephone service area, and I don't know if the trunks that connected them with local offices were supervised with SF signalling, which would be required for a blue box to work. I'd bet that the "pheepers" whom were using blue boxes had to dial an 800 number to get away from the TSPS system and onto an SF-supervised trunk in order to use the blue box. At M.I.T. in the late 60's(1), there were code words for most of the hacker methods, e.g., a "Spiro" was a blue box, a "T" was a bridged-T rectifier(2), and an "Agnew" was a black box. I never heard of a code word that meant "grounding a ground-start dial tone line by putting a pin in the microphone of a payphone," but that's not proof that it wasn't done. Bill 1. Full disclosure: I wasn't enrooled at M.I.T.: I worked at the student run radio station, learing the profession that supported me for about five years. My degree is from Northeastern University. 2. A bridged-T rectifier could be inserted in the cable connection of a 3-slot phone, in order to change the coin-collect voltage into a coin-return voltage. Single-slot "Fortress" phones had a "fraud latch" that would diasable the phone if a "T" was used, requiring a field visit to reset the phone. -- Bill Horne Moderator ------------------------------ ********************************************* End of telecom Digest Tue, 21 Jan 2020