Home Phone Hacking For Fun and Amusement
On this final day of OSCON, the only thing I well and truly wanted to see -- and had all week -- was Brian Aker's "How To Hack Your Home Phone System" presentation.
I'd certainly heard rumors about Aker's experimentation with Asterisk at home.. how if you dial "#666" you will transfer the current caller to the sound of screaming monkeys (and put their telephone number in a telemarketer blacklist so they can never ring through again)... how if you aren't on a pre-set list of phone numbers, there's absolutely no way you can make his phone ring from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m.
Of course, those are certainly some of the cool features, but it does not come without its price. Brian's experimentations and configurations of Asterisk have been very much "shiny thing" driven, and have often left his wife understandably annoyed at how come the home phone system doesn't actually, say, work. (It was a steady part of the talk for him to point out "She uses her cell phone nowadays," and to point out that the subtitle of the talk was "50 Ways to Piss Off Your Lover.")
But the reality shone through: If you had the time to do it right, and were not prone to screwing around with it right before you left for five weeks of travel, a person could quite cheaply install a phone system in their home that rivaled the power of the average commercial enterprise's PBX system.
