Zine

We have a zine about the PhilTel project! Download it here.

Presentations

Presentations we give at conferences or other events are available below.

Resurrecting COCOTs, or: How We Decided to Stop Worrying and Save Tons of Payphones

Presented at JawnCon 010 on October 11th, 2024.

*Almost all payphones that are still installed today are COCOTs, Customer-owned coin-operated telephones, that are owned by private organizations not affiliated with “the phone company.” COCOTs are the black sheep of the payphone world, often dismissed and discarded by enthusiasts because of their “outsider” status and difficulty to configure and program. As more COCOTs enter the second-hand market, those who buy a payphone of their very own often get saddled with hardware they ultimately can’t or won’t use… but not anymore.

Join us as we discuss the current state of COCOTs, both taking the pulse of COCOTs in North America via a home-grown tool that actively monitors activity/usage from the thousands of payphones we know about, and the two-year journey to not only figure out how to program our “Protel” COCOTs but also set up a free-to-use programming line that others can use to quickly make their payphones usable again or bootstrap their own telephone collectives.*

Download slides via GitHub.
Stream video via YouTube.

Unlocking the Secrets of Telephone Phreaking - Phreaking and its implications on modern cyber threats

Presented at “Navigating Cybersecurity in the Digital Age: Telephone Phreaking” at SJU on April 4th, 2024.

A look into telephone phreaking, following the culture from its inception through an evolution into modern day voice threats.

Download slides via GitHub.

The Payphone You Have Dialed Has Been Disconnected – The State (and Revival) of Payphones in 2023 (v2)

Presented at BSidesPhilly 2023 on December 8th, 2023.

Payphones were once ubiquitous in the US, but now you’d be hard-pressed to find one–especially in working order! While most people have largely forgotten about payphones, we are trying to figure out what is still out there and how to bring them back! In this talk we will explore the current state of payphone infrastructure framed though exploratory phone scanning/usage tracking, COCOT oddities, and revival/preservation projects like our own PhilTel. We’ll discuss what it takes to build up your own VoIP-based free-to-use payphone service and how, through it, you can not only place/take calls from the PSTN but relive the joys of phreaking the phone system by way of the telephone hobbyist network PhreakNet!

Download slides via GitHub.
Stream video via YouTube.

The Payphone You Have Dialed Has Been Disconnected – The State (and Revival) of Payphones in 2023

Presented at JawnCon 0x0 on October 20th, 2023.

Payphones were once ubiquitous in the US, but now you’d be hard-pressed to find one–especially in working order! While most people have largely forgotten about payphones, we are trying to figure out what is still out there and how to bring them back! In this talk we will explore the current state of payphone infrastructure framed though exploratory phone scanning/usage tracking, COCOT oddities, and revival/preservation projects like our own PhilTel. We’ll discuss what it takes to build up your own VoIP-based free-to-use payphone service and how, through it, you can not only place/take calls from the PSTN but relive the joys of phreaking the phone system by way of the telephone hobbyist network PhreakNet!

Download slides via GitHub.
Stream video via YouTube.
Download video via Archive.org.