🚀 go-pugleaf

I am reminded by this machine of the hack that you can do to any regular
telephone, in which you place a PLL (phase locked loop) in the phone, and 
change the wiring on the switchook so that the phone can be taken off hook
without the removal of the handset. When calling the phone, you transmit
the tone that the PLL is looking for down the line. In most cases 
a connection to the target phone is made during the 'quiet' period of the 
interupter (the thing that determines your ringing cycle and timing), 
allowing the PLL to see the audio tone and answer the phone before it 
actualy rings. Even if it hits on the start of a ring signal, all you wil 
will hear is a brief blip of a ring from the phone once. 

Now the phone is off hook, just as if someone had answered it. Think 
about how sensitive phone microphones are; with amplification, you
can hear anything said just about anywhere in the house. 

Modern technology is moving to make this impossible, but slowly. 
Most ESS systems will not connect the voice path to the local 
loop (your phone line) until after the signaling (ringing) has
been answered, so in that case this would not work. Large parts of
the country are still on crossbar, and in fact there are areas that
are served by ESS systems which actualy are on #5 crossbar with 
electronic translation, and they may never go to real ESS.

In this world where people will but poison in cold capsules just for fun,
I would recomend that you carefully check out any device that you place
in your home that allows for ANY level of remote control. Will it 
shoot cyanide at you while you sleep ? Hardly likely. But do be on 
the lookout for some sort of code that does the 'listen in on the house'
trick WITHOUT the bleep or the 30 second timeout.....

Paranoid ? No. Who's asking ?!?

Doug