Here’s the skinny – My SO and I have been on the outs here lately, and I’ve noticed that she’s been recording phone activity. (The portable cassette recorder and Radio Shack gizmo located behind the curtain kinda gave it away… I think it was all the wires leading to nowhere that got my attention… ) Anyways, I use a dial-up connection, and she’s busily recording on a cassette tape everything that goes on with the phone line.
My question(s):
Can today’s tapes record high-speed analog communications?
Is a $30 Radio Shack tape recorder capable of doing so?
Assuming that a usable recording CAN be made, can my online activity be, say, reproduced on a suitably-programmed computer?
Should I kill my girlfriend? (Just thought I’d toss that one in to see if we get kicked over to GD or something… )
Help me out, Dopers! I’ve got a bad case of paranoia going here!
I doubt an analog recorder would have sufficient accuracy to record a Dial up connection. Even with moderatly okay analog recorders, there is a hissing in the background which would foul up the recording. Also, it would be difficult to determine what data was being sent and what was being recieved.
I seem to recall hearing on these boards once that REALLY early (Like Apple II era) freeware computer programs were broadcast over FM radio in some places, but again, there’s a difference between the format of what’s essentially a floppy disk copied via radio with that of the interplay between two computers over a phone line. Plus the difference in the amount of data being transmitted.
the answer to your question is yes. the tapes can record what went out and what went in your modem. however, it is a horribly complicated process to demodulate everything, separate incoming and outcoming transmissions, run a packet sniffer on the resulting data and decode the final product into a useful log of your activities.
what puzzles me is why you stay with her (love without trust?) and why you are worried about it?
TBone2 - in theory yes, but only an intellegence offical would have the resources to decode it.
If you are worried about her doing that - you should prolly check your computer for key loggers, that is more of a realist thing that she could be doing.
Most humble thanks to one and all!! Being a bit of a 'puter geek m’self, I didn’t think it was possible, at least not for her, but I was feeling the need for some reassurance.
I still remember storing and loading data with the same sort of cassette deck connected to a TI 99-4/A not so many years ago…
I the Bruce Sterling book “The Hacker Crackdown”, there is a chapter which describes the length that the FBI went through to be able to decode the modem transmissions of a hacker - I think it was Phiber Optik. They had to build a system from scratch that cost a considerable amount of money and took up a whole table. This was all because they could no longer do things the direct way, as faster modem protocols made it impossible to just play something back into a modem and be able to interpret it.
So if you’re connecting at anything over 9600 baud, that radioshack tape deck isn’t going to cut it.
Ranchoth - the programs that were broadcast were from back in the day when consumer computers used cassette tapes as their storage medium. I can remember doing this with a friend with programs for his Commodore 64. You’d record the tape with a normal tape deck/radio combo, and then just pop the tape in the computer’s tape deck.
I would suggest recording fake conversations onto the tapes. Agree ahead of time with a friend to just talk gibberish to each other, and watch the listener go crazy trying to figure out what language you’re speaking.
Sorry, I didn’t mention that the recorder, the Radio Shack thingy and the tape vanished shortly after I discovered them. Also, since my OP, I’ve arranged for housing elsewhere.
FWIW, while it would be hard to get a record of your online sessions with a tape-recorder, it would be very easy to do so with the appropriate software. Backup your important data, and format your hard drive. If you’re using Windows 98, make a recovery disk, boot from that, and do the format. Otherwise, get a friend to make you a Windows 98 recovery disk, and do like above.
This seems odd to me. Phones only go up to something like 8 KHz, well below the upper frequency of a decent tape deck. Do you recall why recording the online session on a tape recorder wouldn’t work? Once it’s on tape, you can play it into a sound card and make a WAV file easily, then use software to get the transmitted bits. Decyphering the data might be hard, but I don’t see why recording to tape would be a problem.
Shalmanese’s suggestion that background hiss is the problem doesn’t sound right to me, since the phone only goes up to 8Khz, and most of the hiss you hear is higher frequencies than that.
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