About a week ago, Phil T. & I finished and released our first video! Its called Citizen Engineer. We finally fixed a lingering audio codec problem and so I invite you to watch it.

Citizen Engineer is an online video series about open source hardware,
electronics, art and hacking by Limor (Ladyada) Fried of Adafruit
Industries & Phillip (pt) Torrone of MAKE magazine. The first video
debuts at “The Last HOPE” conference in New York City.

Volume 01 – Phones: SIM card & payphone hacking
Learn how a SIM card works (the small card inside GSM cell phones)
make a SIM card reader, view deleted messages, phone book entries and
clone/crack a SIM card.

Modify a “retired” payphone so it can be used as a home telephone and
for VoIP (Skype). Then learn how to modify the hacked payphone so it
accepts quarters – and lastly, use a Redbox to make “free phone” calls
from the modified coin-accepting payphone.

Basically its me messing around with electronics. I liked making these videos because I got to play around more than I normally do. Not having to design a ‘payphone kit’ means more time spent learning all about payphones. I’m already planning the next video

There’s a matching kit that goes with the video, its a basic SIM card interface. I modified some open source software for SIM interfaces and had a lot of fun reverse-engineering forensics software to figure out what data was hidden where.

Want to build your own SIM card reader? The SIM card reader/writer is available at Adafruit Industries, it is for experimentation and investigation of SIM & Smart cards. Once the kit is built, accompanying software can be used to read and write from the card. Together they can be used to backup stored SIM card data, recover deleted SMS’s and phone contacts, examine the last 10 phone numbers dialed, etc. (Despite being called a SIM reader, it can also write to SIM cards). Source, schematics and software included.

Update: We now a full text transcript, click more to read!

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