Ladyada and PT have kicked off the first episode of their Citizen Engineer video series in style. This episode explores GSM SIM card technology and the more retro tech found inside a retired Bell payphone. Ladyada shows how to create a SIM reader which you can use to do things like read deleted SMS messages or brute-force the card's secret key. In the second part, the team dismantles an old Bell payphone and hacks it to function as a home telephone, require quarters for use, and make Skype calls.

Citizen Engineer

Kevin C. Tofel posts some big news+a great photo (shown above) for N800 fans:

Skype support for the Nokia N800 is right around the corner. I got a chance to see it, but it won't be available as a download until some time in July. The Nokia N800 already supports Gizmo for VoIP, but the addition of Skype adds more choice to make a good mobile device an even better one.

Related Hackery:

• Skype Hacks - Link
  
• VoIP Hacks - Link
  
• Nokia Smartphone Hacks - Link
  

First, both machines open a connection to a non-firewalled server. The server takes note of the source port (which may have been altered by the firewall) and sends this information to the other party to give it an idea of what port future connections might be coming from.

Client A then attempts to connect to a range of ports on client B's machine. All these requests will fail at client B's firewall, of course. However, in the process a side effect has occurred. Client A has told its own firewall to allow traffic from all of client B's scanned ports! Now, when client B attempts to connect to client A, assuming its outgoing port was previously scanned (which it likely will be), the request will get through to client A's machine.

If all else fails, both machines can use a central server to proxy their connection, but the UDP hole punching trick will typically allow two NAT firewalled machines to communicate directly, which means less latency and a significantly lighter load on the server.

Resources:
How Skype & Co. get round firewalls - Link
RFC3489 STUN - Simple Traversal of UDP through NAT - Link

You should see an entry that looks similar to:
<Video>
   <Device>Built-in iSight</Device>
</Video>

Modify that to read:
<Video>
   <CaptureWidth>640</CaptureWidth>
   <CaptureHeight>480</CaptureHeight>
   <Device>Built-in iSight</Device>
</Video>

When you've finished, your contacts will be seeing you in glorious 640x480 instead of the standard 320x240. There are some tweaks and hardware requirements that might be required for the PC version, so check up on the links below for the nitty-gritty details.

Related links:

• Hi-rez calls for Mac
• Hi-rez calls for PC
• Skype for PC download
• Skype for Mac download
• Skype Hacks
• VoIP Hacks