aaron42net

The booth now is shut down for the year. And I have some stats to share:

For 2026 the booth was setup from Sunday, August 30 around 1pm to Sunday, September 6th at 6am, but was broken for a little over a day starting Thursday afternoon due to a failed power supply and a discovery that our spare was a dud.

Due to the widespread publicity, it was overwhelmed with incoming calls, receiving 33,400 total. Only 1,270 (3.8%) calls were answered for a total talk time of 44.5 hours, 1,600 (4.8%) weren’t answered within after 6 rings, and 30,500 calls (91.3%) got busy signals or other errors. Of the 7,200 unique phone numbers that tried to call, only 970 (13.5%) were able to actually talk to someone.

There were fewer outbound calls this year, presumably due to the booth being busy with incoming calls. There were 1,140 outbound calls to 650 different numbers in 30 countries, for a total talk time of 26.1 hours.

Fixed this. Thanks for the report.

I've implemented this. There's no random function with voip.ms, but there are time-based rules. So it'll play the Matrix easter egg about 1/90th of the day after no answer.

Currently, it looks like I have it configured to allow all destinations that are $0.40/minute or less with voip.ms's "value" routing. This is enough to call all numbers in ~120 countries and some numbers (usually landlines) in another ~70.

And there are occasionally people who have trouble with the concept of "free 5 minute call" (that it hangs up after) not meaning "just keep dialing back for an hour or two", even with a long line behind them. I can't ban specific outgoing numbers with voip.ms, but once I ended up just disabling all calls to the country that a problematic user kept coming back and repeatedly redialing.

That was the look I was going for, but the base is actually 1" plywood with a 45 degree bevel and rounded corners, painted with a few coats of a grey deck paint. There are 6 massive bolts holding the booth pedestal to the base. Assembled, the whole thing is pretty sturdy.

No worries. I'm happy you found it interesting enough to share, and that others found it interesting enough to upvote and ask questions about.

The single phone line was mostly at capacity with the /r/BurningMan crowd trying to call, though. I suspect with several times as many people dialing, sadly that has to mean fewer people can succeed. Hopefully people are still having fun with it, though.

Last year, it was roughly 2/3 outbound vs 1/3 inbound, based on total talk time in the 6.5 days it was set up.

There were 1,460 outbound calls successfully made to 835 different numbers in 23 countries, with a total talk time of 34.8 hours. (This is down about 40% from peak years ago, now that there's more cell service and Internet available at Burning Man.)

There were also 5,658 inbound call attempts, and 676 (12%) were answered with a total talk time of 17.2 hours. 4,070 incoming calls got a busy signal and 912 got no answer.

And you can't make an emergency call on it (which is written in all caps on it); flagging down someone with a radio is the right way to get emergency services out there.

I've had to replace the handset (mic and speaker) and the LEDs in the sign a few times since 2013, but I've mostly left the hardware alone otherwise except switching to Starlink in 2022.

Until then, it got Internet via Burning Man itself through what they call the "participant network", which they still provide: https://internet.burningman.org/

This consisted of setting up a Ubiquiti NanoBridge (then later NanoBeam) with their supplied config on top of a 20 foot tower aimed at the 60 foot radio tower near Center Camp. Sometimes they wouldn't provide the config or get the participant network running until like Tuesday or Wednesday of event week, it might at best provide 400kbit/sec total or have permanent 50% packet loss, or just be down for days at a time. It wasn't great.

I hear it has drastically improved in recent years, but I haven't tried using it.

It's ~$13/year to keep the same phone number, and <= $0.01/minute for all incoming calls and any outgoing calls to North America. Most of the cost comes from outgoing international calls, whose price varies (see https://voip.ms/pricing), but I do disable some of the most expensive destinations.

With paying for ~60 hours of calls for the week it runs, I think it's still usually well under $100, though.

The basics are that it's using a cheap VoIP adapter that you'd plug a classic touch-tone phone into, allowing it to make phone calls over the Internet through a low-cost telco provider called voip.ms.

Here's a list they maintain of current devices: https://wiki.voip.ms/article/ATA_Devices

Anything or nothing.

One of my favorites is to ask the person what's the most amazing thing they've seen that day, and you'll likely get widely varying answers given where they are.

But you could also call and try to sell someone an extended warranty for their couch without breaking. It doesn't matter as long as you (and hopefully they) have fun with it.

It has changed a bit in recent years, but there's still only very spotty cell service at Burning Man. Enough people can figure out how to look up a phone number that this phone still dials out thousands of times during the week.

The bigger problem for this project is because of phone spam, fewer people will answer calls from unknown numbers, so a lot of those calls go to voice mail.

Yes, that wouldn't be hard with the normal voip.ms call routing.

But my intent was for it to be as visually and functionally identical as possible to a phone booth you would've found on a street corner a few decades ago, just in an unusual place (and free). I've avoided anything in the normal usage of it that would deviate from that.

I figured out where the bad street name came from; it's apparently a Google AI Search hallucination. It's apparently what I get for not clicking through to read the relevant page on Burning Man's site.

A little of both. It was popular enough off of a Reddit post last year that people were hearing a lot of busy signals. I thought it might entertain some folks to see just how busy the phone has been in the last hour.

Sadly, not easily. The voip.ms API can show me that the phone is logged in, and I can poll the phone bill ("call detail records") but that only shows calls after they've completed. But there isn't anything available for current call state that I can find.

The only data I collect is my phone bill, and the only thing I do with it show hourly stats on the site and a summary of calls at the end of the event.

I’ve been asked repeatedly to record/transcribe calls, and this has been my stance. Let’s just let two people enjoy a private conversation.

voip.ms. They were the cheapest I could find when I built this in 2013, and they’ve worked just fine since.

I think I've heard of at least a few groups dropping free-to-use phone booths in rural areas without much cell service, sans any form of revenue.

Thanks for the report. Fixed.

My phone booth is definitely not the first out there. Brad's was there at least 2004-2006, and this one's been out most years since 2013.

I ripped the coin-aware guts out of a pay phone I bought from Craigslist, and replaced them with a basic touch-tone board, then hooked that up to a voice-over-IP adapter so it can make calls over the Internet. All of that is powered via power-over-ethernet, including the light in the sign above the phone.

It used to get a little bit of Internet directly from Burning Man itself via a 20 foot tower pointed near center camp, but now it just uses Starlink, which is easier for my campmates to set up without me and much more reliable.

For power, it is now plugged into a solar generator that is occasionally recharged from a gas generator.

This phone is my project. I'm happy to answer questions.

Cloudflare uses JA3 and now JA4 TLS fingerprints, which are hashes of various TLS handshake parameters. https://github.com/FoxIO-LLC/ja4/blob/main/technical_details... has more details on how that works, and they do offer an Nginx module: https://github.com/FoxIO-LLC/ja4-nginx-module

Will Prowse's favorite large panels are cheaper than that, including a 370w bifacial for $111 each in small quantities: https://signaturesolar.com/all-products/solar-panels/

Related video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v33nbi7gKcY

By default, many compilers include things like local filesystem paths, build server hostnames, or build timestamps into their binary artifacts. These will obviously differ build-to-build.

Even without that, it's possible to accidentally leak entropy into the build output. For example, readdir() doesn't guarantee any kind of ordering, so without sorting the list of files it is possible for a binary artifact (or even tar) to produce different output from the same input.

Over the years, I've had direct knowledge of or involvement with maybe a dozen or so events that have ended up in the mainstream news. And in almost every case it has been inaccurate in some way, sometimes getting basic facts wrong and others having significant bias or spin that was misleading.

This hasn't given me great confidence in the accuracy of the reporting for things that I don't have direct knowledge of.

On cell networks, video content is by far the largest consumer of bandwidth. And the default for video generally is to auto-adjust the resolution to the highest quality that the network supports. This kind of sucks, since bandwidth is a shared resource for all users of a given antenna on a cell tower.

Though Speedtest on your cell might show your connection speed as 100 megabits/sec down, cell networks special-case video by identifying it as video and rate-limiting it to something like 1 megabit/sec. This is considered "efficient network management". For T-Mobile, this based on the plan (https://www.t-mobile.com/cell-phone-plans), they sell either "SD streaming" or "4k UHD streaming". "SD streaming" is a fancy way to express that they rate-limit identified video streams to 1 megabit/sec.

They identify video streams by watching the IP your phone is connecting to and/or the hostname mentioned in the TLS SNI header and checking if it is Youtube, Netflix, etc. Sending video content over a VPN removes their ability to understand what the content is.

The default region for global services including https://console.aws.amazon.com is us-east-1, but there are usual regional alternatives. For example: https://us-west-2.console.aws.amazon.com

It would probably be clearer that they exist if the console redirected to the regional URL when you switched regions.

STS, S3, etc have regional endpoints too that have continued to work when us-east-1 has been broken in the past and the various AWS clients can be configured to use them, which they also sadly don't tend to do by default.