Bat-Blog Reboot

Wherein I discuss the past and present of the batphone website.

In the beginning

Years ago, I was doing some volunteer work for some charitable nonprofits, building their Information Technology Infrastructure. A core component was Google Apps, which could host email, web sites, file sharing, and real time text and voice communication using Google Voice. I had an extra invite to the beta, and no charity to donate it to, so I used it to build an informational website about cool things I was doing with Google Voice, as well as other low cost telephony using the Internet.

A few years later, I found myself using a smartphone provided by my employer, which I wanted to supplement with a cheap prepaid mobile phone to use in emergencies. After doing a fair amount of research for handsets and cheap calling plans, I added a section to the website for using these low cost phones.

At one point, the site was probably useful for someone, now it probably isn't.

Now things are different

In the 10 plus years since I have created this website, VOIP technology and services have changed significantly. Google Voice has restricted its services a fair amount, low cost vendors like IPKall have dropped off of the map, and the pay by the minute mobile plan has all but disappeared. As I looked through the site for things that might require updating, I figured that it would be best to just delete all of the old content and start over. I will still be looking at VOIP and mobile telephone stuff, I am just also getting in to PBX software like Asterisk and 3CX, as well as low cost hosting from services like Digital Ocean.

In the past, this site has always flirted with the idea of the dark side of telephony, either as a means to avoid stalking and harassment from others, or as a means to evade surveillance by law enforcement. I still consider these to be subjects that I am neither interested in, nor qualified to talk about. But I do know a little bit about being in an abusive relationship where you are constantly being surveilled, and I have some familiarity with how intelligence systems work with regard to intercepting communications. So I will share what I know, in the hope that it inspires someone else to get help leaving an abusive relationship and to seek more knowledge about how governments, militaries, and private companies collect and analyze data about us on a regular basis.