toys & code: john wilkes phone booth

John Wilkes Phone Booth – johnwilkesphonebooth.com

As soon as I got my first Google Voice invite, I decided to create a proof-of-concept showing that the technology could be used for an anonymous “phone drop.” A phone drop isn’t a particularly useful in and of itself, but the code for pulling voicemails from Google’s servers has limitless applications. For the back-end I used Perl (emails from the Google account were piped to a Perl script via Google’s email forwarding feature.) PHP was used for the front-end.

#!/usr/bin/perl

while(my $line = <STDIN>) {

	if ($line =~ /got new voicemail from/i) {
		($area_code) = $line =~ /\((\d{3})\)/;
		($phone_num) = $line =~ /(\(.*\d)/;
	}

	if ($line =~ /google\.com\/voice\/fm\//i) {
		$google_link = $line;
		last;
	}

}

if($area_code =~ /^\d{3}$/) {
# do nothing
} else {
	$area_code = '000';
	$phone_num = '(000) 000-0000';
}

$google_mp3 = $google_link;
$google_mp3 =~ s/\/fm\//\/media\/svm\//;

($filename) = $google_mp3 =~ /.*\/(.*)/;

chdir("/home/johnwilk/mailpipe/");

$time = time;

open(LOG,">>phone.log");
print LOG "$time,$area_code,$phone_num,$filename\n";
close LOG;

$newfile = $filename . '_' . $time . '_' . $area_code . '.mp3';

system("wget $google_mp3");
system("mv $filename /home/johnwilk/public_html/messages/$newfile");

exit;