So I was looking around on google maps tonight, and noticed a 'call' link next to the business listings. After a bit of playing with it, its pretty nifty. You could easily use it to get free long distance to businesses around the country, which means you could use it to call 'from' a payfone for phree.
It spoofs the business number to whatever number you give it, and presumably (verification needed) spoofs your number to that business. It is limited in that it will only call things you can find on google maps (so no residential, unlisted, or 'other' numbers). I played around with it a bit, and I can't get it to call anything else, but here is what I came up with;
The whole deal looks like this (I separated each post term just so it wouldn't side scroll to hell and back). In this case it would first call the Beehive bridge, wait for it to answer, then call the secret service.
http://maps.google.com/maps/call?from=14352348255&
to=12024068800&
ticket=ChMIwKLjx_T3iAIVG2JiCh0zDS7vEAEYnI-jlbvipKR0IAAoAA&
hmac=FuKQsukUl41Tlkc4W0cYen13Fo4&
save_phone_cookie=1
So just to go through the variables here, 'from' and 'to' should be self evident, if they aren't please turn off your computer now...
'ticket' is some type of unique identifier for the phone listing. This case was one less character than the some of the others ones I looked at, though when I went to go find an example of one with a longer 'ticket', the party city I randomly looked up was the same length, so go figure. They do all seem to start with 'ChMI'.
'hmac' is some type of timed session identifier, it seems to be linked to the listing you looked up but not the local computer. It expires after some amount of time.
I think it would be very cool if there was a way to call arbitrary numbers with Google maps. It would also be cool if there was a way to have it send you a different number as the caller ID than the 'to' number; that way you could spoof a Cingular number to your Cingular phone when you call some place and get a free call.
Perhaps there is a way to do a direct query of the 'ticket' field to google, or even a way to get a 'ticket' for any given number. I do not know if it is a hash or if it is an index. the former would suggest there would be some way to independently generate a 'ticket' from a given number.
Let me know what everyone finds out about it, I like to think there is some way to get it to call more than just what Google maps will return in search results.
