62 lines
4.2 KiB
Plaintext
62 lines
4.2 KiB
Plaintext
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A Short History of Phreaking courtesy of the Jolly Roger
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Well now we know a little vocabulary, and now its into history, Phreak
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history. Back at MIT in 1964 arrived a student by the name of Stewart Nelson,
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who was extremely interested in the telephone. Before entering MIT, he had
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built autodialers, cheese boxes, and many more gadgets. But when he came to
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MIT he became even more interested in "fone-hacking" as they called it. After
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a little while he naturally started using the PDP-1, the schools computer at
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that time, and from there he decided that it would be interesting to see
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whether the computer could generate the frequencies required for blue boxing.
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The hackers at MIT were not interested in ripping off Ma Bell, but just
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exploring the telephone network. Stew (as he was called) wrote a program to
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generate all the tones and set off into the vast network.
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Now there were more people phreaking than the ones at MIT. Most people have
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heard of Captain Crunch (No not the cereal), he also discovered how to take
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rides through the fone system, with the aid of a small whistle found in a
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cereal box (can we guess which one?). By blowing this whistle, he generated
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the magical 2600hz and into the mouthpiece it sailed, giving him complete
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control over the system. I have heard rumors that at one time he made about
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1/4 of the calls coming out of San Francisco. He got famous fast. He made the
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cover of people magazine and was interviewed several times (as you'll soon
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see). Well he finally got caught after a long adventurous career. After he
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was caught he was put in jail and was beaten up quite badly because he would
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not teach other inmates how to box calls. After getting out, he joined Apple
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computer and is still out there somewhere.
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Then there was Joe the Whistler, blind form the day he was born. He could
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whistle a perfect 2600hz tone. It was rumored phreaks used to call him to tune
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their boxes.
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Well that was up to about 1970, then from 1970 to 1979, phreaking was mainly
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done by college students, businessmen and anyone who knew enough about
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electronics and the fone company to make a 555 Ic to generate those magic
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tones. Businessmen and a few college students mainly just blue box to get free
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calls. The others were still there, exploring 800#'s and the new ESS systems.
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ESS posed a big problem for phreaks then and even a bigger one now. ESS was
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not widespread, but where it was, blue boxing was next to impossible except for
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the most experienced phreak. Today ESS is installed in almost all major cities
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and blue boxing is getting harder and harder.
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1978 marked a change in phreaking, the Apple ][, now a computer that was
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affordable, could be programmed, and could save all that precious work on a
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cassette. Then just a short while later came the Apple Cat modem. With this
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modem, generating all blue box tones was easy as writing a program to count
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form one to ten (a little exaggerated). Pretty soon programs that could
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imitate an operator just as good as the real thing were hitting the community,
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TSPS and Cat's Meow, are the standard now and are the best.
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1982-1986: LD services were starting to appear in mass numbers. People now
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had programs to hack LD services, telephone exchanges, and even passwords. By
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now many phreaks were getting extremely good and BBS's started to spring up
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everywhere, each having many documentations on phreaking for the novice. Then
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it happened, the movie War Games was released and mass numbers of sixth grade
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to all ages flocked to see it. The problem wasn't that the movie was bad, it
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was that now EVERYONE wanted to be a hacker/phreak. Novices came out in such
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mass numbers, that bulletin boards started to be busy 24 hours a day. To this
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day, they still have not recovered. Other problems started to occur, novices
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guessed easy passwords on large government computers and started to play
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around... Well it wasn't long before they were caught, I think that many
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people remember the 414-hackers. They were so stupid as to say "yes" when the
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computer asked them whether they'd like to play games. Well at least it takes
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the heat off the real phreaks/hacker/krackers.
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(from the Official Phreaker's Manual)
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