207 lines
11 KiB
Plaintext
207 lines
11 KiB
Plaintext
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Cellular Phreaks & Code Dudes - Hacking chips on cellular phones is the
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latest thing in th eunderground
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by John Markoff
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In Silicon Valley, each new technology gives rise to a new generation of
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hackers. Consider the cellular telephone. The land-based telephone system
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was originally the playground for small group of hardy adventurer who
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believed mastery of telephone technology was an end in itself. Free phone
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calls weren't the goal of the first phone phreaks. The challenge was to
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understand the system.
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The philosophy of these phone hackers: Push the machines as far as they
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would go.
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Little has changed. Meet V.T. and N.M., the nation's most clever cellular
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phone phreaks. (Names here are obscured because, as with many hackers,
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V.T. and N.M.'s deeds inhabit a legal gray area.) The original phone
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phreaks thought of themselves as "telecommunications hobbyists" who
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explored the nooks and crannies of the nation's telephone network - not
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for profit, but for intellectual challenge. For a new generation of mobile
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phone hackers, the cellular revolution offers rich new veins to mine.
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V.T. is a young scientist at a prestigious government laboratory. He has
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long hair and his choice in garb frequently tends toward Patagonia. He is
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generally regarded as a computer hacker with few equals. N.M. is a
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selftaught hacker who lives and works in Silicon Valley. He has mastered
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the intricacies of Unix and DOS. Unusually persistent, he spent almost an
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entire year picking apart his cellular phone just to see how it works.
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What V.T. and N.M. discovered last year is that cellular phones are really
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just computers - network terminals - linked together by a gigantic
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cellular network. They'also realized that just like other computers,
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cellular phones are programmable.
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Progammable! In a hacker's mind that means is no reason to limit a
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cellular phone to the choice of functions offered by its manufacturer.
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That means that cellular phones can be hacked! They can be dissected and
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disassembled and put back together in remarkable new ways. Optimized!
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Cellular phones aren't the first consumer appliances to be cracked open
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and augmented in ways their designers never conceived. Cars, for example,
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are no longer the sole province of mechanics. This is the information age:
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Modern automobiles have dozens of tiny microprocessors. Each one is a
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computer; each one can be reprogrammed. Hot rodding cars today doeon't
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mean throwing in a new carburetor, it means ''rewriting' the software
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governing the car's fuel injection system.
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This is the reality science fiction writers William Gibson and Bruce
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Sterling had in mind when they created cyberpunk: Any technology, no
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matter how advanced, almost immediately falls to the level of the street.
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Here in Silicon Valley, there are hundreds of others like V.T. and N. M.
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who squeeze into the crannies of any new technology, bending it to new and
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more exotic uses.
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On a recent afternoon, V.T. sits at a conference room table in a San
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Francisco highrise. ln his hand is an OKI 900 cellular phone. It nestles
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comfortably in his palm as his flngers dance across the keyboard.
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Suddenly, the tiny back-lit screen flashes a message: "Good Timing!" Good
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Timing? This is a whimsical welcome message left hidden in the phone's
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software by the manufacturer's programmers. V.T. has entered the phone's
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software sub-basement -- a command area normally reserved for
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technicians. This is where the phone can be reprogrammed; a control
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point from which the phone can be directed to do new and cooler things. It
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is hidden by a simple
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undocumented password.
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How did V.T. get the password, or even know one was required? It didn't
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even take sophisticated social engineering - the phone phreak s term for
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gaining secret engineering data by fooling unwitting employees into
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thinking they are talking to an official phone company technician.
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Rather, all he did was order the technical manual, which told him he
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needed special codes to enter the software basement. V.T. then called the
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cellular phone maker's technical support hotline. "They said 'sorry about
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that,' and asked for a fax number. A couple of minutes later we had the
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codes," he recalls with a faint grin.
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V.T. fingers continue darting across the keys he is issuing commands built
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into the phone by the original programmers. These commands are not found
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in the phone''s user manual. Suddenly, voices emerge from the phone's ear
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piece. The first is that of a salesman getting his messages from a voice
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mail system. V.T. shifts frequencies. Another voice. A woman giving her
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boss directions to his next appointment.
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What's going on here? V.T. and N.M. have discovered that every cellular
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phone possesses a secret mode that turns it into a powelful cellular
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scanner.
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That's just the beginning. Using a special program called a
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"disassembler," V.T. has read-out the OKl's software, revealing mole than
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90 secret commands for controlling the phone.
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That's how the two hackers found the undocumented feartures that turn the
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phone into a scanner. Best of all, the manufacturer has included a simple
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interface that makes it possible to control the phone with a standard
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personal computer.
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A personal computer! The most programmable of a hacker's tools! That means
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that what appears to be a simple telephone can be easily transformed into
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a powerful machine that can do things its designers never dreamed of!
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V.T. alld N.M. have also discovered that the OKl s 64-Kbyte ROM - a
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standard off the shelf chip that stores the phone's software - has more
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than 20 Kbytes of free space. Plenty of room to add special features, just
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like hot rodding the electronics of a late-model car. Not only do the
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hackers use the software that is already there, but they can add some of
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their own as well. And for a good programmer, 20 Kbytes is a lot ot room
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to work with.
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It is worth noting that V.T. and N.M. are not interested in getting free
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phone calls. There are dozens of other ways to accomplish that, as an
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anonymous young pirate recently demonstlated by stealing the electronic
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serial number from a San Diego roaddide emergency box and then racking up
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thousands of phone calls before the scam was discovered. (Such a serial
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number allowed the clever hacker to create a phone that the phone network
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thought was somewhere on a pole by the side of the freeway .)
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It's also possible to wander to street corners in any borough in New York
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City and tind a code dude - street slang for someone who illegally pirates
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telephone codes - who will give you 15 minutes of phone time to any corner
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of the world for $10. These 'duldes' find illegally gathered charge card
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numbers and then resell them on the street until telephone security
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catches on. The tip-off: often an unusually large number of calls to
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Ecuador or France emmanating trom one particular street corner.
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Then again, it's possible for you to join the code hackers who write
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telephone software that automatically tinds codes to be stolen. Or you can
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buy a hot ROM - one that contains magic security information identifying
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you as a paying customer. Either way, your actions would be untraceable by
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the phone company's interwoven security databases.
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But free phone calls are not what V.T. and N.M. are about. "It's so
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boring," says V.T. "If you're going to do something illegal, you might as
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well do something interesting." So what's tempting? N.M. has hooked his
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portable PC and his cellular phone together. He watches the laptop's
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screen, which is drawing a map of each cellular phone call currently being
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placed in our cell - a term for the area covered by one broadcast unit in
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the cellular phone network. The network can easily query each cellular
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phone as to its current location. When phones travel trom one cell to the
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next - as they tend to do in a car information is passed on in the form of
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hidden code married to the phone transmission. Since N.M. knows where each
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local cell is, he can display the approximate geographic locations of each
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phone that is currently active.
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But for that tracking scheme to work, the user must be on the phone. It
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would take only a tew days of hacking to extend the sottware on N.M.'s PC
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to do an cven more intriging monitoring task: Why not pirate the data from
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the cellular network's paging channel (a special frequency that cellular
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networks use to communicate administrative information to cellular phones)
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and use it to follow car phones through the networks? Each time there is a
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hand-off from one cell to the next, that fact could be recorded on the
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screen of the PC - making it possible to track users regardless of whether
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or not they are on the phone.
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Of course this is highly illegal, but N.M. muses that the capability is
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something that might be extremely valuable to law enforcement agencies -
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and all at a cost far below the exotic systems they now use.
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Hooking a cellular phone to a personal computer offers other surveillance
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possibilities as well. V.T. and N.M. have considered writing software to
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monitor particular phone numbers. They could easily design a program that
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turns the OKI 900 on when calls are origilnted on a specific number or
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when specific nulmbers are called. A simple voice-activated recorder could
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then tape the call. And, ot course a reprogrammed phone could
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automatically decode touch-tone passwords - making it easy to steal credit
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card numbers or voicemail codes.
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Then there's the vampire phone. Why not, suggests V.T. take advantage of
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a cellular phone's radio frequency lealkage - inevitable low-power radio
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emissions - to build a phone that with the press of a few buttons, could
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scan the RF spectrum for the victim's electronic serial number. You'd have
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to be pretty close to the target phone to pick up the RF, but once you
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have the identity codes reprogrammed the phone becomes digitally
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indistinguishable from the original. This is the type ol phone fraad that
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keeps federal investigators up at night.
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Or how about the ultimate hackers spoof? V.T. has carefully studied phone
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company billing procedures and toured many examples of inaccurate bills.
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Why not monitor somebody's caIls and then anonymously send the person a
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correct version of their bill "According to our reords..."
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.
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Of course, such surveillance is probably highly illegal, and although it
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may seem to be catching on, The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of
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1986 makes it a federal crime to eavesdrop on cellular phlonle calls. More
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recently, Congress passed another law forbidding the manufacture of
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cellular scanners. While they may not be manufacturers, both N.M. and V.T.
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realize that their beautifully crafted phones are probably illegal.
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For now, their goals are less bold. V.T., for example, wants to be able to
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have several phones with the same phone number. "Not a problem as I see
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it."
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Although federal law requires that electronic serial numbers be hidden in
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special protected memory V.T. and N.M. have figured out how to pull that
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ESN out and write software so that they can replace it with their own.
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V.T. and N.M's explorations into the secrets of the OKI 900 have them with
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a great deal of admiration for OKl's programmers. "I don't know what they
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were thinking, but they had a good time," V.T. said, "This phone was
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clearly built by hackers."
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The one thing V.T. and N.M. haven't decided is whether or not they should
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tell OKI about the bugs - anld the possibilities they've found in the
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phone's software.
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