182 lines
9.3 KiB
Plaintext
182 lines
9.3 KiB
Plaintext
.DOCUMENT BlueBEEP Documentation
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.TOPIC Editorial
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.SUBTITLE Hello and goodbye - an adventure 2 years in the making
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- Welcome to BlueBEEP 1.00 -
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Today, it's been two years since I sat in my room in Hamburg
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and casually decided that I am going to start the next couple days
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on writing a little blueboxing tool for myself and my friends. It
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should be a project that changed the world; mine, and those of others.
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Five days later, the first version, 0.01 was finished and I called
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my friend uptown. "I wrote a little bluebox in Pascal. You want me to
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send it over to you so you can check it out?" The next day he rang me
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up in the evening and told me that he liked it a lot, and if I could
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add a couple of features. He also suggested that I should give it a try
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and upload it to a local warez board so we could see if other people
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liked it too.
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A warez board. Holy shit.
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About a week later, I called my local uucp email provider to see if
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that girl I was writing with already sent me a reply. When I logged on,
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I didn't find 1 message.
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I found 57.
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A total of fifty-seven people from all over the world had sent me
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letters about how much they liked BlueBEEP and what kind of features
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they were missing direly from other, older blueboxes that were out. Or
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those cool menus they had in that Amiga bluebox. Or this. Or that. It
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was out of control. As much as everyone rags on the warez scene, it's
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sure as hell the best digital junkmail network you can imagine; you
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throw something into it, and thousands of warez puppies make sure it
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ends up in everybody's front yard. God bless WaReZ.
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The overwhelming interest in the program never subsided. If
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blueboxing died in one country, other people in a different country
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finally figured out what they could do by shooting some signals down to
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a remote CCITT long-distance switch. It was seeping down from the more
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elite countries all the way to the bottom: USA, Canada, Western Europe,
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then Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Brazil.. It blew me out of my chair.
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While I kept on developing BlueBEEP, I received a clip from a norwegian
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newspaper in the mail. A big article, with an image that pictured a
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very concerned looking guy in a suit in front of a PBX system. From the
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norwegian blah underneath I could only tell my handle was mentioned.
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And BlueBEEP. In a huge double-page article with screen-shot. WTF! The
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english translation that was neatly made on a laser printer, made me a
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little bit wiser.
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"SHELL NORWAY IS SUFFERING MAJOR LOSSES FROM A PROGRAM THAT IS BEING
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PASSED AROUND IN THE NORWEGIAN COMPUTER UNDERGROUND FOR UP TP Nk. 20000
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PER COPY. THE PROGRAM, WITH THE RIGHT SETUP, ENABLED THE USER TO USE
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SHELL'S TELEPHONE SWITCHING SYSTEM TO MAKE FREE PHONE CALLS AT SHELL'S
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EXPENSE. BLUEBEEP, AS THE PROGRAM IS CALLED, WAS CREATED BY A COMPUTER
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HACKER FROM HAMBURG, GERMANY WHO GOES BY THE NAME OF "ONKEL DITTMEYER".
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LOCAL INVESTIGATIONS IN GERMANY ARE STILL PENDING AT THIS TIME..."
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The suit on the picture threw me evil looks, and I sat down. Here we
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are, giving people free tools to explore the phone system, learn, and
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trade K-RaD 0DaY WaReZ for free! Then some asshole turns it into
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white-collar crime and we get blamed for all the shit. Luckily, in
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the long run, nobody ever came to my house and asked me to "move it"
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downtown. Our "local investigators" must have been too busy scooping up
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the guys that got jumped by some Turks last night. Busy Police is one
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of the few good things about living in a crappy neighborhood.
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However, BlueBEEP made it through. Maybe not in a steady flow, but
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I always managed to come up with something new and throw it into the
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big junkmail machine. In December '93, I flew to the states on some
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saved-up money and attended HoHoCon. I had just completely rewritten
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BlueBEEP from pieces, cluster by cluster, from my hard drive that had
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just crashed. It took me about 5 days of coding - without a break. The
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combination of loud music, coffeine and painkillers is a productive
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one,I was just comfortably feeling numb while and about 2 weeks after
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I did it. All programmers must have these moments. In Texas, a couple
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of the people there had already played around with the program, and it
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was up on most local h/p bbses there. I was supposed to talk about the
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program, but by the time my english was bad and I was too chicken to
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go up and dare to bore 350 hung-over and grouchy hackers! (sorry dFx)
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DrunkFux should get some credit here, because I always harrassed him,
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both '93 and 94, to give me a speaker slot and I never took him up on
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it at the actual con. I better watch out now! But you can't see him
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coming, each time I see him he has a different hair color. He'll
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probably print my name on the TOP TEN CHICKEN LIST when he makes next
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year's HoHo-shirts. Eye phear!
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After that, I couldn't really program too much because my life
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turned out of control, and I never had the time and the piece of mind
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to focus on and do some good programming. Somehow, I managed to release
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0.09 and 0.10, 0.10 with some really interesting improvements, like the
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internal file structure etc. Since Summer '94 or so, nothing much was
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done on the code because until recently I couldn't get the 3 necessary
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components together: Inspiration, Peace of Mind and Hardware. Now that
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my life is somewhat calmer now, my straightforwardness and my focus
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has returned but BlueBEEP - for a long time now - is basically sucked
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dry for improvements. There is no useful feature that could be added.
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If it was there and it made sense and it was possible to realize it,
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some user let me know about it and it has been implemented. For a
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couple months already, there are no more useful suggestions coming in
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on how I could be improved. Want a wardialer? Try ToneLoc. Want a
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terminal? Try Telix. Want cryptostuff? Try PGP. Nothing really made
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sense, and that's the state the program is in right now. With this last
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version, I just added some tiny little details and fixed some bugs. One
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thing is special about it though:
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IT IS THE LAST RELEASE
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I will make no further improvements, bug fixes or releases of this
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proggy. For fairness, learning and to keep the hacker spirit of the
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50's and 60's alive, I make the whole unabridges source code available
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to everybody for improvements, very like the way it was done at MIT
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when programming was coming to life back in the days.
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If you would ask me if I think that publishing the source code is
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a good idea, I would have to say no. It is unevitable that some teenage
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lamers from all over the world are going to come out with bad bluebeep
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hacks that don't really work, that people are gonna steal parts of this
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code and use it without giving me the props, and that people are going
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to flame at me on how bad my programming sucks (feel free). It is
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definitely not smart, but it's Right. And, tons of people are bickering
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for linux/windows/os2/insert_os_name_here versions. Well, go ahead,
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port the thing (I did't tell you it was fun, remember that!) and give
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me the credit. I am not good enough a programmer to port it into all
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those environments, but if you think you can do it for just one, go
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right ahead. Unless anyone is going to sell this code or portations of
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it, it's cool with me. Just let me know if you can, OK?
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Some acknowledgements to people who really helped along the way:
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Prime/Spyce - for getting me into boxing in the first place
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Urmel - for making some cool adlib sound routines
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ECR - for stealing them from Urmel and giving them to me :)
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LowCyl - who betatested it in the rough WaReZ reality, 24/7.
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Tr8or - who always came up with something good.
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Werdohl M.R. - for keeping all of us entertained at all times
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DrunkFux - for his talent in organizing cool events
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Beetle - who opened my eyes on many ideas and helped me manage
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Carlos (C.A.T) - for running the BlueBEEP Fan Club in Brazil
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and wife
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#phreak/#hack - stuck on a higher level (gnawt) try #k0dek1dz
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Pluvius - just for being a cool contact
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and all those that cheered, complained, suggested, rumored, uploaded,
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ftp'ed, traded, toted, spread, criticized and used BlueBEEP all along.
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Happy Birthday and goodbye.
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- Onkel Dittmeyer, April 1st, 1995
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onkeld@earth.planet.net
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.END
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.TOPIC GAWD-DAMN!
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.SUBTITLE Something came along and nuked the docs!
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|RGAWDDAMN, |WSHITFUQ, |YMUTHAFUQIN JEZUZ KRIST! |ZBVERFLIXT 'N ZUGENAEHT!!!!
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Just when I was editing this file tonight, a straight text file about
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90k in size, my editor crashed while saving the file and completely wiped
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it out. However, the documentation of the source code was not affected and
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you can still read it as source.doc (plaintext). I will re-write and release
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the fixed documentation in the next couple of days; however because I want
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to keep my promise of having the source out on April 1st, BlueBEEPs second
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anniversary, I am releasing it anyway. You can grab the full documentation
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in a week or so at ftp.fc.net, and I bet it will also be traded around on
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#phreak/#phreak/#warez*. Stay tuned. The editorial survived the crash; chew
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on that in the meantime ;-]
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|COnkel Dittmeyer / onkeld@planet.net
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|BApril 1st, 1995
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.END
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.ENDDOC
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