textfiles/magazines/CHN/chn-0003.txt

          PHREAKING AMONG THE GAUCHOS

          By Viktor Arevalo <viktare@well.com>
          
           I told myself I was lucky when I returned to Argentina after 
          ten years in Europe. I had read in Ed Krol's The Whole Internet 
          that Argentina rated BIUF, an international connectivity rating 
          better than Australia and much better than New Zealand.  
          Gophering, I even discovered a couple of Argentine addresses: 
          the Foreign Ministry and La Plata University.  "Argentina equals 
          Switzerland as to Internet capacity," I celebrated in advance.  
          "An internaut will miss nothing down there." The only minus point 
          listed, compared to the USA, was the absence of OSI/ISO 
          connectivity, of no consequence whatsoever for TCP/IP or the 
          Internet as a whole.
           When I arrived in Rosario on the Parana River, I found 
          just a conventional phone jack in my house. I verified the jack 
          right away: an old pulse line, with international access only 
          feasible through an operator after waiting half an hour or more.  
          The next day, I went to the nearest office of France Telecom 
          S.A., the telco monopoly.  A dour girl with a hare-lip and the 
          body of a Greek goddess assured me: "You're fortunate, where you 
          live you can tone dial internationally just by paying us $50". I 
          signed a form and paid.  Then I asked cheerfully, "Can you give 
          me the addresses of some Internet access providers in the city?" 
          The girl turned red and uttered back angrily, "Please, sir, 
          don't make me such proposals! I'm a decent woman, I don't provide 
          such things!" I didn't dare to inquire what the Greek goddess 
          with the hare-lip had understood I wanted from her. 
          I returned home baffled and worried.  Nobody I met had the least 
          idea about Internet.
           Weeks passed. I noticed one day that I could tone dial 
          internationally on that phone. I fired up my modem, called 
          halcyon.com in Seattle and opened a common dial-up account 
          and a SLIP account in less than 5 minutes.  Then I connected to 
          pipeline.com in New York and downloaded a file, 1,544,070 bytes, 
          with ZModem.  The download took 24 minutes, at a speed of 
          about 11.000 bps-not bad for a place so far-and away.  Before 
          jogging, I called the international operator and asked, "How much 
          cost per, minute to USA'?" He answered: "3.52". 
          "3.52 what, explain, please!" He stressed back: "3.52 US dollars, 
          Sir, do you  understand Spanish'? Dollars, Sir." The stupid 30 
          minute test had cost $105.60. My usual two daily hours on the Net 
          would gulp more than thirteen thousand dollars a month. The only way 
          to reach Internet from Argentina: dialing international calls at the 
          outrageous rate of $3.52 a minute. No way.             
           After months of total incommunication and frustration, I met 
          Kurt, who described himself as "a German visiting professor in 
          Argentina from the University of Leipzig." His specialty was some
          obscure branch of optical links beyond my understanding.
          Even if he weren't a German scholar in such an unnatural and odd 
          place like Rosario, Kurt would cut an imposing figure: black suit 
          with a neatly knotted tie over a snow white shirt. Hovering over 
          the suit were piercing black eyes framed by shoulder length black 
          hair and a beard worthy of an Ayatollah.
           When I told him about my isolation because of the phone rates, he 
          responded: "Internet, Donnerwetter, my colleagues and pupils pass 
          hours and hours on the Internet, they don't pay a cent. Please, 
          Herr Kollege, come next Friday evening to our workshop about TCP/IP.
          I'll show you everything. First, I had to help a little bit,
          but they don't need me now anymore. These kids are really smart."
           What an outspoken jerk I'd been. Of course there was Internet at 
          the University, like everywhere in the world, with one or several 
          64K high speed links and racks of modems. Surely they'll loan me a 
          point to point line, if I know how to ask for it. Why not? How
          foolish to have lost so many months with snail mail and faxes!
           Next evening, I went to the Technological University clothed like
          an IBM executive of the old times with my darkest tie and my whitest
          shirt. The facilities reminded me of some cluster-bombed buildings
          in Abadan, South Iran, during the Gulf War. All window panes broken,
          all walls cracked. One could see and smell the decay and dirtiness of
          decades. I asked a fellow, some kind of guard or janitor, about Prof.
          Kurt and he answered with mocking disdain: "Ah,the German that looks
          like Rasputin, yeah, he's down there in the cellar with his lunatics.
          Is there some special show that you come so costumed?" 
           I tried to find the cellar, but got lost. All of a sudden, behind 
          me,I heard to my relief the metallic voice of Kurt in impeccable 
          Hochdeutsch: "Oh, Herr Kollege, you're here, quite early, people 
          arrive in Argentina mostly an hour late. Come, please, we are
          about to begin the session." We went down a dimly lit flight of 
          stairs.  A massive, rusty iron gate, a piece of ancient design, 
          offered access to the cellar, a totall underground construction,
          most unusual in Argentina.  Perhaps it was the remnant of some 
          older building swallowed by the foundations.  Six personal computers
          rested on a long table against one wall: cheap clones,mini-tower 
          cases, 14" Samsung color VGA screens, rank and file in Argentina 
          all running Windows 3.1. I couldn't see any cables and couldn't
          say if they were networked or not.
           The atmosphere of the huge vaulted cellar reflected order, almost
          obsessive order, an cleanliness of the humblest sort. Greenish
          lights shone from side wall niches, indirect lighting perfect for 
          working at the computers, but weird for anything else. How the place
          looked, nobody would say we were in Argentina.  The setting was 
          typical East European.
            Four young Men and two girls, all in their twenties, sat 
          before the screens, The acted polite, neat and grave, as though 
          they were performing a ceremonial task. All greeted me respectfully,
          too much so for their local customs. They all stood up and gave me
          their hands. One told me: "I'm Nathan, we just assist Prof. Kurt. 
          We worked as a team to learn abou the Internet and it's protocol.." 
           Nathan explained further: "we now run Windows in a peer to peer 
          net. We usually call sirius.com in the USA on our V34 at 28800
          We try at least, sometimes it fails and fails".
           Nathan dialed a common touch phone, and When he heard something on
          the other side, he, threw a sharp screech through the phone 
          mouthpiece with a walkman headphone connected to an IBM notebook.
          Then I perceived again the characteristic playing of phone numbers 
          in tone. "This is CCITT five"' Nathan said.  
          A short modem negotiation of screeches came, sirius appeared and 
          popped a SLIP node number, Nathan registered it and jumped to his 
          desktop computer. he fed the address into Trumpet Winsock and ran 
          Eudora to fetch mail. It suprised me how much mail they received
          and how much they sent back.
           I asked Kurt if We could run Mosaic or NetScape.  
          It took no more than a minute to load Mosaic and it's, "What's 
          New" page; the speed impressed me. "What's New" suggested a 
          new Web page devoted entirely to cats.  There we went: a center 
          for cat owners and fans, where you can peruse all aspects of 
          feline existence and ask counsel about your cat, even if it is 
          on drugs like Prozac.  We were roaming the Net until late, 
          about 5am. An exhilarating experience after, so many months
          of exclusion! I could even log into CompuServe with WinCom through
          the Internet SLIP connection, using a small shareware program
          called comt that emulates a Hayes modem on TCP/IP.
          Mosaic and NetScape brought images lightning quick for such a 
          forgotten corner of the world, astoundingly quick.  We used the
          Swedish telnet,  freeware Ewan for telnet, which was excellent 
          For email, Pegasus and Eudora were constantly checking in the
          background.  For News they had the classic Trumpet News and Win News.
          All programs ran on all six pc's without a glitch. Time flew.
           My backached, my eyes were swollen and my hands missed the keys.
          It was late, very late. All of a sudden I realized how different
          these people behaved from the hackers and internauts I knew.
          their commentaries were objective, sparse, and unobtrusive:
          about download speeds, better logging scripts for Winsock, or the
          advantages of PPP over SLIP.
          They never bragged about what the accomplished. Kurt sat all those
          hours somewhere in the dark and didn't speak a word. He was working,
          perhaps writing at his tiny Toshiba protege'.  Silence could be 
          absolute in the cellar for 20 minutes, the mushy keyboards didn't 
          even click. sound came only through the walkman, creating an eerie,
          ghastly atmosphere. 
           After the amazing session, I invited them all to a coffee breakfast
          in a shabby, dusty bar. All bars were shabby and dusty in these 
          surroundings, but the coffee tasted great and the pastry was still
          warm from the ovens.
           I felt exhausted. buoyant and worried. I told Kurt:
          "Great, this technological university seems ahead of all others
          in Argentina. How do they manage the phone bills? Do they enjoy an
          optical link with a flat rate? Where's the backbone?"
           Kurt answered in his too-correct, cacophonous Spanish: "The 
          University pays nothing. The cellar itself lies outside the premises 
          of the university, it is a leftover of a mansion demolished 30 years
          ago. We use it and nobody objects. We wired and air-conditioned it
          using borrowed materials, the university provides nothing and opposes
          nothing. How do we call long distance? I thought you knew. 
          We simply phreak, Viktor, phreak and phreak! 
          We have gathered some 135 direct country services, 800 numbers for
          collect calls, we seize one or several trunks and stay online all 
          the time we wish".
           "Is it legal?" he continued. " I don't know. Is it fair? Yes. it is.
          We harm nobody. The phone company, a private French monopoly, 
          voracious like a school of piranhas, charges $3.52 per minute to the
          USA. University teachers, students, young people, don't have a 
          choice: if they want access to the Internet, they must phreak.
          We don't need any special hardware like the old blue boxes or the 
          modern demon dialers from Holland. BlueBeep covers all our wishes. 
          BlueBeep is a freeware from Hamburg that generates the trunk 
          tones through the cheapest SoundBlaster clone.  If you have the 
          smallest doubt, you phone its author, Uncle Dittmayer, for help 
          and he never asks a cent for support.  We opened, of course, some 
          SLIP and PPP accounts with American service providers on the West 
          coast.  We navigate the Net at a modest but acceptable speed 
          under Windows.  Internet is here a matter of survival, not like 
          in the USA or Europe ... the university is totally bankrupt in 
          Argentina, textbooks in the library are 20 years old, if you can 
          find them.  All subscriptions to scientific journals were canceled 
          a decade ago."
           I was shocked. Where I worked more than ten years in Europe, they 
          punished phreaking as a federal offense, a crime.  On the contrary,
          Kurt described phreaking in Argentina as the only path to Information
          Justice against the monopolies.  The revelation took me absolutely 
          unprepared.  
          The only backbones I had found where those in my own back and 
          they began to ache terribly. I felt depressed and giddy. 
          I showed the most sincere mixture of understanding and confusion. 
          I slept that Saturday ten hours and dreamed nonstop about Tolkien's 
          stuff: elves, dwarfs and orcs with phones but without a happy end.
          I never returned to that cellar.
           I needn't resort to phreaking. Providence, personified by some 
          old pupils of mine and friends in Switzerland, rescued me from the
          isolation of the Pampas. After delicate negotiations with German 
          and Swiss banks, they hired for me a callback service with no time
          limits and at a flat rate, they say. They pay. The best present I 
          ever had. I ignore how much it costs, but it works transparently 
          and never lets me down. Kurt didn't comment much on my absolute              *callback
          legal solution. He considered it morally inferior compared to 
          phreaking and too dependent for his values.  He told me: "You have
          to thank somebody for getting your rights, you degrade them to 
          privileges and your solution remains purely personal. You harm 
          nobody indeed, but you help only yourself."
           At the end of November 1994, I met Prof. Kurt once more in a 
          dilapidated pub near the harbor. He wanted me to help him in 
          debugging some C++ routines; the problem was tough and we
          worked five hours on it with our notebooks. Then we ate dinner 
          together. He commented that evening, "I understand your absolute
          reluctance to phreak. Anyway, what the students do with the 
          phones in the cellar is very simple, any kid could do the same and
          phone all over the world without paying a cent. 
          But the real possibilities, the great changes, are in the future.
          We could install here a cloaked Internet node with all the facilities
          of a large service provider, say like The Little Garden in the
          States or Rhein-Main in Germany. We could make a clean connection 
          with the main optic link, which passes some twenty meters from the 
          institute cellar.
          Then the students will enjoy unlimited bandwidth, the bandwidth 
          equivalent to 35 simultaneous ISDN connections. And the telcos would 
          never know or suspect anything. Even if they knew, they would
          never spot our cable, not in a thousand years."
           It seemed to me that Kurt knew what he was talking about 
          up to the smallest technical detail, but ignored completely 
          the legal implications and the political realities in 
          Argentina.  I liked Kurt and was distressed about the 
          needless dangers he ran. I told him: "The legal consequences 
          of your technical jump could be far reaching, too." And what 
          I didn't say, but pictured in my thoughts, was Prof.  Kurt 
          without his notebook vegetating in some dungeon.  But the mad 
          all are in God's keeping.  Anyway, I admired Kurt: he wasn't 
          flashy, but did things in a solid dominating way.  Even his 
          dreams based on facts, he had a fanatical dedication: he wanted
          to end the Internet isolation of Argentina and the official 
          hypocrisy hiding it. He stated to me his principles and
          I could not contend their *morality;
               
               1) We don't harm anyone

               2) The telcos bar the public from any Internet access, but
                  officially declare Argentina as enjoying all Internet
                  services.

               3) People need the Internet here much more than in countries
                  where the universities really work. Argentine universities
                  are hollow shells without any resource or mission whatsoever.

               4) The telcos monopolize so much bandwidth that our calls take 
                  away nothing, just a little bit of their surplus, the 
                  discarded dark fiber.
             

           But principles, and reality need a revolution to coincide. 
          Agraule, a graduate from the cellar team, a sad-looking and 
          beautiful girl, told him once in my presence: 
          "Yes, Prof.  Kurt, perhaps you're right, but it's much better 
          to keep a low profile, Laws and judges don't have much to 
          do with justice in Argentina.  We have to prepare ourselves 
          for the future.  To break into any cable would first make us 
          grow in numbers, and then destroy us all.  It's too 
          dangerous.  You know too much for us, your wisdom will burn 
          us out if we drink it all in one year.  We need limits and 
          goals, knowledge can be like rhino ammo and blow us away."
          Sunday mid-afternoon in January, torrid, unbearable hot, 
          a deserted city. I almost hate the cicadas now.  They are 
          funny bugs first, then they batter the eardrums so much 
          you cannot think.  The people, the few people that remain in 
          Rosario, sleep long siestas. I have to avoid siestas at any 
          rate, they provoke head-aches and nausea in me, I was typing 
          at my notebook and finishing the first draft of this article 
          when the doorbell rang.  A yawning old maid shuffled into my 
          home office saying, "A foreigner, Senor, wants to see 
          you".
           Kurt came in: "Viktor, dear chap, I'm going back home
          and want to say good-bye. I hope I'll return next 
          winter.  But perhaps you don't stay much longer in 
          Argentina.  You suffer too much isolation, it's not the 
          right place for you.  Go away as soon as possible!" I 
          responded, "Oh, yes, perhaps we meet again somewhere 
          else, but I'll have to remain here half a year at least to 
          streamline the farm.  Do you return to your chair at the 
          university in Leipzig'?"
           Kurt answered, "Yes, something of the sort, a lot of matters 
          pending." I asked, "How long have you taught at that university
          in Germany?" "When the Democratic Republic ceased to exist, they
          had to send me somewhere," he told me.  "They sent me to Leipzig.
          They ordered me to leave Berlin, too, but for legal reasons. 
          I'm under some sort of prosecution, you know, such things take 
          years and years to clear." I asked, "What the hell, they 
          prosecute you there because of phreaking?".
          "Oh no, Viktor:'he said, "I wish it were so simple. I worked 
          all my life, even before graduating and habilitating as a full
          professor, at the STASI (the East German Secret Service).
          They paid me as a university professor but my chair was without
          pupils and without university." I said jokingly: "Were you a 
          communist James Bond, Kurt?" Kurt answered: "No, I hate spying
          and am not gifted for it. I was the manager of a whole technical
          area for computers and international telecommunications.
          We had to blow all STASI hardware and data before the takeover.
          I obeyed our orders to the letter. Now they try to find fault 
          with such actions. That's of no consequence for my life, my
          career's closed, and I'll stay as a professor in Leipzig for 
          life. A boring task indeed! Now, listen: I, we, could try to
          crack Intellink. It's easy. It's a quest."
           When Kurt left, I felt I had found the last piece of a puzzle.
          I knew the local phone companies were no match for Herr Professor
          Kurt. Alas! It is a great and terrible world. BIUF or not BIUF, 
          what does it matter. Mr. Krol?