[LUAU] You know this world famous hacker?

[Jim Thompson]

Karen Lofstrom wrote:

> On Wed, 2 Nov 2005, Tim Newsham wrote:
>
>>> He was a phone hacker.....You need to have been around in telephony 
>>> for a
>>> little while.
>>
>> Lemme guess - likes to offer back massages to young boys at cons?
>
>
> Boyohboy this makes me feel like an old fut. Captain Crunch. Cereal. 
> Free whistles in boxes of cereal. Whistle just happens to make the 
> very tone that, blown into a telephone handset, gives you a FREE 
> long-distance phone call. Back before e-mail made having friends in 
> Mumbai a matter of course.  

You needed a "Blue Box" to get a freeLD phone call, and you needed to 
close up one of the holes in the whistle to make 2600 Hz.  The 2600Hz 
tone would only get you a trunk seize.  When you placed a long-distance 
call in those days, the system was quite simple. You would connect first 
to your local telephone exchange. When it detected that you were dialing 
long-distance, it would scan the outgoing trunk lines for an "idle" 
tone-the 2600 Hz frequency.  To exploit the hack, a phone phreak would 
dial an 800 number, which would trigger the local exchange to connect an 
idle trunk line and tag the call as free. Then the phreaker sent the 
2600 Hz tone down the line. The long-distance exchange would interpret 
that as an indication that the call was complete, but the local exchange 
would still consider the trunk to be in-use for a free call.

You needed a blue box (and its ability to generate MF) to do anything 
after that, using the now-outmoded in-band signaling of the phone system 
of yore.  "Blue boxes" commonly generated 2600 Hz all by themselves 
anyway, so the whistle was moot.  It was, at best a stupid hack.

Draper didn't actually discover that the whistle could be used to 
generate 2600 Hz,  nor did he discover that 2600 Hz could be used to 
sieze a trunk, a blind phone phreak named Joe Engressia (aka 
"Joybubbles") did, five years before I was born.  Draper admits this 
now, but always took a lot of credit back in the day.

Jim -- who won't admit that he has a complete 'brick' of TAP and a Bud 
set somewhere, or that he ever got TAP in the mail while he was in Jr. 
High, (likely putting him on the FBI watch list for life) or that he 
once, back when computers consumed his life, coded a DSP to generate not 
only a "complete" set of blue, red and black boxes, but also one end of 
a UUCP startup sequence from detecting dial tone and generating the DTMF 
to 'dial' 'the 'phone', through "Shere" just to see if it could be done 
(as a 1200 baud modem)   Perhaps one of the first "soft modems"...  You 
could do the same thing with a decent sound card and a P3 today, but 
hardly anyone talks UUCP anymore.