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.
