This was probably posted here because of the book promotion articles referring to Beto O'Rourke's hacker culture history, which is directly connected to this whistle, and the subsequent solder hacks on Radio Shack phone dialers to emulate said whistle's 2600 Hz tone.
So there is at least an indirect current events element to it. Fun times were had once.
You are probably thinking of the WATS pins. It was a huge thing at the time to war dial entire exchanges to find them, and then publish the lists. A lot of the time people would then use unsecured bridges to hold mass group chats. Beto was no stranger to those circles, even though cDc actively stated the level of risk one takes on when doing so.
Bridges were terrible for modems, as at any moment another war dialer would connect, or people looking to chat, and knock the modem offline from the announce beep.
The chats were mainly social, but a lot of technical discourse occurred, which was a huge draw.
I routinely now work with people who never experienced the world without the internet.
When cars, airplanes, radio and TV were first invented (and commercialized), it must have been relatively easier for folks to imagine life before them. Immediate access to information is truly jaw-dropping.
I had the odd experience of nobody at work recognizing the Sputnik satellite. Granted, I'm probably somewhat nerdier than average, and am originally from Russia, but still - a 0% hit rate seemed odd.
tractor feed use the tearable holed paper to feed and might or might not be dot matrix, which is how ink gets transferred to paper, you can still find tractor feed lasers around
War Games and Ferris Buelers Day Off were why I searched "how to hack" into excite.com a couple hours into getting my first internet capable home computer. I found ESR's "Hacker How-To" and tried to follow it with youthful zeal.
You and me both. Now days people send their kids off to college with a cell phone. When I went off to college my Mom gave me a roll of quarters to use to call home with. I used phone hacks instead and spent the quarters on beer :) Back then a roll of quarters bought enough beers to get you pretty buzzed.
It saddens me that Gen Z hackers think a Redbox is where you rent blu-rays.
(But on a serious note, it surprises me how few people in the community have a sense of history. I spent a lot of time in the late 90s/early 2000s reading stuff on textfiles.com, researching terms etc I didn't understand, and I think it really helped me become a better hacker.)
Now, in the age of Wikipedia, it astounds me how uncurious many people are. Maybe I'm werid, but I often look stuff up and click around.
It makes me sad that we have so much more information than previous generations, but so few seem to leverage it.
(Ex: most of my technical issues can be solved with a simple DDG search. Back in the day it would have been hours of reading man pages, poking through mailing list archives, or possibly popping into the IRC room for the devs to do something as simple as get a wifi card working)
> Now, in the age of Wikipedia, it astounds me how uncurious many people are
I find myself constantly astounded by this. But I think this age we are in only exposes something that is probably the default state for this country.
I was "into computers" growing up in the early 80's and I remember the number one question I got from adults was - "what are you going to do with a computer?". I'm guessing many people had the same experience.
Curiosity isn't a default state. It is what separates us from everyone else. Very sadly.
I think everyone is curious, the only difference is what people are curious about. Not everyone gives a rip about computers, that doesn't make them fundamentally uncurious.
On a physical layer, yes: ADSL runs over the same copper lines. But the upper layers are quite separated. Moving everyone to VoIP means less infrastructure needed, things working the same for fiber and ADSL customers, and higher speeds for ADSL (due to being able to use the frequency bands reserved for phone service for data too). This has been a general trend in countries that are using ADSL a lot, e.g. here in Germany plain analogue and ISDN service has been reduced more and more too.
Yep. "Hackers" has changed definitions at least six times that I can think of.
And anything to do with the telephone network was "phreakers."
And "cypherpunks" wasn't always about encryption. It was about passwords.
Before the internet, and on the internet before the web, it was common for hackers and casual sysops to create an account on a system with the username "cypherpunk" and the password "cypherpunk" to let anyone in to explore. This was very useful once data started getting siloed into pay services. If you think paying $2/week for nytimes.com is bad, before the internet, you might pay $60-$100 an hour in today's dollars to read a newspaper online.
There's a watered-down version of it happening right now with store checkout systems where you enter a phone number to collect "points." I ran into it a couple of years ago, and I'm surprised how many stores it works in. There's no way I'm going to spill the beans on HN, because I enjoy collecting my gas discounts through the collective help of this anonymous community.
Reminds me of a Firefox extension I saw a while back that had hard coded shared usernames/passwords for the various news sites that were "free" with a registration (which also opted you into receiving spam)
"The legendary Mark Bernay" featured in the Esquire article:
>The Legendary Mark Bernay Turns Out to Be “The Midnight Skulker”
Mark Bernay. I had come across that name before. It was on Gilbertson’s select list of phone phreaks. The California phone phreaks had spoken of a mysterious Mark Bernay as perhaps the first and oldest phone phreak on the West Coast. And in fact almost every phone phreak in the West can trace his origins either directly to Mark Bernay or to a disciple of Mark Bernay.
It seems that five years ago this Mark Bernay (a pseudonym he chose for himself ) began traveling up and down the West Coast pasting tiny stickers in phone books all along his way. The stickers read something like “Want to hear an interesting tape recording? Call these numbers.” The numbers that followed were toll-free loop-around pairs. When one of the curious called one of the numbers he would hear a tape recording pre-hooked into the loop by Bernay which explained the use of looparound pairs, gave the numbers of several more, and ended by telling the caller, “At six o’clock tonight this recording will stop and you and your friends can try it out. Have fun.”
“I was disappointed by the response at first,” Bernay told me, when I finally reached him at one of his many numbers and he had dispensed with the usual “I never do anything illegal” formalities with which experienced phone phreaks open most conversations. “I went all over the coast with these stickers not only on pay phones, but I’d throw them in front of high schools in the middle of the night, I’d leave them unobtrusively in candy stores, scatter them on main streets of small towns. At first hardly anyone bothered to try it out. I would listen in for hours and hours after six o’clock and no one came on. I couldn’t figure out why people wouldn’t be interested. Finally these two girls in Oregon tried it out and told all their friends and suddenly it began to spread.”
Before his Johnny Appleseed trip Bernay had already gathered a sizable group of early pre-blue-box phone phreaks together on loop-arounds in Los Angeles. Bernay does not claim credit for the original discovery of the loop-around numbers. He attributes the discovery to an eighteen-vear-old reform-school kid in Long Beach whose name he forgets and who, he says, “just disappeared one day.” When Bernay himself discovered loop-arounds independently, from clues in his readings in old issues of the Automatic Electric Technical Journal, he found dozens of the reform-school kid’s friends already using them. However, it was one of Bernay’s disciples in Seattle that introduced phone phreaking to blind kids. The Seattle kid who learned about loops through Bernay’s recording told a blind friend, the blind kid taught the secret to his friends at a winter camp for blind kids in Los Angeles. When the camp session was over these kids took the secret back to towns all over the West. This is how the original blind kids became phone phreaks. For them, for most phone phreaks in general, it was the discovery of the possibilities of loop-arounds which led them on to far more serious and sophisticated phonephreak methods, and which gave them a medium for sharing their discoveries.
A year later a blind kid who moved back east brought the technique to a blind kids’ summer camp in Vermont, which spread it along the East Coast. All from a Mark Bernay sticker.
Bernay, who is nearly thirty years old now, got his start when he was fifteen and his family moved into an L.A. suburb serviced by General Telephone and Electronics equipment. He became fascinated with the differences between Bell and G.T.&E. equipment. He learned he could make interesting things happen by carefully timed clicks with the disengage button. He learned to interpret subtle differences in the array of clicks, whirrs and kachinks he could hear on his lines. He learned he could shift himself around the switching relays of the L.A. area code in a not-too-predictable fashion by interspersing his ow...
I don't know if this works outside the UK, but last year BBC Radio 4 did a wonderful documentary on Joybubbles – one of the first phreakers. Great way to spend 28 minutes. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08hlnjq
Sorry, it bugs me when I see this guy get written about. Please do not pass up his sexual misconduct issues (mentioned in the article as well). He might be an early legend, but I don't think he should be idolized any longer.
Yow. That's sad. Crunch is a mess. Arguably brilliant with some of the things he's created, but the madness is a pretty high price to pay. Personally, I could never get past his lack of basic hygiene. The back thing, though, prison was not kind to Draper and left him with a lot of on-going pain.
I saw similarities with some of the folks Aaron Swartz associated with back in the 90's. That jackass Winer, for one.
There's a lot of fragility in young minds, do them a favor and call out against this festering abusive behavior. Otherwise they continue to get away with it.
Thank you. People are just now starting to ban him from conferences and what not, but he's still finding his way to prey upon young people in our communities.
If you are interested in this stuff, here's a somewhat shameless plug for my book: Exploding The Phone, which is a deep dive into the history of phone hacking from 1950 to the mid-1980s. http://explodingthephone.com/
55 comments
[ 19.7 ms ] story [ 1716 ms ] threadSo there is at least an indirect current events element to it. Fun times were had once.
Bridges were terrible for modems, as at any moment another war dialer would connect, or people looking to chat, and knock the modem offline from the announce beep.
The chats were mainly social, but a lot of technical discourse occurred, which was a huge draw.
When cars, airplanes, radio and TV were first invented (and commercialized), it must have been relatively easier for folks to imagine life before them. Immediate access to information is truly jaw-dropping.
One of the people I work with didn't know what a tractor feed printer is when I mentioned it to him. And this is an IT (networking) guy.
https://tinyapps.org/blog/200702250700_why_in_my_day.html
Who decided using news as a sub domain for an http site was a good idea?
https://xkcd.com/1053/
(But on a serious note, it surprises me how few people in the community have a sense of history. I spent a lot of time in the late 90s/early 2000s reading stuff on textfiles.com, researching terms etc I didn't understand, and I think it really helped me become a better hacker.)
Now, in the age of Wikipedia, it astounds me how uncurious many people are. Maybe I'm werid, but I often look stuff up and click around.
It makes me sad that we have so much more information than previous generations, but so few seem to leverage it.
(Ex: most of my technical issues can be solved with a simple DDG search. Back in the day it would have been hours of reading man pages, poking through mailing list archives, or possibly popping into the IRC room for the devs to do something as simple as get a wifi card working)
I find myself constantly astounded by this. But I think this age we are in only exposes something that is probably the default state for this country.
I was "into computers" growing up in the early 80's and I remember the number one question I got from adults was - "what are you going to do with a computer?". I'm guessing many people had the same experience.
Curiosity isn't a default state. It is what separates us from everyone else. Very sadly.
I think everyone is curious, the only difference is what people are curious about. Not everyone gives a rip about computers, that doesn't make them fundamentally uncurious.
Can get a small bit of that feeling of communicating for 'free' across vast distances with amateur radio.
Edit: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/15/openreach_consults_...
And anything to do with the telephone network was "phreakers."
And "cypherpunks" wasn't always about encryption. It was about passwords.
Before the internet, and on the internet before the web, it was common for hackers and casual sysops to create an account on a system with the username "cypherpunk" and the password "cypherpunk" to let anyone in to explore. This was very useful once data started getting siloed into pay services. If you think paying $2/week for nytimes.com is bad, before the internet, you might pay $60-$100 an hour in today's dollars to read a newspaper online.
There's a watered-down version of it happening right now with store checkout systems where you enter a phone number to collect "points." I ran into it a couple of years ago, and I'm surprised how many stores it works in. There's no way I'm going to spill the beans on HN, because I enjoy collecting my gas discounts through the collective help of this anonymous community.
https://manybutfinite.com/post/first-recorded-usage-of-hacke...
>The Legendary Mark Bernay Turns Out to Be “The Midnight Skulker” Mark Bernay. I had come across that name before. It was on Gilbertson’s select list of phone phreaks. The California phone phreaks had spoken of a mysterious Mark Bernay as perhaps the first and oldest phone phreak on the West Coast. And in fact almost every phone phreak in the West can trace his origins either directly to Mark Bernay or to a disciple of Mark Bernay.
It seems that five years ago this Mark Bernay (a pseudonym he chose for himself ) began traveling up and down the West Coast pasting tiny stickers in phone books all along his way. The stickers read something like “Want to hear an interesting tape recording? Call these numbers.” The numbers that followed were toll-free loop-around pairs. When one of the curious called one of the numbers he would hear a tape recording pre-hooked into the loop by Bernay which explained the use of looparound pairs, gave the numbers of several more, and ended by telling the caller, “At six o’clock tonight this recording will stop and you and your friends can try it out. Have fun.”
“I was disappointed by the response at first,” Bernay told me, when I finally reached him at one of his many numbers and he had dispensed with the usual “I never do anything illegal” formalities with which experienced phone phreaks open most conversations. “I went all over the coast with these stickers not only on pay phones, but I’d throw them in front of high schools in the middle of the night, I’d leave them unobtrusively in candy stores, scatter them on main streets of small towns. At first hardly anyone bothered to try it out. I would listen in for hours and hours after six o’clock and no one came on. I couldn’t figure out why people wouldn’t be interested. Finally these two girls in Oregon tried it out and told all their friends and suddenly it began to spread.”
Before his Johnny Appleseed trip Bernay had already gathered a sizable group of early pre-blue-box phone phreaks together on loop-arounds in Los Angeles. Bernay does not claim credit for the original discovery of the loop-around numbers. He attributes the discovery to an eighteen-vear-old reform-school kid in Long Beach whose name he forgets and who, he says, “just disappeared one day.” When Bernay himself discovered loop-arounds independently, from clues in his readings in old issues of the Automatic Electric Technical Journal, he found dozens of the reform-school kid’s friends already using them. However, it was one of Bernay’s disciples in Seattle that introduced phone phreaking to blind kids. The Seattle kid who learned about loops through Bernay’s recording told a blind friend, the blind kid taught the secret to his friends at a winter camp for blind kids in Los Angeles. When the camp session was over these kids took the secret back to towns all over the West. This is how the original blind kids became phone phreaks. For them, for most phone phreaks in general, it was the discovery of the possibilities of loop-arounds which led them on to far more serious and sophisticated phonephreak methods, and which gave them a medium for sharing their discoveries.
A year later a blind kid who moved back east brought the technique to a blind kids’ summer camp in Vermont, which spread it along the East Coast. All from a Mark Bernay sticker.
Bernay, who is nearly thirty years old now, got his start when he was fifteen and his family moved into an L.A. suburb serviced by General Telephone and Electronics equipment. He became fascinated with the differences between Bell and G.T.&E. equipment. He learned he could make interesting things happen by carefully timed clicks with the disengage button. He learned to interpret subtle differences in the array of clicks, whirrs and kachinks he could hear on his lines. He learned he could shift himself around the switching relays of the L.A. area code in a not-too-predictable fashion by interspersing his ow...
https://hackaday.com/2017/12/01/we-need-to-have-a-chat-about...
https://www.csoonline.com/article/3237591/captain-crunch-aka...
I saw similarities with some of the folks Aaron Swartz associated with back in the 90's. That jackass Winer, for one.
There's a lot of fragility in young minds, do them a favor and call out against this festering abusive behavior. Otherwise they continue to get away with it.