Wierd, I thought war dialing (at least by hand) came about around the time of the Strowger Switch? I read somewhere (sorry, no link) that as telephones became popular people would ring numbers sequentially to see who was at the other end.
Decades ago to crack into a computer you needed to be a hacker, since computers were all different. Today we have "script kiddies" who most definitely aren't hackers, but are crackers.
I don't think there's a script-kiddie equivalent for phone systems.
It's like a disease endemic to us nerds. Honestly who looks at the word "hack" and thinks hey i'm gonna make a white hat form of this? An OS called GNU?? Linus was lucky he had a buddy in marketing to help him name the kernel otherwise we'd have something like the clusterfuck in gnome & kde packages.
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[ 7.4 ms ] story [ 49.8 ms ] thread"'brute force techniques' - mass dialing until something 'interesting' is found"
Sounds an awful lot like war dialing. Not sure what was on the other side though and what got done.
"Are you a good hacker, or a bad hacker?"
The techniques and thinking styles are the same, either way.
I don't think there's a script-kiddie equivalent for phone systems.
To paraphrase John Draper (aka Captain Crunch), "A system is a system, whether a phone network or a computer."
Exactly. Specifically, Linus' name for Linux was "Freax"
By himself he referred to it as "Linux" but thought it was lame. Only after the name being suggested by others did he agree. I got this "first-hand" from Revolution OS ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_OS You can watch it here ~ http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7707585592627775409