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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 own hook-switch clicks with the clicks within the line. (Independent phone companies—there are nineteen hundred of them still left, most of them tiny island principalities in Ma Bell’s vast empire—have always been favorites with phone phreaks, first as learning tools, then as Archimedes platforms from which to manipulate the huge Bell system. A phone phreak in Bell territory will often M-F himself into an independent’s switching system, with switching idiosyncrasies which can give him marvelous leverage over the Bell System.
“I have a real affection for Automatic Electric equipment,” Bernay told me. “There are a lot of things you can play with. Things break down in interesting ways.”
Shortly after Bernay graduated from college (with a double major in chemistry and philosophy), he graduated from phreaking around with G.T.&E. to the Bell System itself, and made his legendary sticker-pasting journey north along the coast, settling finally in Northwest Pacific Bell territory. He discovered that if Bell does not break down as interestingly as G.T.&E., it nevertheless offers a lot of “things to play with.”
Bernay learned to play with blue boxes. He established his own personal switchboard and phone-phreak research laboratory complex. He continued his phone-phreak evangelism with ongoing sticker campaigns. He set up two recording numbers, one with instructions for beginning phone phreaks, the other with latest news and technical developments (along with some advanced instruction) gathered from sources all over the country.
These days, Bernay told me, he had gone beyond phone-phreaking itself. “Lately I’ve been enjoying playing with computers more than playing with phones. My personal thing in computers is just like with phones, I guess —the kick is in finding out how to beat the system, how to get at things I’m not supposed to know about, how to do things with the system that I’m not supposed to be able to do.”
As a matter of fact, Bernay told me, he had just been fired from his computer-programming job for doing things he was not supposed to be able to do. He had been working with a huge timesharing computer owned by a large corporation but shared by many others. Access to the computer was limited to those programmers and corporations that had been assigned certain passwords. And each password restricted its user to access to only the one section of the computer cordoned off from its own information storager. The password system prevented companies and individuals from stealing each other’s information.
“I figured out how to write a program that would let me read everyone else’s password,” Bernay reports. “I began playing around with passwords. I began letting the people who used the computer know, in subtle ways, that I knew their passwords. I began dropping notes to the computer supervisors with hints that I knew what I know. I signed them ‘The Midnight Skulker.’ I kept getting cleverer and cleverer with my messages and devising ways of showing them what I could do. I’m sure they couldn’t imagine I could do the things I was showing them. But they never responded to me. Every once in a while they’d change the passwords, but I found out how to discover what the new ones were, and I let them know. But they never responded directly to The Midnight Skulker. I even finally designed a program which they could use to prevent my program from finding out what it did. In effect I told them how to wipe me out, The Midnight Skulker. It was a very clever program. I started leaving clues about myself. I wanted them to try and use it and then try to come up with something to get around that and reappear again. But they wouldn’t play. I wanted to get caught. I mean I didn’t want to get caught personally, but I wanted them to notice me and admit that they noticed me. I wanted them to attempt to respond, maybe in some interesting way.”
Finally the computer managers became concerned enough about the threat of information-stealing to respond. However, instead of using The Midnight Skulker’s own elegant self-destruct program, they called in their security personnel, interrogated everyone, found an informer to identify Bernay as The Midnight Skulker, and fired him.
“At first the security people advised the company to hire me full-time to search out other flaws and discover other computer freaks. I might have liked that. But I probably would have turned into a double double agent rather than the double agent they wanted. I might have resurrected The Midnight Skulker and tried to catch myself. Who knows? Anyway, the higher-ups turned the whole idea down.”
IRL is Richard Kashdan, now 74 (https://www.facebook.com/PhoneTrips), who lives in San Francisco and from time to time sends me items of interest for my blog.
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.
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
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/
