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2. Teenager turns 16 and gets car

3. +++ATH0

--
You weren't a real BBS if your AC
wasn't one of the 35 reachable by
PC PURSUIT

"10-52 Ambulance Needed"
http://www.phreak.org/radio/tencode.html

Back in the 1980s, there was an incident on the Apple Macintosh platform with an infected CD-ROM. The disc was the "QLTech MEGA ROM" disc (Volume 1, October 1988.) The producer of the disc, Quantum Leap Technologies Inc., made a replacement disc to replace the infected one. More details here.

Viruses on mass-produced CD-ROMs are extremely rare. Homemade data CDs made on a CD burner are a different matter.

Good Bye Horses my love. Dedicated to kewsh

You told me, I see you rise
But, it always falls
I see you come, I see you go
You say, All things pass into the night
And I say, Oh no sir I must say you're wrong
I must disagree, oh no sir, I must say you're wrong
Won't you listen to me
You told me, I've seen it all before
Been there, I've seen my hopes and dreams
A lying on the ground
I've seen the sky just begin to fall
And you say, All things pass into the night
And I say, Oh no sir, I must say you're wrong
I must disagree, oh no sir, I must say you're wrong
Won't you listen to me
Good-bye horses I'm lying over you
Good-bye horses I'm lying over you

Back in the 1992 timeframe, there was a Dark Avenger virus toolkit that allowed Skr1p7 KidDi3z to create "encrypted, polymorphic viruses". Check out then-InfoWorld columnist Steve Gibson's alarmist article (scroll down to the part entitled "Article 2") It sounds kind of funny now:

• "It is clear that the game is forever changed; the sophistication of the Mutation Engine is amazing and staggering. Simple pattern-matching virus scanners will still reliably detect the several thousand well-known viruses; however, these scanners are completely incapable of detecting any of the growing number of viruses now being cloaked by the Dark Avenger Mutation Engine."

That was going to be the end of the world as we knew it. Now we have a VB script engine and the world is going to end. Or not.

Here are some classic tidbits:

"Julf's anonymous server seems to me to be contributing to the erosion of civility and responsibility that have been the hallmarks of the more traditional parts of USENET. More than that, Julf has refused to even discuss a compromise to his position that all hierarchies should be open, by default, to his server."

"There shouldn't be much controversy over this, but there will be anyhow. :-)"

"Though I disagree with Depews actions, he stood up and took the heat. an8785 engaged in an act of moral cowardice, and is now hiding behind the shield of anonymity. Previously my opinion was that the an8785 should simply be disabled. Given that an8785 has actively urged people to take actions to harm Depew and refused to adequately reverse those actions, I now think an8785 should be unmasked. Should Depew come to actual harm, the anonymous service might find itself in interesting waters."

"I disagree. an8785 did what s/he felt was necessary, and voicing one's opinions (even anonymously) is the better path than not doing so."

"In other words, anonymous servers with inadequate safegards protect law-breakers from the consequences of their actions. *That* is what I oppose."

Read the discussion. Note the use of REAL NAMES in almost every instance. Note the baseline belief differences between the admins of yesteryear and the admins of today. Privacy, as we define it today, was almost unthinkable then. And unless we remember that, blaming the people who behaved in one way a decade ago for not conforming to modern standards is not only a disservice, but a complete denial of how much we have changed.

I wasn't sure what chords the phone tones actually were, so I went to over to howstuffworks and took a look. On page 2 of this article on telephones, it has a great section on the tones.

In particular, I learned that "the dial tone sound is simply a combination of 350 hertz tone and a 440 hertz tone," and "if the number is busy, you hear a busy signal that is made up of a 480 hertz and a 620 hertz tone, with a cycle of 1/2 second on and 1/2 second off" and there is a great chart showing the tone for each button on the keypad. For example, the tone for "1" is a combination of a 1209 Hz tone and a 697 Hz tone.

A little more research turned up this cool frequency to note converter and where I discovered that 1209 Hz is equivalent to D6 plus 50 cents, and 697 is F5 minus 4 cents. So basically the keypad one is an out of tune inversion of the D minor chord. (music majors feel free to Score: -1, Moronic)

Of course, if you were into phreaking then you'd already know all that.