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Nixon said "What's the nature of the crisis?", My friend said in a serious tone of voice "We're out of toilet paper sir!" http://www.webcrunchers.com/crunch/Play/history/stories/toilet.html/

I met Draper once, went 'raving' with him (he was a big club raver then), and talked him into signing my homebrew lineman's handset with 'CaptnCrunch', even though he didn't want to go by that nick anymore. So I got his autograph on something worthwhile. Back then I was patching into roadside payphones to get a dialtone to get on the internet, with a torx screwdriver I picked up free from a computer tradeshow. Figured it was time to quit when I opened one box up and black widow spider had made a little happy home in there. The highpoint of my phreaking career was what I called the 'plaid box', or adding a cordless basestation and answering machine inline with a payphone, so you could drive within range of it and make and make free phone calls from inside your car. This worked with those third party carrier payphones. I was a hacker, not a phreaker, so my only interest really was in getting a data connection on the road.

Watched him give an interview in a park to an Indie film crew, and kind of snickered to myself listening to his exploits as a hacker, because I myself at the time was sucessfully hacking ATM machines. There I was standing watching the interview, 10x a hacker, with the film crew oblivious to me but obviously wrapped up in the by gone legend of the Crunch persona.

Beware his attempts to engage you in excercise or 'straighten out your back'. My guess is his short time in prison he went gay. You've got to be predisposed for that however. If you don't want to go gay in prison you don't, nobody forces you to. I did two years in prison (and subsequently won my appeal) and had two consecutive flaming butch fags for roommates and no way in hell was I going to go gay, I hated those SOBs.

He goes to India a lot, and is not as computer illiterate and someone here claimed. He is destitute most of the time back then it seemed to me, living off of payment for 'speaking engagements' which pretty much have run out. Most of his personal hardware are Apple laptops given to him by Woz. I gave him 3 old Pentium boxes one time. He tried selling a firewall for a stint called the 'Crunchbox' I believe, coded by a guy I believe by the name of John Chen?, who did all the programing and was a hardcore fan of NetBSD for its ability to royally lock down the OS security wise.

Had a website http://webcrunchers.com/ and http://shopip.com/

The thing is, if you are good hacker, I mean, a great hacker, you never get caught. Nobody ever even knows your name. You don't advertise. You never develop any attachment to any particular nick. I never got caught. My lovely tour of prison was a freak victim of circumstance thing, I happened to be apparently in the wrong place at the time when something else was going down.

The fun thing about the internet is, you can talk to these folks online. I've talked to Clifford Stoll, and Woz via emails. Never talked to RMS in real life, but almost ran into him. I don't get around much anymore and try to avoid traveling in hacker circles, avoid Defcon, etc.

Of course, I'm sure that everyone here remembers the 'no-frills' craze in the 70's. My Dad kept buying no-frills this and no-frills that... it seems like that has gone by the wayside, how sad.

It's actually easier to wiretap a regular phone than a VoIP phone.

Phreak Yeah! That's a good point, although, typically to do a simple wiretap you have to have physical access to the wiring at the house or office. The process is pretty straightforward though I guess. I think the concern w/ VOIP is that someone with malicious intent could probably craft a pretty decent trojan/virus that woudl just look for weak nodes, drop itself in, and start monitoring calls. These could actually be pretty funny... the virus could randomly play a WAV of the toilet flushing or a string of profanity when you're on the call. There are some other thoughts on this (the security of Voip, not viruses that play random sounds on your calls) here

And on a completely different note... for the good ole' skill phreaks
Fun reading about the Phone Phreak!

Any bank that puts its ATMs on the internet has a moron in charge of IT.

Not necessarily, security is all about tradeoffs.

The best way to secure these things is to make sure that the only physical connection from the ATM is to a well secured computer under controlled by the bank.

So all ATMs would be inside bank vaults.
Fat lot of good they would do us there.

Right now most ATMs seem to rely on POTS (Plain old telephone service)for their com link, and it's not as if the telephone system has never been hacked before.

If banks are acheiving reasonable security with POTS service, whats to stop them from adding some more encryption and doing the same over IP?

(Capt'n Crunch)

John Draper (aka Cap'n Crunch)

Maybe you are thinking of Cheshire Cat

This is a crack? I mean, if you count the cap'n crunch as a crack, sure. But I don't consider tilting a bottle of soda a crack. It seems more like social engineering.

Reminds of the guy that first figured out that the Captain Crunch whistle exactly matched the long distance tones on the phone system.

Or Cap'n Crunch and his blue box. Here's the original article from Esquire that brought phreakers into the mainstream in 1971.

...

Taken from
First Visit:
"Anyway, after playing around with Jimmy's organ, I headed home and dug out my trusty parts".

Here.

If you didn't get it, look here and here.

...the hackers and crackers are just not "evil" as they are made out.

Or at least, they aren't beyond redemption. The infamous Captain Crunch seems to have turned his life around and is now a productive member of society.

But evil is not the issue. The law punishes people for what they do, not who they are. Just as they should not be punished for being evil, they should not be spared punishment because they are fundamentally decent.

Many of us have more sympathy for hackers than other types of juvenile delinquents because we recognize some of the same impulses in ourselves. To the extent we advocate mercy for hackers we are also asking for mercy for ourselves. We probably shouldn't let ourselves off the hook so easily either.

The original article in Esquire magazine, October 1971. The Capt'n is still the man. He's the CTO of a company making "The Crunch Box" which is an IDS appliance running on OpenBSD.

The original article in Esquire magazine, October 1971. The Capt'n is still the man. He's the CTO of a company making "The Crunch Box" which is an IDS appliance running on OpenBSD.

This is a very humorous and interesting read. Check it out:
http://www.webcrunchers.com/crunch/story.html

It wasn't "Captain Crunch" who figured out that you could make free calls with the whistle that came with the 'Captain Crunch' cereal.

Although he did claim it in the beginning, he admitted the truth after beeing called a lot of bad names for taking the credit from a group of blind kids that discovered this.

Today, he openly admitts, it were the blind kids, who figured it out, but has completely forgotten about that he tryed to credit himself with the discovery.

You can read about it here

--
Why pay for drugs when you can get Linux for free ?

This link gives general information and stories about cap'n crunch.

Discovery Online has John Draper in their Hall of Fame. Gives some general information about him.

There's more information about him, EasyWriter, and his work at WebCrunchers.

I thought he was still exploring the telephone company with his Cap'n Crunch flute.

Woz has been one of my heros ever since I got hooked on the Apple back when the Apple II was new. I checked out his web page and saw a link to another one of my heros from that era. John Draper, aka Captain Crunch, worked with Woz off and on. John designed the first modem for the apple. He had to redo it because Woz thought there might be some legal problems with the blue box built into it. Woz hosts Capn' Crunch's web site here . The thing I think is really cool is another hero of mine is John's roommate, Richard Cheshire, aka Cheshire Catalyst, one of the early phone phreaks and editor of TAP magazine. Chesh. has his web page here .

More info on the origins of the phone phreaking and the 2600 hertz tone can be found at http://www.webcrunchers.com/crunch/Play/history/ho me.html .

It's an interesting read.

Mr. Wozniak, do you have any "wild stories" from the blue boxing days like Capn Crunch's Toilet Paper Crisis? I would love to hear any you have.

By being programmable, it was inherently able to do the sorts of nefarious things that one would do with a "Blue Box" or any of the other Phone Freaking equipment.

At the time, Apple concluded that deploying a more freakworthy variation on what had just gotten Draper imprisoned would be a very bad idea.

That, of course, was a goodly dozen years ago. Time has passed, and the average computer with sound card contains 50 times as much DSP hardware as "scared off" Apple.

In effect, the modern PC can be programmed to be a phreaking monster.

Back to DVDs... If they deploy software on PCs that allows reading DVDs, and do not use some form of tamper-resistant hardware-based strong crypto, then the general purpose hardware along with general purpose software represents a potent force to completely crack anything the music folk try to use to prevent unlicensed dissemination of music.

Furthermore, even with strong crypto, of the DVD happens to be readable by a DVD drive, then copies can be made, even if the music can't be played on one's PC.

It is evident that the industry moguls are entirely clueless in this...