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New Boxes For Captain Crunch
Logic Bomb, standing in for a crowd of submittors, writes: "The New York Times has an interesting profile (free reg req) of John T. Draper, a long-time phreaker and hacker. He's had quite a career, but is probably best known for figuring out that a freebie toy whistle from a cereal box generated the right tone to make free calls at pay phones. It's an entertaining read."
As sachsmachin puts it, "Crunch is apparently trying to redeem his blue-box-filled past by working as a white-hat hacker in the Web security industry -- his company, "ShopIP," does OpenBSD-based firewalls." Draper is also well-known for writing the first word processor for the IBM PC, (EasyWriter) among other things.
In 1971, John Draper taught Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak how to make blue boxes. They sold them door-to-door on the Berkeley campus.
Decades later, Jobs brings Apple back from the brink of despair by.. selling computers with coloured boxes!
I was immediately concerned that the actual captain on the cereal box was going to change when reading the subject. Further reading revealed no such trauma.
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 ?
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
You can bypass all the reg-required NY Times links if you notice that channel.nytimes.com has all the stories, but without the login prompts. Next, notice that channel.nytimes.com has a different IP address than www.nytimes.com and nytimes.com. Do a DNS lookup on channel.nytimes.com and add it to your hosts file, something like this:
208.48.26.223 www.nytimes.com
208.48.26.223 nytimes.com
There. No more reg links. channel.nytimes.com gives you a directory listing for the root directory, however, so you don't get a flashy intro page. But if you use their page at www.nytimes.com, you probably have an account there anyway.
From the article:
It was an ideal situation," he said. "It forced me to get off the computer and think and debug my program."
I had a computer science prof who just couldn't seem to emphasize this enough--"don't just sit down at the computer and start coding away. It'll be a nightmare. You need to be away from the machine and think out your code before you start in on it, and sometimes it helps to get a hardcopy and review the code on paper when you're debugging. "
In this age, though, all the up-and-coming programmers, the college kids and such, have had no experience with programming that required a LOT more effort and thought--such as punch cards, time-limited use of a mainframe, etc. They sit down at their $400 eMachines and bang out some Java. Is there anyone here who can comment on this? Is code quality worse now that people are used to just sitting down and hacking it out?
Also--in the movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley"--even I know a good deal of that movie was exaggeration and pretty flashy things, but blue boxes WERE shown--what did a blue box look like?
Any URLs?
I'm honestly asking this stuff here. Thanks.
Angry IT woman in big clompy boots. And talking lint!.
Here's the no login link to http://partners.nytimes.com/2001/01/29/technology/ 29CAP.html.
Richy C.
You're correct - the US telephone companies used a signal at 2600Hz to switch customer lines onto the telephone 'trunk'. More information can be found in Chapter 5 of 'The Phreakers Manual' as well as the details of the legendary blue box
Richy C.
rr
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.