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New Boxes For Captain Crunch

Posted by timothy on from the not-soggy-in-milk dept.

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.

6 of 146 comments (clear)

  1. Humourous aside.. by Stormie · · Score: 5

    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!

  2. Don't forget the blind kids ,,, by AftanGustur · · Score: 5


    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
  3. Permanent no-login links by Kreeblah · · Score: 5

    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.

  4. No reg. link by beebware · · Score: 5

    Here's the no login link to http://partners.nytimes.com/2001/01/29/technology/ 29CAP.html.
    Richy C.

  5. Re:2600 by beebware · · Score: 5

    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.

  6. 2600 by CarrotLord · · Score: 5
    I believe that this is where the significance of 2600 came from -- the whistle was at 2600 Hz....

    rr

    --
    Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.