Talk It Over With Captain Crunch

John T. Draper is most famous as "Captain Crunch," the legendary phone phreak who taught others how to make illicit use of Ma Bell's facilities to call almost anywhere, almost any time, for free. But (as a glance at his personal page will show you), that is just about the least of Draper's accomplishments. Not only that, he's still going strong. This is your chance to talk directly to a man without whom the modern-day personal computer -- and modern hacking and many other things we take for granted -- might not exist at all, and certainly would not exist in their current forms. One question per post please, and try to avoid asking questions that could be answered with a little online research. We'll send 10 or 12 of the highest-moderated questions to Draper tomorrow, and run his answers as soon as he has time to reply.

Comments

Some FAQs to avoid...

[MadFarmAnimalz]

Here.

Some Biography for /.

[sielwolf]

You can get a good bio on the Captain on the Rotten Library. Most interesting:

His "handle" came from the inclusion of a plastic whistle in Captain Crunch cereal in the 1960's which could, with proper manipulation, send out a control tone that would affect telephone systems of the time. Of course, Draper didn't actually discover that fact (the honor goes to a blind phone phreak named Joe Engressia) but he was quite happy to not go out of his way to correct people when they claimed he had.

Re:What grab�s you now?

[Anonymous Coward]

My question for you is do you know the meaning of "run on sentence." Here is a translation of his post that would probably make a better question:

Most hackers have lost sleep over an especially challenging problem at some point. When you were younger I expect that hacking and phreaking was one of these problems for you. Each of us has had different problems that have plagued us but it is the drive and focus that we have in common. Do you still have moments like this and if so, what type of problem grabs you now.

It's a reference to WHY his nick is Captain Crunch

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Wasn't this suppose to be a joke question? A play on the breakfast cereal character Captain Crunch? Yet pumped up as interesting..

No. It's a reference to why John's phreaker nick was Captain Crunch, back in the middle of the Twentieth Century.

In those days the long distance system used in-band signaling tones to connect, disconnect, and dial calls. The base system used a 2600 Hz tone to do the rough equivalent of "on-hook". (That's why 2600 magazine is named that.) The full-blown system also had a set of dual-tones, similar to touch-tones, to "dial" the call - but on some trunks (typically those going to legacy dial-only exchanges) you also dialed the call by switching the 2600 Hz tone on and off like a pulse dialer.

Phone Phreaks needed a tone generator to do the dual-tone system. But you could whistle the 2600 "disconnect" tone (especially if you had perfect pitch). If you were REALLY good you could also whistle pluses of it to dial calls. But that was tough. Something over 5 pulses per second or they separate into two digits. Get every digit right or you dial the wrong number.

Then Captain Crunch cereal came out with a prize inside - a plastic whistle. It JUST HAPPENED to be 2600 Hz. Oops! With the whistle it was REALLY EASY to "blow off" calls and/or to dial calls on the legacy-exchange trunks. John Draper noticed this, made heavy use of it, became famous in phreaker circles for it, and eventually used Captain Crunch as his phone phreak nickname.

So his first Captain Crunch plastic whistle is a real historical artifact. (And probably sitting in an evidence locker somewhere if he didn't lose it long ago.)