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Three Blind Phreaks
Post writes "'When they dial, they use the middle finger.' - Wired's story about three sightless brothers who 'have devoted their lives to proving they can out-think, out-program, and out-hack anyone with vision.'"
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Would that be John 'Captain Crunch' Draper?
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
It was a blind phreaker named Denny that showed John Draper what the whistle could do. cap'n Crunch just got popular because of it.
Google's cache of the story.
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eeww, I'll have a crab juice.
It was steve wozniak, I saw it on techtv, he was talking about it on the screen savers.
It looks to me like these 3 guys were being rather selective in who they scammed. The credit cards they stole were from a phone sex mogul, and so one could morally make a decision that "If you're wasting your money on phone sex hotlines, you deserve some hassles with your credit card...."
.... again, not exactly like charging phone calls to the general public or a small business.
Their "big target" was the govt. sponsored radio/propaganda station
It was a blind phreaker named Denny that showed John Draper what the whistle could do. cap'n Crunch just got popular because of it.
Actually, the blind phreak was named Joe Engressia, and he didn't need the plastic whistle to produce 2600 Hz or other multifrequency tones. He could simply whistle them. IIRC, John did discover that the whistle would cause long-distance calls to drop. If only I could find my old '71 Esquire issue...
Trivia: Joe now lives in Minneapolis and has changed his name to Joybubbles.
Right, and that's what Slashdot does--it tells you about interesting articles on Wired. And in the New York Times, and the Guardian, and on Groklaw. Slashdot produces very little of its own content. There are a few book reviews and interview, but the bread and butter of Slashdot is providing links to interesting and/or useful articles in other news sources...and providing a venue in which its readers can comment on those stories.
~Idarubicin