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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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I think that's their advantage. Less distraction.
Thats really cool. Reminds of the guy that first figured out that the Captain Crunch whistle exactly matched the long distance tones on the phone system.
The good ol' days when you could get long distance...
*sigh*
A blind man was seen waiting at a street corner with his guide dog. After a short wait the dog started leading the blind man across the street against the red light.
First a car comes screeching to a halt inches away from him, but still the dog leads on, then a bicyclist almost wipes them out and curses as he goes by. Finally in the last lane a truck swerves and barely misses them.
After they reach the far corner the blind man reaches in his pocket and pulls out a cookie and offers it to the guide dog. At this point another person who has watched the entire episode interrupts asking why he was rewarding the dog after the dog had endangered his life and almost got him run over by a car, bicycle and truck.
The blind man responded: "I'm not rewarding him, I'm just trying to find out which end is his head so I can kick him in the ass."
One advantage of their situation!!!
did you mean tactile?
from the article, "They called secretaries and said, 'I need to get in to do a repair. You need to give me the number and password.' Sometimes they succeeded, or else they'd get only the number and try to break the password by using proprietary programs."
sounds like normal boring phreakers to me.
But they make news because they are blind.
DAMNIT why could'nt I have been born blind so I could make the news!
It used to be cool to show off with these 'hacks' like phreaking and other service-theft tricks, but these days it seems that they would do better service to the name 'hacker' if they worked on things that made our world easier to live in, for both sightless and sighted folks.
I'm not about to tell them what they should or shouldn't be doing, but sometimes you really have to wonder how the hacker community can take having borderline criminals like these three brothers calling themselves part of hackerdom.
They are crackers, despite what they call themselves.
I have been pwned because my
Blind people use their fingers to "read" books. Now what's worse? seeing a picture of the goatse guy, or feeling it...
three sightless brothers who 'have devoted their lives to proving they can out-think, out-program, and out-hack anyone with vision
I'm sure the judge will take that into consideration.
slashdot, news for crazed liberal socialist zealots
I'm more interested in the things they do, as opposed to the fact that they're blind. People shouldn't be defined in terms of their disability, but in what they do. (And judging by what these guys do, they seem like mere kiddies.)
FloodMT: crapflood Movab
They're still thieves. The article doesn't really display any sense of apology from the brothers, and it sounds like they're just giving bullshit lines to make it sound like they're doing the old 'I switched to the good side' thing. I have ten bucks that says they'll be back to the same old thefts within a month.
to a game of catch.
Two nuns are ordered to paint a room in the convent, and the last instruction of the Mother Superior is that they must not get even a drop of paint on their habits. After conferring about this for a while, the two nuns decide to lock the door of the room, strip off their habits, and paint in the nude. In the middle of the painting, there comes a knock at the door.
"Who is it?", calls one of the nuns.
"Blind man," replies a voice from the other side of the door.
The two nuns look at each other and shrug, and, deciding that no harm can come from letting a blind man into the room, they open the door.
"Hi, ladies, nice boobs" says the man, "where do you want these blinds?"
"I taught myself to program in all the languages: C, C++, Basic, Java, HTML, PHP, CGI..."
So that's it, huh? Makes me wonder about the validity of their claim to be "hackers".
lol what has happened to Slashdot!
:) Want some originality...
"well, Wired said..."
If we want Wired, we can read Wired!
so they use a text-to-voice module?
Muzher: hey d00de, ping that server to see if it's still up
Shadde: ok, bro.. *clickety*
Voice: pinging.. one hundred... twenty.. seven.. dot.. zero!.. dot.. zero!.. dot.. one with.. thirty.. two... bytes.. of.. data.. colon..
newline.... newline...
reply from.. one hundred... twenty.. seven.. dot.. zero!.. dot.. zero!.. dot.. one.. colon.. bytes equals.. thirty two.. time... one.. M..S.. TEE-TEE-L equals.. one hundred.. twenty.. eight...
Ramy: wait a minute.. hey! you're pinging yourself you stupid blind fuck!
Actually they ripped of several phonesex companies, so they managed quite fine ;)
I find it really fascinating that the older brother learned to program in a lot of languages while blind, it must take an awful lot of time, if every error has to be machine-read, and if the error isn't really that saying ("parse error on line 10").
My <1000 UID is with a hot chick
I'm not as advanced. I know the Perl language, but I havn't learned the CGI language. Also, I still haven't learned how to write a loop in HTML.
what you can achieve when you're not looking at porn all day.
OK, I hate this sort of post normally but this time it is justified.
/. and wired. How about you hone your skills as well as them, then start wishing to be blind.
Normal phreakers cannot hear and instantly memorise touch tones, normal phreakers don't get away with large-scale crime taking down a p0rn empire, normal phreakers don't get away with it.
As mentioned in replies earlier, these guys were elite hackers, and as far as I know elite hackers _do_ get a mention on
You quoted They called secretaries and said, 'I need to get in to do a repair. You need to give me the number and password.' Sometimes they succeeded, or else they'd get only the number and try to break the password by using proprietary programs, did you read the following sentence?
--
It is not the commies, the government, the nigger, nor the corporates. It is your paranoia.
And these super duper blind phreakers are so good they never got cau... um. I'm sure I've got a point here somewhere.
Ok, perhaps not :-)
Why is this news exactly?
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"you posted from the article, "They called secretaries and said, 'I need to get in to do a repair. You need to give me the number and password.' Sometimes they succeeded, or else they'd get only the number and try to break the password by using proprietary programs." sounds like normal boring phreakers to me. But they make news because they are blind. DAMNIT why could'nt I have been born blind so I could make the news!
The only advantage they have is being blind.
Being blind is not an advantage. If you think it is you are a damn fool. You have a pair of ears, becoming blind does not magically make your hearing better but reliance on hearing increases. Have you ever tried training hearing, if not then stop posting BS saying if you ask me, being blind only makes it easier for them to do these tricks, how about you sit down an hour a day and do some training? Better that than posting crap.
--
It is not the commies, the government, the nigger, nor the corporates. It is your paranoia.
And while eye-sight was required for survival centuries ago, intelligence is required to survive now. Evolution doesn't need these brothers to be weeded out. Survival of the fittest means that if these brothers survive because of intelligence, then their lives are not worthless for the next generation of humans.
So go back to your cave, troll...
All bow to his Noodliness!! His Noodle Appendage has touched me!
As a deaf guy I just have to say... living your life based on revenge and sticking it to others is a sad way of living. All you do is repeat the unfair sort of situations that made you so PO'ed and produce an army of other angry PO'ed people... ooohhh... negative feedback loop! Cutting people off on the freeway and tailgating doesn't solve your problems. It's funny how people in left hand turn lanes get upset at people running red lights keeping them from making their turn... so they in "revenge" run their red light and cause different people to miss THEIR turn, who then in return... blaaahhh... just live by "The Golden Rule" and everybody is a little bit happier.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
If they had their sight, they would be criminals.
Since they're blind they are....?
Still criminals. Though the wired story would have you believe otherwise.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
a thief. Regardless of how "skilled" they are who cares? All they did was cheat, steal and lie. I really dont get the point of this article, why do we reward criminals?
This is slightly off topic, but I feel that it's interesting and related none-the-less.
Several years ago, I used to be the primary admin/coder of a MUD(Multi User Dungeon{A game online...}). I was randomly watching people play, and I noticed that there was one player who had no "prompt(a status bar that you see after every action)". I questioned this player, as to why he didn't have one, and he went on to explain that he was completely blind, and it made his text-to-speech software go nuts, because it was far too much information, too quickly.
Anyhow, one day, he asked if he could help out with a little bit of coding...I was intrigued. I asked him to write me a small command, and he was done in about 30 minutes. I'll admit, I'm not the best coder in the world, but this was some of the cleanest code I had ever seen. A blind man named Dave(I think), was a better coder then most people I know... If that isn't inspiring, I don't know what is.
As of 10/06/03, I hate COBOL developers.
Wow... I thought we'd heard the end of this with the death of Hitler's Nazis, and Margaret Sanger.
I would say the best thing about our society, is that physical abilities do not mean life or death. I would assume that you are a skinny geeky guy (possibly not, but likely since you are posting here) and in the world of hunting and gathering, you would be dead, because you are not the strongest, and fastest.
If you think that all geeks should die off, then you are a moron who can just discard the contributions that less-physically-fit people have made.
The best example that comes to mind is Stephen Hawking... He should be dead by most measures, but he is alive, and contributing to the betterment of all society.
What do you know? Are you certain that blind people have nothing to contribute to society? People though the same thing about Blacks, Hispanics, etc., yet they've been proven wrong time and time again.
First off, you are assuming that there was a time before civilization. Animals like wolves have a natural pack instinct, and humans show the same traits. It would seem that humans would have always sought-out civilization...
Well, I suppose crap like this is why I marked you as a FOE in the first place...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Sorry, but I wasnt really impressed by these people. I've always heard that blind people make the best phone phreakers. Thats probably true. When you deal with an entire system based on sound frequencies I can see blind people having an advantage.
But whats the point of the article? They're just 3 blind script kiddies that think they can hack the planet. I see people with vision every day committing credit card fraud. Why are these guys bragging about it on Wired? THEY EVEN GOT CAUGHT. GENIUSES!!
And what is this?!
But Ramy was too ambitious to stop there. "I taught myself to program in all the languages: C, C++, Basic, Java, HTML, PHP, CGI.
CGI isnt a language! And thats a direct quote from him. What kind of idiot says "I can program in CGI."
Sorry, but these are just three script kiddies causing the usual problems that script kiddies cause. Am I supposed to be impressed?
I like stories like this that don't portray people who play with phone systems and computers in an intrusive way as reclusive introverts. It clearly shows that these brothers are experts at social engineering. They manipulated people with such expertise and skill that the people did anything the brothers wanted. That can be the most dangerous aspect of security.
Canadian Cynic, canadian politics is less boring than you
And, of course, there are other amusing bits...
That's a pretty... limited view of what "all the (programming) languages" are.I'll grant that they're clever; that, and too much time on their hands made 'em dangerous and irresponsible.
No wonder they turned out to be criminals!Pick One: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~stremler/sigs/sigs.html (Note - disable Javascript first!)
"They are surviving because society is providing for their needs."
Yeah? And who's providing for your needs like roads, electricity, food, etc.? Satan? Can you build all these services yourself? It appears to me that we all need "society" to provide for our needs.
What?
This sounds so familiar. While I'm not blind, but spastic, society treats you like you're some moron. Your esteem for other people kinda drops when you get treated like an idiot day in, day out. If you are able to convert your anger towards other people into something good, ie. acquiring skills, you definitely have an edge.
How you use your skills is another thing, but you generally don't respect the rules of society as much as you should because you feel society doesn't respect you as much as itt should.
So if you use phone sex hotlines you deserve to have your money stolen? If you use a dating service do you deserve the same thing? If you subscribe to a right-wing or left-wing newspaper do you deserve to be ripped off by someone?
As for ripping off a government-sponsored radio station, who do you think is paying for it? Where does the government's money come from? It's not takin money from mom and pop directly, but it's not as though their not hurting the general public. People like to rail against government inefficiency and complain of mismanaged tax dollars. It's odd to me that someone would not be outraged by criminals directly stealing those tax dollars.
These guys aren't exactly Robin Hoods.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
1) First, hackers are heroes to the tech community. Actually, hackers are heroes in a all communities. Keaneu Reeves in the Matrix, Matthew Broderick in WarGames, Ed Furlong in T2, and the guys from Office Space. There is something about sticking it to the man through technology. One because you don't see the victim as you would when someone robs a liquor store, two because there is no physical violence, and three if its done against a major corporation then it's like they deserve it somehow. Plus there is the whole "concentrated gain, dispersed loss" thing For a big telco, three phreakers using free service does not dent their pocket book but certainly helps the attackers.
2) It's in a foreign country. Americans have a numbness to foreign pain. Look how the 20,000 large death toll from Iranian's earthquake did not rattle Americans. So when we hear about Israelis getting hacked by blind Palestinians we are equally passive, especially since many feel the Israeli's deserve it in someway.
3) Their blind and they're overcoming challenge.
"People said that God cursed our mother by giving her three blind sons," recalls Ramy. "Children beat us on the backs of our legs. Those abuses left scars on our hearts. But they also forced us to grow stronger."
When you hear that it cannot help but make you feel proud for these guys. Overcoming their obstacle of blindness is just amazing in general. It's a testament to human resilience and therefore the type of story that inspires hope--something much needed in our outsourcing-paranoid IT workers.
If these were, on the other hand, three blind robbers in San Francisco who stole purses from Old Grannies, yeah, this wouldn't get the same coverage.
Philosophistry
The biggest only thing that is leading some to consider these jerks "heros" is thier disability. Reading the article, I find little to respect about thier "skilz" as it seems that most of thier tech-dependant exploits were performed using software not written by themselves. Knowing what script to run does not necessarily imply an understanding of how it works.
The sad thing is that it seems that those with little or no skill garner acolades if they also demonstrate an accompanying lack of restraint or outright dishonesty. While contientious tech explorers and practitioners go unnoticed by the media, loud mouthed script kiddies and clueless "experts" get to tout thier wares and mythical skills to the most respected security companies.
As to whether thier sentancing was apropriate, it seems a little light to me. In keeping with Mitnik's extended probation from computing equipment, these jerks should be sentanced to mittens and earplugs for the next five years.
Read, L
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
"Phreaking" was hacking with a cause. Nothing like Cyber (trolls) Hippies or some dipshit "community spirit". When I was a very young kid, my bluebox (R1) was was my ticket to ride. With all the people I met, I am what I am today. You'd never know in America (where I grew up) what a crock Vietnam was from the start, the "Cold War" was a farce, Nixon was a super crook and on and on. __People__ told me what the press dared not report!
Due to an obscure Federal law, it was a crime to get priviladged service from the only 'provider' there was then: Ma Bell. It never bothered me to break a stupid law and never at any time was using a circuit that would have been otherwise idle wrong. In the early days, it may have cost a few bucks to make an international call but times were to change, but the rates didn't reflect that.
Europe, 1989, and wow, its legal! Armed with the knowledge that a transAtlantic call cost about $0.05/min and the consumer was charged about $3.00/min brought a new cause. Here in Europe, we took it to the press and won our case. While we were paying a few cents a minute to call, Americans were still paying a few dollars. Yes, they made it somewhat illegal in 1993 but the battle was won and then and only then was it associated with a bunch of Amiga lamers and criminals that made one-trick boxes.
As a 'phreak' I applied what i knew about Unix and its rather crude scheduling at the time. Finding a new 'trick' was a treat. First one in a hacker, copycats, criminals. Like writing code, it can take allot of persistence. Often more as the only feedback was sound and ofcourse, social engineering. I took great pride in asking the switchman if he noticed me in his system and the answer always: "No". Those musical Amigas enevitably played at the wrong level was always a giveaway: You could hear the timbre of an Amiga in the crosstalk!
Except for possibly mobile phones, there is no reason to do this stuff today. Unix and Internet are more interesting anyways. Phreaking was my way in to the Unix crowd and all the hackers that make 'mousing arround' possible for so many today. And guess what: You sheep out there spam, flood, use html attachments and cause general mayhem for a system that is as fragile as the phone was in the past. Criminal I'm not. And you with your software out of a cerial box? Did it ever occur to you why commercial software is packaged like that?
Believe it, it takes alot of skill to twidle a call. It takes nothing to ruin the Internet and so many of you are doing it now. I'm very proud it did it and still benefit today by not doing it. It is nice to know if there is ever a war or situation that requires it, I can do it and with computers, so much more.
"Three Blind Mice", nice to hear the story again. Blind people can type and often run a Votrax (the real speech synthesiser) at 200 WPM or more. I'm sighted and can read alot faster than that, but most can't.