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.'"

Comments

Three Blind Mice

[Fenis-Wolf]

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*

Re:Three Blind Mice

[OS24Ever]

Would that be John 'Captain Crunch' Draper?

Re:Three Blind Mice

[stankyho]

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.

Re:Three Blind Mice

[Directrix1]

This article just shows that even a blind person can be as big a dipsh!t, as anyone with sight. If they were ripping innocent people off without technology, there would be outrage. But the fact they are using "social engineering" and hacking techniques make them idols? Those who think this is cool, are more blind than the brothers.

Re:Three Blind Mice

[Osrin]

When we had analog exchanges in the UK you used to be able to simply play with the dialing codes for free long distance. Each town had a long distance code you had to dial to get to it (i.e. 0254), they also had short dials that would allow you to dial adjecent towns to your own (i.e. 91 used to get me from Blackburn to Preston).

If you could work it all out you used to be able to hop from town to town to town using the short dials. Long numbers to call, but much, much cheaper.

I know, I know... offtopic, I'd all but forgotten about this.

Re:Three Blind Mice

[Rex Code]

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.

Re:Three Blind Mice

[namespan]

Dude, Osama bin Laden is so damn cool. Did you see how on Sept. 11 he orchestrated a complex attack on the US, involving a collection of covert actions intricately interwoven to form a subtle web

This is actually quite true. The terrorist actions were bold and devastatingly effective, the result of some clever thinking combined with a willingness to die.

Cool in the same way a nuclear bomb is cool. Horrifying, something you want to totally reject, even as it is impressive.

Blind Joke

[Anonymous Coward]

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."

Best of all, they're not subject to things like..

[Anonymous Coward]

... hidden links to Goatse or Tubgirl.

One advantage of their situation!!!

Nothing Special

[pocketfullofshells]

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!

Re:Nothing Special

[aTMsA]

sounds like normal boring phreakers to me.

But they make news because they are blind.

Well if you read the article carefully, you'll see this:

At one point during my visit with the Badirs, I pull out my cell phone and make a call. Before it even connects, Shadde, who is sitting across the room, recites all 12 digits perfectly.

Ramy smiles at the parlor trick. "It used to be disgusting to be blind," he says. "Today, you scare people. You possess skills that those with sight cannot possibly understand."

This is something normal people usually can't do, but i've known blind people that can do that kind of "tricks"(they can also tell you if you're standing or sitting while talking on the phone, for example). Certainly being blind gives them some good social-engineering-enabling abilities, and they can also play the poor-blind-victim that'll probably soften the most paranoid secretary;

Of course, if instead of touch-tone passwords these secretaries had been typing their passwords in a unix terminal, they would be screwed, and no amount of over-the-shoulder peeking would have helped them! ;)

Re:Nothing Special

[decipher_saint]

sounds like normal boring phreakers to me.
But they make news because they are blind.

That's for damn sure, I'm a visually impaired programmer what doesen't commit crimes, where's my news story?

Articles like these really piss me off. It makes it sound amazing that not only can blind people use computers but they can use them well enough to commit crime!

Yeesh next thing'll be "Blindsploitation" movies...
"Take that sighty!"

Are they heroes?

[ObviousGuy]

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.

Re:Best of all, they're not subject to things like

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

Blind people use their fingers to "read" books. Now what's worse? seeing a picture of the goatse guy, or feeling it...

that's nice

[andih8u]

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.

Yeah, they're blind, so what

[W32.Klez.A]

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.

I challenge them...

[Anonymous Coward]

to a game of catch.

Another Blind Joke

[Anonymous Coward]

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?"

All of them?

[dan14807]

"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".

Re:All of them?

[UserGoogol]

Yeah, because a GUI is so useful when you're blind.

text to voice

[plams]

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!

CGI, HTML Programming Languages?

[nick_urbanik]

"I taught myself to program in all the languages: C, C++, Basic, Java, HTML, PHP, CGI.

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.

This just goes to show

[teamhasnoi]

what you can achieve when you're not looking at porn all day.

Re:Why are genetically defective people breeding?

[univgeek]

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...

My my...

[CODiNE]

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.

Blind C Coder

[Qwell]

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.

Re:Why are genetically defective people breeding?

[evilviper]

the parents should have stopped breeding. Now there are three more genetically defective people who can keep those defective genes into the gene pool.

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.

Before "civilization", nature would weed out genetic defects like that using starvation, wolves, lions, bears, etc. Now you have people perpetuating defective genetic lines just because they can.

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...

blind script kiddies

[krappie]

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?

Society

[marijnm]

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 theft isn't theft?

[Infonaut]

Nothing like selective morality.

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.

The story works because

[philipkd]

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.