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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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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!!!
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...
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?"
Well if you read the article carefully, you'll see this:
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! ;)
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!
what you can achieve when you're not looking at porn all day.
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
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
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