A Look Back at One of the Original Phreaks

tmalone writes "The New York Times is running an end of year piece about the most interesting people who have died this year. One of their picks is Joybubbles, also known as Josef Engressia, or 'Whistler.' He was born blind and discovered at the age of 7 that he could whistle 2600 hertz into a phone to make free long-distance calls. He was one of the original phone phreaks, got arrested for phone fraud, and was even employed by the phone company. The article deals more with his personal life than with his technical exploits, but is a very interesting story."

Comments

Ah this takes me back...

[Cyno01]

Still have my redbox in a drawer somewhere, probably next to my beige box and attempted homemade autodialer. Also still keep redbox tones on my MP3 players, more for nostalga than practicality since i have a cell phone and they havnt worked in 10 years.

Re:Ah this takes me back...

[ajs318]

British payphones have *always* held track of credit in the payphone itself, rather than relying on the exchange to do it {which is just stupidly vulnerable to attacks}. Metering pulses {common-mode with respect to Earth} were sent down the line from the exchange after each unit. If you tried disconnecting the Earth wire to block the pulses, the phone would just cut you off anyway after a preset timeout, equivalent to one unit at the cheapest rate. Nowadays, payphones are smart enough to know, from the STD code and the time of day, how much to charge for a call and so meter pulses are not required (the facility is even being withdrawn as exchanges are modernised).

The biggest difference between British payphones is how much armour-plating they use. A privately-owned payphone in a hairdresser's salon may well be constructed in lightweight polycarbonate; one in a pub might have a metal coin safe. Street payphones are close to bomb-proof.

Payphones are an endangered species in Britain anyway, now almost everyone has a mobile phone.

interview

[Kizzle]

I was involved with an internet radio show a while back that did an excellent interview with him that covered a lot of interesting technical topics. http://audio.textfiles.com/shows/haxorradio/haxor_radio_show_04.mp3

Slight offtopic but there's a guy that just made a graphic novel about the history of phreaking. I'm not sure if Joybubbles is in it but looks neat. http://www.edpiskor.com/wizzy.html

Re:get my hopes up

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a somber story about the Twilight Years of Cap'n Crunch on here not too long ago. I think he was interviewed by Slashdot but I can't find his responses article.

I called him in 1984

[Christoph]

When I was about 14, the Minneapolis City Pages did a story on him. The story said he was listed as "Zxzyx" in the Minneapolis phone book (so that he was guaranteed the last spot) and anyone could call him anytime. I looked in the phone book, and the listing was there, and I called. I was impressed that he had the guts to live completely out in the open (and it worked for him, too).

Re:Obligatory

[Pojut]

Indeed it is. And if you suspend any expectation of realism, it's actually a really good movie. Kinda like Die Hard 4...don't look for realism, shoot the voice in your head that says "it's not possible", and just be entertained.

Re:Obligatory

[bladesjester]

Some people don't get the point of entertainment.

Personally, I liked the movie. Always have. It amuses the heck out of me.

Besides, you have to love Penn getting called a "Hapless techno-weenie" *grin*

Re:Talk about...

[bladesjester]

It used to be common practice that hackers and phreaks that got caught were given a choice:

Work for us at a good salary or we have you thrown in jail for most of the rest of your life.

It's not really a blind faith issue (decent pun use though). They realized that anyone good enough to figure out how to circumvent their systems could be a useful asset to their company from both a technical and security standpoint provided they could be "domesticated" so to speak.

Now they just tend to go apes**t any time someone exploits one of their systems and scream "lock them away for ever and ever!!!111" It's a shame to see them go downhill like that.

Re:The Mentor

[bladesjester]

Anybody know what happened to The Mentor? (the Phrack magazine guru)

Here's his site according to his wikipedia article

Phreaks

[conureman]

I fondly remember the olden days,(when I was a kid), and Herbert Schwartz showing me the lineman's phones that he'd socially engineered from some Bell Telephone guys. Herbie had a junction box in his back yard there in Livermore, so he could hook on and call his friends in Vienna. By not hooking on to the (correct) lines, nobody got billed for the calls. Way cool. This was back before touch-tone dialing, and it was a while before any sort of security or blocking was instituted anyway, so it was hardly phreaking. Knowing Herbert, he was still the first kid in town with the blue box or whatever. Wonder where he is these days.

Re:Phreaks

[Viceroy Potatohead]

For some strange reason, this article also made me feel all nostalgic.

Eh Tee Dee Tee
Eh Tee Eff Oh
Eh Tee Ate Six Seven Five Three Oh Nine
[Limbers up whistling muscles]...hWooooooooooooooooooooooofhhhhhhhhhoooooooooooooooooo.
Good Evening Cowboy Neil, sending updates to the porn landscape of the Internet to your system. (Please Wait...)
Eh Tee Aitch Oh
[No Carrier]

Yup, I've still got it! (Actually, I don't remember modem codes at all, so I've undoubtedly got them wrong...)

Seriously, though, it's amazing what telephone technology has done in the last quarter century. I went from a party line (we were two long, one short) to dial phones that you could actually figure out some weird hacks by semi-intelligently flapping away at the hook (or more likely getting a call from a pissed off operator), to carrying something around that's smaller than a wallet which gives you the ability to create video and pictures, play games, do arithmetic, save or generate text, talk to almost anybody on the planet without explaining yourself to some telephone company employee, save an audio message, record an audio message, and a hundred other things. And not only that, it's not screwed to the wall. Really, the achievements in telephony have been pretty remarkable. I wonder what the modern Joybubbles is up to....

The whole nine yards (Almost)

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember those days I had (have) the whole set of tones, except shaw (#) and star (*). I obtained them from a person who worked at AT&T in the last 60's. The shaw & star weren't in use yet and he couldn't get them.

In the day this was hot information, technology to separate was hard to come by. Some people could tell the different tones by listening.

What did I use them for? That would be none of your business.

All in hertz

Disconnect 2600

Key Punch 1100 & 1700 (I don't remember what this does)

Key pad numbers:
1 700 & 900
2 700 & 1100
3 900 & 1100
4 700 & 1300
5 900 & 1300
6 1100 & 1300
7 700 & 1500
8 900 & 1500
9 1100 & 1500
0 1300 & 1500

Start 1500 & 1700 (had something to do with getting the equipment to accept the numbers).

BTW you see that I've posted as Anonymous Coward, don't wast your mod points

listen to Joybubbles

[BroadbandBradley]

http://audio.textfiles.com/shows/storiesandstuff/

do believe they were there...

[swschrad]

but the only use for them was in controlling routing in setting up LD calls. they were on the operator consoles in the mid 60s when I got a tour through NW Bell. looked like ITW lighted buttons. at that time, they were not published in the bell telephone engineering standards pubs that were in places like engineering school libraries.

Poor Ol' Joe

[drwho]

I used to regularly phreak calls to Joe in the mid 80s. I remember he had a phone number that ended in either 0000 or 9999, I can't remember which. Anyhow, this guy was cool. He just loved phones, and talking about phones. I remember he used to be able to tell what kind of switch a phone was on by calling it and listening to it ring. He used to be able to do pretty much everything with the phone system, but was against the people like Steve Jobs who made and sold blue boxes for a profit. We used to call Joe on Alliance Teleconferences (us being $LOD$ and friends) and we had a lot of fun. But then, some cranks (I think it might have been MOD) got his number and started harassing him. He went underground to avoid them and I lost all touch with him.

He was a great guy. I don't know how well he fared once the phone system went digital, but he was someone who made the best out of what life took from him, and what life gave him. That is, his sight was taken but his tone sensitivity was extreme.

Phone phreaking is a lost art -- an analog art, made of electronics and geeky passion. It was damaged by criminals out for nothing more than free calls, but ultimately destroyed by SS7.

I've had the idea to use all this wondrous DSP technology and massive amounts of CPU power and storage to recreate the phone network circa 1982 - a phreaker's version, as close to the real thing as possible, where you'd use a blue box to get around, and find loops, etc. Think of it as an audio adventure game. I don't have the DSP talent to make it happen though. But if I ever could get it done, I would dedicate it to the memory of Joe Engressia.

Re:Poor Ol' Joe

[anticypher]

I used to talk with Joe from time to time back in the mid-'70s and early '80s, I was introduced to him by Draper. Everything I learned about R2 signaling I got from Joe and the other Phreaks on the loops and conferences and by building my own boxes. That knowledge still serves me well, on projects in Africa where R2 is still widely used. Joe always gave without expecting anything in return, and his largess influenced many who started the open source movement.

SS7 was an absolute necessity, the old inband signaling system was very expensive, too slow to deal with traffic growth, and too exploitable. Now, there is a whole new generation of Phreaks manipulating the SS7 system with relative impunity and ease. You have been reading about the very public exploits of the destructive and immature ones. They insert false info into remote PSAPs (e911 systems) and social engineer an armed SWAT response to a distant victim's house. For the little bit you hear about in the press, there is a large amount going on quietly unseen even to the /. crowd. Last night I got several impossible calls and SMS text messages, from some Phreaks who knew just how to inject the right info. Either that, or GW Bush sent me a New Years greeting from the whitehouse, Putin sent me greetings in Russian from the Kremlin, and the Pope sent greetings from the Vatican switchboard.

Someday, when the rest of us around Joe's age have passed to greener pastures, the current /. crowd will be reminiscing about the old SS7 exploit crews, and the clever hacks they coded up. Ahh, the good old days when the internet was neutral and still ran IPv4 and websites were popular :-)

the AC

I speak modem

[Tablizer]

and discovered at the age of 7 that he could whistle 2600 hertz into a phone to make free long-distance calls.

I had to actually do something like this with phone modems for testing purposes. We had a bank of modems and to check which modem went to which phone number (people sometimes switched them without telling us) we would have to call the number on a voice phone across the way and then run over to the modem bank to see which lights were on.

Often the modem lights wouldn't stay on long enough from a mere phone call. Rather than run fast and risky in a crowded, wiry data center, I discovered that if I whistled certain frequencies mirroring the connect sound, the modem would think I was another modem and spend a longer time trying to connect. Thus, by learning to speak modemese, I could walk instead of run.