Slashdot Mirror
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."
I'm sure most geeks here have seen this video. But for those who haven't, History of Hacking.
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.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
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
Hacker Media
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.
NPR did a bit on Joybubbles (Joe's handle) some months ago.
Very good listen.
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Just out of curiosity, is the blind character "Whistler" from "Sneakers" based on him?
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).
www.cgstock.com
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.
Living With a Nerd
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*
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
"Dressing in the dark again, Eugene?"
Best line in the whole movie.
Living With a Nerd
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.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
Anybody know what happened to The Mentor? (the Phrack magazine guru)
Here's his site according to his wikipedia article
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
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.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
http://audio.textfiles.com/shows/storiesandstuff/
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
Has it occurred to you that maybe the "Get them to work for US" experiments didn't work out as well as they'd hoped?
In some cases, I'm sure they still had problems. However, as a couple of anecdotal data points, I've known a couple of people that were busted back in the early-mid nineties and given that choice. They both worked out quite well.
A lot of it, I think, comes down to why they were doing it - exploration and learning vs trying to defraud, etc.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
KP and ST were needed for sentinel values due to the in-band signaling nature of the old MF long distance system. KP1 is not key punch, but key pulse. You send it after a supervision wink before you enter routing codes or destination numbers. Very important if you wanted to get into the art of tandem stacking or if you wanted to do anything with a bluebox at all. After putting in the routing codes or destination number, you would send ST.
There were two KPs, KP1 and KP2. KP1 was used for making domestic calls. KP2 was for international calls.
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.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
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.
I think your tones are off. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTMF
It was never that really hot information... There were commercially available wristwatches that would dial the phone for you by holding it up to the phone, etc.
As a prank, when I was in grade school, circa 1990, a friend and I made a BASIC program on our school IBM's that would give a fake login screen that would "allow" you via simple commands to "dial FBI" completely with realistic "modem" dialtone and carrier tones. It would be hilarious to watch some of the other students get so excited to type "help", then a few silly commands, and finally "DIAL FBI" and get carried away to see an ASCII art warning screen we drew up. The best thing was, after they "logged in" they would get dropped, and never tell the teachers what was going on because of their "illegal" activity. Those sneaky kids!
I forgot where we got the tone listing, but I think it was in a book in the school library. It was amazingly realistic when played on the speaker.
As for whistling to dial, it is a myth as far as I know. A person can whistle 2600; it is not that hard. I hate how mythical powers get embodied to people that exploited lame design and in band signaling by the phone companies. To whistle to dial is impossible, because multiple tones are required.
Slashdotter, ID #101. UIDs are in binary, right?
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.
Table-ized A.I.
I want a Red Ryder Tonal Action 2600Hz Range Model Blue-Box... with a compass in the stock.
http://www.coderoshi.com/
I think the ultimate examples of that worked fabulously well. It got you guys to space and then the moon.