Woz Expounds On His Hacking Shenanigans and Online Mischief

Heh... chalk it up to... by NotQuiteReal · 2013-09-25 15:08 · Score: 5, Insightful

Kid's will be kids. Case dismissed!

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Re:Heh... chalk it up to... by ShieldW0lf · 2013-09-25 15:12 · Score: 0, Flamebait

What a tool Woz is.

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Re:Heh... chalk it up to... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-25 16:16 · Score: 0, Troll

I remember being in sixth grade and taking a data processing class. I told the teach that I could hack the school computer which was a PDP11/4a (if I remember correctly).
He said, no you can't
I said, "Yes I can"
He said again, "No you can't"
I said I most certainly can!
He said, "I dare ya to prove it"
So I did just that and did a cat /dev/random>sda1 or some such thing, and erased the days works from the RPG class.
Nearly got expelled for it! It was worth the fun! Goes to show ya!
Now I am up to much much more constructive fun with this kickstarter project!
Best Damn iPhone Case EVER!
By the way iWoz is a great book! Go Woz!
Re:Heh... chalk it up to... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-25 19:50 · Score: 0

I remember being in sixth grade and taking a data processing class. I told the teach that I could hack the school computer which was a PDP11/4a (if I remember correctly).
...
So I did just that and did a cat /dev/random>sda1 or some such thing, and erased the days works from the RPG class.
So in other words, you didn't hack it, you trashed it.
Re: Heh... chalk it up to... by loufoque · 2013-09-26 00:58 · Score: 1

You had a class dedicated to Role Playing Games?
Re:Heh... chalk it up to... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-26 01:54 · Score: 0

Kid's will be kids. Case dismissed!
Kid's WHAT will be kids? The kids' kids?
Greengrocer joke aside (get your GED, notquiterealnerd), that sounds like some of the stuff I did when I was a kid. His TV disruptor sounds like my Dufus Detector I made in the 6th grade. It was just a box with a light bulb, AAA battery, and a magnetic switch, with a magnet glued to a ring I was wearing. Hold it right and it lit up (crap, I just thought of Apple's famous "you're holding it wrong"). It got confiscated when it pegged the teacher as a dufus (actually she WAS a dufus).
His phone phreaking was quite a bit higher tech than mine, as well. They had rotary phones way back when I was a teenager, and there were "incoming call only" phones then; there was one in the ticket booth of the drive-in theater I worked in. Of course, if you knew how the dials worked you could fake it by rapidly hitting the hook. Numbers with a lot of 9s were kind of hard to call.
Sorry for posting AC, I can't log in on this machine. Some of you can guess who I am by the dufus detector and drive in theater, I've mentioned them in JEs.
Re:Heh... chalk it up to... by Teancum · 2013-09-26 02:10 · Score: 1

Woz did many of these things as an adult. He was certainly a young twenty-something adult that was foolish, but none the less an adult or at least a teen for some of these exploits.
Re:Heh... chalk it up to... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-26 02:55 · Score: 0

Denial of Service attack.
Re: Heh... chalk it up to... by geekoid · 2013-09-26 03:18 · Score: 1

I did. It was called 'Theater'

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Re:Heh... chalk it up to... by g0bshiTe · 2013-09-26 03:48 · Score: 1

Get back to work Woz!

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Re: Heh... chalk it up to... by Darinbob · 2013-09-26 06:06 · Score: 1

The advanced role playing students went on to take RPG-II classes.

Not much detail here... by drussell · 2013-09-25 15:10 · Score: 2

What's with all the fluff articles lately? I read a detailed article many years ago about Woz' phone phreaking adventures an his love of jokes and pranks is well known. I'd love to read a modern article on some of the (presumably hilarious) details, but this is certainly not it. :-)

is woz even allowed on an apple campus? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-25 15:16 · Score: 0

he was a goofball then. Something Jobs keyed in on and took full advantage of.
he is a goofball now. but Cook is no match for him.

Re:is woz even allowed on an apple campus? by Camembert · 2013-09-25 16:00 · Score: 4, Insightful

I think that Woz needed the early marketing genius of Jobs to shine and make a real difference in society with the Apple 2; and it is equally true that Jobs would not have been able to rise to fame back then without the technical genius of Wozniak. Their talents complemented each other very well, and at the right time. Imagine if Woz would have had an early job offer at say HP. He might have become a respected engineer over there, but unlikely with the same recognition today. We wouldn't have heard of Jobs so early on, yet the man had a such a good consumer insight that it is not inconceivable that he would have become notable in other ways.
Re:is woz even allowed on an apple campus? by tlhIngan · 2013-09-25 17:35 · Score: 5, Informative

Imagine if Woz would have had an early job offer at say HP. He might have become a respected engineer over there, but unlikely with the same recognition today.
Woz was working at HP (in their calculator division) while he was building the Apple I. In fact, HP had a policy that allowed people to take parts home for experimentation (and Woz used it to build the Apple I). The only catch is that if you build anything, you must show it to HP to give them right of first refusal to build and commercialize the product.
In fact, during this time, Woz applied to transfer to HP's computer division, and was rejected, multiple times.
Eventually he built the Apple I, and he showed it to HP management. They liked it, HOWEVER, they rejected the idea that it can connect to an ordinary TV. They felt that doing so violated the HP way - what if the customer has a piss-poor TV? They'll blame HP for making a crap product! No, your device must use an HP display.
So in the end, Woz got his release on the Apple I, HP only made workstations (and nothing for the home computer market). When Jobs went about selling the Apple I, and got an order for 1000 of them, Woz quit HP and they entered into building the Apple I full time.
There was insufficient capital, so Woz sold his HP calculator to pay for the PCBs, and they could only build about 10 or so at a time - they'd build 10 of them, then they'd pay the suppliers for the next batch (whom refused to release the parts until they were prepaid - so the parts sat in a secured locker at the factory). Jobs would take the 10 units and deliver them and take partial payment.
Woz and Jobs complimented each other. It was Jobs' idea to sell the Apple I (Woz was planning on just selling boards and schematics). That was innovation #1, because it meant a computer no longer was the exclusive territory of the big companies nor hardcore hackers - people could *buy* one prebuilt (and many stores threw in the requisite additional parts - power supply, keyboard, case). Until then, even the Altairs were shipped as a kit you had to put together, so limited to the hobbyist market. Of course, even the hobbyist market was big enough to create Microsoft and have Gates port his BASIC to it. Of course, it's also when Gates wrote his famous piracy letter.
Innovation #2 came with the Apple II - in which Jobs packaged it all up in a plastic case so now any mom and dad with no engineering skills can go to the store and buy it completely assembled and for the time, stylish looking.
Re:is woz even allowed on an apple campus? by __aajfby9338 · 2013-09-25 17:39 · Score: 1

Imagine if Woz would have had an early job offer at say HP.
There's no need to imagine that. He quit his job at HP in order to launch Apple Computer with Jobs.
Re:is woz even allowed on an apple campus? by Teancum · 2013-09-26 02:27 · Score: 3, Interesting

Woz also invented the floppy disc drive for the Apple II. While floppy drives weren't exactly new at the time, the big innovation that Woz did was in reducing the chip count considerably and moving much of the timing circuitry and formatting systems into software, thus making the disc controllers much more affordable. The Apple II computers were one of the first mass produced computers with that technology and gave Apple Computer a very early lead over their competitors who were still using cassette tapes for data storage systems.
I still have awe at how Woz was not able to create the Integer BASIC interpreter used on the Apple I & Apple II computers, but that he hand assembled every op code into raw binary before putting it into the ROM chip. It was something that a lack of capital forced to happen... which is also why Woz developed the mini assembler that was found in the Apple II monitor ROM so he didn't need to do that again.
There certainly are some other gems in terms of just raw elegance in the design that Woz came up with that take somebody digging around the components to fully appreciate. It may seem quirky in terms of somebody developing an emulator with 21st Century technology, but it was utter brilliance at the time. Another chip reducing approach was to use the NTSC frame synch clock used for the display to also trigger the RAM data refresh cycle (thus refreshing the RAM at 60 Hz). Other computers of the era needed separate clock circuity. I could go on, but there were a whole bunch of similar genuine innovations.
Re:is woz even allowed on an apple campus? by tlhIngan · 2013-09-26 03:06 · Score: 2

Woz also invented the floppy disc drive for the Apple II. While floppy drives weren't exactly new at the time, the big innovation that Woz did was in reducing the chip count considerably and moving much of the timing circuitry and formatting systems into software, thus making the disc controllers much more affordable. The Apple II computers were one of the first mass produced computers with that technology and gave Apple Computer a very early lead over their competitors who were still using cassette tapes for data storage systems.
I still have awe at how Woz was not able to create the Integer BASIC interpreter used on the Apple I & Apple II computers, but that he hand assembled every op code into raw binary before putting it into the ROM chip. It was something that a lack of capital forced to happen... which is also why Woz developed the mini assembler that was found in the Apple II monitor ROM so he didn't need to do that again.
The floppy drive thing was interesting, because the early floppy drives used a lot of chips because they offloaded a lot of work from the CPU to the drive electronics. When Woz was experimenting, he got the drive from Shugart and poked around with the operations manual. Eventually he realized he could get rid of most of the controller on the drive and completely simplify things. (It took a bit of convincing to get Shugart to sell Apple plain mechanisms without controller chips).
What Woz REALLY did with these innovations was realize that the CPU can do most of the world and be far cheaper at it - i.e., offload to software what was done in hardware to reduce cost and complexity.
As for hand assembly - back in those days it was easy enough, if a bit tedious. These were the days where if you wanted an assembler, they cost a lot of money and only ran on big computers like PDPs and the like. Of course, when you only had a tiny amount of memory, it only was a few days work to hand assemble the OS and other things. Plus if you looked at the disk controller code, you'll find stuff in there that could only be done if you hand-assembled it - there were severe timing restrictions caused by the software approach that required that a bunch of code be located at specific locations so the 6502 clock count would just make the necessary timing. If the code moved, there was a chance it would break the driver. Again, something you could only do back when things were simpler and could hand assemble the code to ensure that you got what you needed and could double-check the cycle counts.
Re:is woz even allowed on an apple campus? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-26 03:21 · Score: 0

What I remembered most when Apple II came out is I could read the manual! I was taking CSC-101 (FORTRAN) my first programming and this used time-shared computer (terminals in library), along with textbook there was a complement IBM-360 manual (which was horribly bureaucratic to read).
Re:is woz even allowed on an apple campus? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-26 03:54 · Score: 0

Actually the Commodore PET was released in an all ready to go in a case (just plug it in and turn it on) several months before the Apple II came out in its ready to go case.
However many people forget about the PET and that it actually beat Apple to market by about 4 to 6 months.
Re:is woz even allowed on an apple campus? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-26 07:03 · Score: 0

Just a quick grammar nazi post: Complement and compliment are different words with different meanings.

Blue Box by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-25 15:36 · Score: 0

This is no surprise, he made blue boxes.

Re:Blue Box by drkim · 2013-09-25 19:26 · Score: 3, Insightful

This is no surprise, he made blue boxes.
Except in the article he seems to imply that he didn't do it for personal gain:
He went out and learned more about the exact frequencies and tried them out on the telephone system. “I wanted to explore the network,” he said. It was all a form of “White Hat hacking” he says he did but never for purposes of stealing or avoiding paying bills.
But Jobs convinced him to start selling the boxes, and they made about $6,000.
That's not exactly "White Hat hacking" at that point...
Re:Blue Box by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-26 00:59 · Score: 0

It was all a form of “White Hat hacking” he says he did but never for purposes of stealing phone service or avoiding paying phone bills.
FTFY
Re:Blue Box by mjwalshe · 2013-09-26 05:17 · Score: 1

In the UK you used to be prosecuted for stealing the queens electricity back in the day.
Re:Blue Box by drkim · 2013-09-26 16:03 · Score: 1

It was all a form of “White Hat hacking” he says he did but never for purposes of stealing phone service or avoiding paying phone bills.
FTFY
First: I love Woz, and what he did for computing (stlll have my IIe in the garage)
If you are blue boxing you are, by definition, not paying for the phone services that you are using.
Building a blue box and and 'exploring' Ma Bell, can be considered "white hat."
Once you start building them and selling them for a profit, not so much.
Remember, selling or owning them was very illegal back then. One builder lined his with Thermite across the PCB, so if the cops were approaching you could fry the board.
More here:
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/the_spectator/2011/10/the_article_that_inspired_steve_jobs_secrets_of_the_little_blue_.html

Naked Woz by deodiaus2 · 2013-09-25 15:57 · Score: 1

Who has a pic of a naked Woz in his inbox?

Re:Naked Woz by drkim · 2013-09-25 19:27 · Score: 1

Who has a pic of a naked Woz in his inbox?
This is Slashdot.
We ALL do.
Re:Naked Woz by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-26 01:03 · Score: 0

And pouring hot grits over his head.
Re:Naked Woz by operagost · 2013-09-26 03:23 · Score: 1

Nope. Desktop wallpaper.

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Re:Naked Woz by drkim · 2013-09-26 15:43 · Score: 1

And pouring hot grits over his head.
Oooooo! Send me that one!

Headline news! by Cyfun · 2013-09-25 16:30 · Score: 1

Geeks like to play pranks? Amazing!

What'll be news next? Women like shoes? Cats like to sleep? Cowboyneal likes tentacle porn?

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Re:Name a relic of a by-gone era by Em+Adespoton · 2013-09-25 16:35 · Score: 1

http://www.biography.com/people/steve-wozniak-9537334

Since Dancing With The Stars, he's been working at Fusion-IO
Looks like he's been developing distributed flash-based storage solutions. Not much solder, but plenty of design.

I still remember him for the universal remote....

Look at him now! by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-25 17:06 · Score: 0

“because I was a geek, and had little hope of finding a girlfriend or a wife,” Wozniak says.

Look at him now, bagging Kathy Griffin........ *coug*......yeah....

And the list of what he did? by Anubis+IV · 2013-09-25 17:13 · Score: 4, Insightful

1) He did some phreaking (phone hacking, back when audible frequencies were used to control the networks).

2) He made a TV jammer and then had friends go try out elaborate steps to "fix" the issue.

3) He snuck into computing facilities and tested out his punch card programs in the middle of the night when they weren't in use.

That's about it from the article. No particularly scintillating details even. Just stuff most of us have already heard.

tomorrow morning "FBI to arrests Woz" by raymorris · 2013-09-25 17:16 · Score: 3, Insightful

I wouldn't admit to hacking anything in today's USA.
The Obama administration doesn't like people to be smarter than them.

Re:tomorrow morning "FBI to arrests Woz" by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-25 17:54 · Score: 0

This is why he must do it. He's smart and brave, unlike the other dead apple d00d. And the bullshit policy has to go.
Re:tomorrow morning "FBI to arrests Woz" by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-25 19:21 · Score: 3, Insightful

Can't you Americans have any discussion on government behavior without immediately making it a red/blue thing ?
I have no doubt someone else will respond, pointing out how this is actually a Bush instigated problem, after which someone else undoubtedly will find a way to blame Clinton, etc,etc.
After that someone will remind us that the problem is the system itself and that red and blue are just 2 sides of the same coin and that you should vote independent.
By that time the thread is swamped by political shills drowning any real discussion of the problem at hand.
So thank you for your contribution, but may I kindly ask that, next time something like this comes along, you JUST SHUT UP ?
thanks and regards,
The internet
Re:tomorrow morning "FBI to arrests Woz" by bill_mcgonigle · 2013-09-25 21:18 · Score: 2

This is why we need total surveillance by the government in our society. We all know that to achieve the best results, we need that government to have perfect information and perfect law enforcement. If that's what it takes to jail menaces like Woz, then so be it, because society will be better off without any "troublemakers" around.
Just think - if only the law breakers who started the women's rights movement, the civil rights movement and the gay rights movements had been properly surveilled then they could have been stopped early on and not caused so much trouble.
This is the kind of government the American people are clamoring for. At least that's what their representatives say.

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Re:tomorrow morning "FBI to arrests Woz" by SuricouRaven · 2013-09-26 00:02 · Score: 2

It helps if you think of the sides as fans of rival sports teams. There's no real distinction between the teams, but their supporters don't see it that way.
Re:tomorrow morning "FBI to arrests Woz" by intermodal · 2013-09-26 01:24 · Score: 2

They'd have a hard time arresting the man for claims of nonspecific security breaches ocurring prior to the passage of the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984.

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Re:tomorrow morning "FBI to arrests Woz" by operagost · 2013-09-26 03:25 · Score: 1

The Obama administration doesn't like people to be smarter than them.

That's a pretty low bar.

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Re:tomorrow morning "FBI to arrests Woz" by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-26 03:53 · Score: 0

Not all of us think this way. Just the ones that have been fooled into thinking there really is a difference between the two major political parties. This is how the people in power want it, too; if the majority finally woke up and started voting independent, this would force the Republocrat superparty to either step aside, or attempt to maintain their power base in other, more obvious ways.
The illusion of choice is a very cunning way to maintain a "democracy".
Re:tomorrow morning "FBI to arrests Woz" by mjwalshe · 2013-09-26 05:19 · Score: 1

its making it a "black" thing actually
Re:tomorrow morning "FBI to arrests Woz" by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-26 07:42 · Score: 0

I see you've never been to Illinois' capital city. It's right in the middle of the state, and half the folks here are originally from the St Louis area and half are from Chicago, so the Cubs-Cardinals rivalry is pretty heavy around here. The difference between the teams? The Cardinals win the world series at least once per decade, while the Cubs haven't won the series since 1908 and haven't been in one since WWII. I asked a Cubs fan once why he rooted for those losers. He shrugged. "I'm a loser too," he said.
Nothing like Democrats and Republicans, both of whom are both pretty damned evil and both of whom win pretty much as many games as the other. Sometimes I think politics is more like pro rasslin' than baseball (I.e., made up fake bullshit).

Obviously a Terrorist-Hacker by gweihir · 2013-09-25 17:21 · Score: 3, Funny

Life in prison is too god for him. Oh, wait, in those times prosecutors had not heard of the Internet yet and had not started their immoral tactics of piling charges upon charges on people like Woz. I wonder how many great talents we have already lost because they do not dare to learn these things today or are sitting in prison.

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Re:Obviously a Terrorist-Hacker by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-25 18:59 · Score: 0

In those times, perhaps, but by the mid-80's I can tell you first-hand that they were quite willing to prosecute Blue Boxing as a felony.
If you're counting up how much has been lost, you can start counting from there.
Re:Obviously a Terrorist-Hacker by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-26 03:43 · Score: 0

Yes, in the late '80s I was repairing hardware for a guy that had four computers and four phone lines set up in an empty apartment in Montreal. He was downloading stuff 24/7 from Germany and Poland via a color box of some kind. At that time, the phone system was fully computerized with the ESS, so Bell knew what was going on. Hell, I remember once as a kid I was practicing pulse-dialing by finger on the "hang up" button. It worked, but eventually a Bell tech called me to ask what kind of phone I was using...
Anyhow, one day I found out the RCMP had shut down his little zero-day wares shop.

Watch Out by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-25 17:37 · Score: 0

We've got a badass over here

It was different back then. by SuricouRaven · 2013-09-25 18:40 · Score: 1

As computers shifted to a position of greater importance in society, the potential damage even a playful hacker could do increased. Enforcement an penalties increased correspondingly.

A bit of online mischief has long been part of learning to be a good computer engineer, whatever the exact role. It's just that the chances of getting caught, prosecuted, jailed and/or financially ruined have increased too. The bumbling beginner, whatever their potential, won't have learned properly how to mask their identity.

TV goofin' by Tablizer · 2013-09-25 18:57 · Score: 4, Funny

Somewhere I read an interview of Jobs where he expanded on how he and Woz would cause interference on the dorm TV from a distance. At first they just wanted to get others to leave so that they could watch their favorite show. But then they went further.

When students stood up to adjust the antenna, they'd make the set suddenly work, but go snowy if the student walked toward the set. Thus, the student would have to stand in one spot throughout the show to "get a good signal". They "fine tuned" the people to control where and how they stood, practically making them dance, and training them like dogs.

Sounds like great fun. I remember those days of finicky TV signals, though, and can see how such a trick could grow.

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Table-ized A.I.

Re:TV goofin' by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-25 22:21 · Score: 0

Somewhere I read an interview of Jobs where he expanded on how he and Woz would cause interference on the dorm TV from a distance. At first they just wanted to get others to leave so that they could watch their favorite show. But then they went further.
When students stood up to adjust the antenna, they'd make the set suddenly work, but go snowy if the student walked toward the set. Thus, the student would have to stand in one spot throughout the show to "get a good signal". They "fine tuned" the people to control where and how they stood, practically making them dance, and training them like dogs.
Sounds like great fun. I remember those days of finicky TV signals, though, and can see how such a trick could grow.
sounds like a d*ck tbh.
Re:TV goofin' by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-27 05:20 · Score: 0

Hmmm ... ... looking at the lines of people queueing for the next
iStuff it feels they became pretty good at the "training
them like dogs" thingy ... ;-)

Re:Name a relic of a by-gone era by SternisheFan · 2013-09-25 22:30 · Score: 1

I've read that Woz helps out startups by investing in their ideas. In his own way, he keeps his hand in the tech game, though he seems to prefer to stay low-key about his doings. I couldn't blame him if he did nothing else since his groundbreaking tech work, took the money and retired. His place in history is assured.

harder than arresting a guy for a YouTube video by raymorris · 2013-09-26 01:44 · Score: 2

Would that be harder than arresting a guy for posting a YouTube video offensive to Mohammed?

Re:harder than arresting a guy for a YouTube video by intermodal · 2013-09-26 01:56 · Score: 1

Yes, primarily because Woz has a lot of respect and support in the public square.

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An illustration of what has gone wrong by erroneus · 2013-09-26 01:59 · Score: 1

There is probably a very long list of possible good entries into the list and I hope people reply here to add their own.

This is a short list of "things that were okay/acceptable before but terrible now." (Mostly things I did as a child)

1. Fireworks
2. Children playing/hiking far away from home
3. Play with guns (both toys and real... yes I knew how to use a gun from a very early age and how dangerous they are. Still here, no one was harmed.)
4. Play with knives
5. "Hunted small game" (meaning killed small animals for sport)
6. War dialing finding a lot of interesting things back in the day

The top few of my list would, today, result in my removal from society and possibly institutionalized somewhere. War dialing would make me a criminal hacker and possibly even a traitor to my nation.

Re:An illustration of what has gone wrong by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-26 04:22 · Score: 0

and it's happened before. Stalin Russia, Nazi Germany, Mao China, etc. purges that wiped out many smart people.

Re:Name a relic of a by-gone era by Teancum · 2013-09-26 02:40 · Score: 2

Steve Wozniak went back to school and got a teaching certificate, and spent several years as an elementary school teacher so he could inspire a new generation to innovate and create some really interesting stuff. He sure didn't need the money. He also finished his engineering degree.

To call Woz a money grubber is really being unfair to the guy. He also also started a bunch of Silicon Valley companies on his own and does pretty much his own thing how he wants and whatever he wants. That and he is still technically an employee of Apple Computer who can do special projects whenever he wants or feels the need.

Mostly Woz keeps to himself and doesn't flout all of his accomplishments, which are considerable.

No, it wasn't really different back then by Phil+Urich · 2013-09-26 06:36 · Score: 1

I think it's kindof balanced out. Sure, in theory someone could do more damage now, but in practice it takes a fair bit of know-how to do damage against anything that isn't extremely poorly set up (I'm looking at you, publicly-facing SQL servers). Meanwhile, back in the day a single guy with a box that could generate the right tones could potentially control all telephone routing for an entire coast.

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I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!

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Woz Expounds On His Hacking Shenanigans and Online Mischief

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