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Captain Crunch (and Steve Wozniak) Write New Book: 'Beyond the Little Blue Box' (kickstarter.com)
Slashdot reader blottsie shares a new article about the legendary Captain Crunch -- which includes Steve Wozniak's memory that Steve Jobs "started avoiding Crunch...afraid that it would put us too close to getting arrested." The Daily Dot reports:
Wozniak and Jobs, of course, would go on to found the most successful tech company in the world. But Draper is far from being just an important footnote in Apple's history. He's the original hacking prankster, a purist driven by curiosity and craftsmanship, with a lifetime of exploits that have pushed technological and legal boundaries. And according to Jobs, in a rare 1994 interview, without him there wouldn't have been Apple. Now, for the first time, Draper is looking to publish his story with Beyond the Little Blue Box, an autobiography for which he's about to launch a Kickstarter campaign...
[H]e anonymously called in a national emergency directly to a furious President Richard Nixon on the Oval Office phone line, reporting that the West Coast had run out of toilet paper. He also claims he once bypassed the Iron Curtain to call Moscow in the Soviet Union. There's a playful mischief about him, but he's serious when it comes to his craft, relaying technical, intricate details about the systems he worked to hack... For many tinkering young coders and internet activists, Draper is still considered a folk hero, one whose apolitical infatuation with complex systems and compulsion to expose their limits made him a target -- especially where that curiosity crossed with corporate interests.
"Experiences like that taught us the power of ideas," Steve Jobs said in a 1994 interview. "The power of understanding that if you could build this box, you could control hundreds of billions of dollars around the world, that's a powerful thing." Steve Wozniak -- who writes the book's foreword -- remembers how Jobs ended that interview. "Steve Jobs said -- and I agree -- that without the blue box there might never have been an Apple."
Draper's Kickstarter campaign includes a "2600 Club" Bronze level, while people who pledge over $199 will receive an actual blue anonabox. And there's also a $10,000 "Super Phreak" level which includes a "VIP one-to-one meeting" with 74-year-old John Draper himself.
[H]e anonymously called in a national emergency directly to a furious President Richard Nixon on the Oval Office phone line, reporting that the West Coast had run out of toilet paper. He also claims he once bypassed the Iron Curtain to call Moscow in the Soviet Union. There's a playful mischief about him, but he's serious when it comes to his craft, relaying technical, intricate details about the systems he worked to hack... For many tinkering young coders and internet activists, Draper is still considered a folk hero, one whose apolitical infatuation with complex systems and compulsion to expose their limits made him a target -- especially where that curiosity crossed with corporate interests.
"Experiences like that taught us the power of ideas," Steve Jobs said in a 1994 interview. "The power of understanding that if you could build this box, you could control hundreds of billions of dollars around the world, that's a powerful thing." Steve Wozniak -- who writes the book's foreword -- remembers how Jobs ended that interview. "Steve Jobs said -- and I agree -- that without the blue box there might never have been an Apple."
Draper's Kickstarter campaign includes a "2600 Club" Bronze level, while people who pledge over $199 will receive an actual blue anonabox. And there's also a $10,000 "Super Phreak" level which includes a "VIP one-to-one meeting" with 74-year-old John Draper himself.
Dear blottsie, please try to make your Slashvertisement a little less obvious next time.
This sounds pretty cool and all in a "1998 and Slashdot is great" kind of way. But what the fuck does any of this have to do with Apple in 2017?
Captain Crunch's story can be found in "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" by Steven Levy.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
John Draper A.K.A. Captain Crunch
Was it too much to ask for that the (slashdot) story—just once—mention the guy's actual name? Yes.
Heck, the source's title uses his actual name.
...
We were both in the Palo Alto Macintosh developers user group. I was a Stanford student at the time. I dont remember anything out of the ordinary about hime other than his blue-box fame
Especially one where "the writing is done and most of the editing". Are conventional publishers not interested? Or is this just a means of coaxing a better deal out of publishers?
I understand crowd funding for projects to expensive to self fund yet too small for conventional venture capital. But conventional book publishing seems to have this covered. Writers write. Publishers publish and sometimes providers editors and advance payment to writers. Is there reason to believe this book would not be published were it not for the kickstarter campaign?
”Captain Crunch (and Steve Wozniak) Write New Book: 'Beyond the Little Blue Box'”
I didn’t realize it was so easy to get author credit.
#DeleteChrome
For a good read on phone phreaking history and culture read Exploding the Phone. The forward is written by Woz.
The Evan Doorbell tapes offer quite a treasure trove of stories, techniques, and sounds from those days.
The Esquire article probably did more harm to phreaking than anything else, IMO. Captain Crunch made a bold claim that three phreakers with blue boxes could take down the Bell System by stacking connections. Among the Evan Doorbell tapes, there are some examples of how stacking worked, and its limitations. Only a few two-wire tandem switches were actually stackable; the four-wire switches that handled the lion's share of long-distance traffic were not. Also, each extra link added also increased the noise floor to the point that signalling tones could only go so far. Evan Doorbell, in his own discussion of stacking, said that about 24 links or so was the most he could count on any of his tapes of stacks.
Crunch's hypothetical "three phreakers" might have been able to busy out a few minor trunk groups, but take down the Bell System? Not likely. Nonetheless, claims like that had to light a fire under the security department's butts.
Though it didn't come out until decades later, AT&T was no stranger to mass surveillance; their Project Greenstar system, deployed in 1964, which was meant to catch phreakers committing toll fraud. It monitored random trunks for out-of-place occurrences of 2600 Hz, and would then start recording the call in question. Ma Bell was concerned enough about its legality that it was kept top secret and never mentioned in phone fraud trials.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
The cold war's unreachable countries list was just a dialing restriction placed on Americans really. You could seize an overseas trunk, MF into Paris, grab an outgoing trunk there and tone straight into Moscow.
I did it once to a random number and had a hilarious 10 minute 'conversation' with a confused Muscovite who knew only a few English words. He figured out that I was repeating some of his words, understood the English word 'American' and laughed, we parroted each other for awhile in good humor. I'll bet the KGB has a whole dossier on THAT conversation.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>