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A Hacker 'Hero' Has Been Banned From Cyber Conferences After Decades Of Inappropriate Behavior (buzzfeed.com)
Several readers share a report: John Draper, a prankster hero to an early generation of hackers, used his status at cybersecurity conferences to arrange private meetings with teenage fans and a reporter where he touched them inappropriately, multiple men have told BuzzFeed News. The allegations are the latest in what has become in recent weeks an explosion of sexual misconduct reports that have roiled a seemingly endless list of industries, from Hollywood to the news media to the Alabama Senate race. As in many of those other cases, Draper's actions were well known to at least a core of people who had regular contact with him. Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak told BuzzFeed News that Steve Jobs once told him that Draper, an early associate, once asked Jobs to sit on Draper's back in the 1970s, an offer Wozniak said Jobs declined as being "out of the ordinary." But in the hacking world, where unusual behavior is accepted and often celebrated, there were few official steps taken to prevent Draper's overtures to unsuspecting fans. Volunteers who worked the annual DEF CON hacking conventions in Las Vegas recalled that one of their responsibilities was to separate Draper from his teenage followers. Draper's behavior drew attention at other conventions as well, where he was a frequent presence. Brandon Creighton, a long-standing volunteer at hacker conferences who was familiar with rumors about Draper, recalled escorting him from a private party after ToorCon in San Diego in 2007, though exactly why was not clear.
For a minimum of a decade or decade and a half. Draper extensively hit on a friend of mine, who at the time was 18 or 19.
Apparently, not all the teenagers were above 18. That's the part not being mentioned. He wasn't exclusively hitting on dudes under 18, but he just wasn't remotely cautious about the age of the folks he was hitting on. Usually people were NOT interested.
I used to hang out in the #2600 IRC, Drapers panache for young boys was being discussed as far back as 1998 according to my recollection.
I've personally seen what Draper did. This was 20 years ago at XMas Con. Draper was a friend of a friend, and staying in our room. The guy frankly creeped me out and I wasn't very happy with it, but it was only one night, so whatever.
Later that night I went back to the room for something, and found Draper lying on the back of a local hacker I knew. The hacker later described the weird "energy exercise" thing described in the article. The hacker was also tripping on Robitussin at the time, and not in his right mind. He thanked me later for waking him up to what was happening, and was convinced Draper was going to rape him.
Now, I didn't see any rape happen. And nobody in the article exactly described rape. But I sure wouldn't call this particular series of incidents part of a witch hunt either. What Draper did is seriously seriously creepy. I don't know if it is/was illegal, but what he did wasn't right and shouldn't be tolerated.
The issue with Draper is there are documented cases of his Yoga exercises with boys under the age of consent, 15 years old. This has been well known for many years and even though some of us tried to get the word out, too much hero worship surrounds the guy.
The problem is that when you idolize someone as much as we did (Draper was a member of my group back in the day.) when they ask something weird, you aren't as likely as a kid to say no to your hero. We quickly learned what he was really like...
The guy is just a dirty bum with serious mental issues who has a thing for young guys and doesn't keep the bar above age of consent.
The "whistle" was not created by "Captain Crunch" the hacker, it was a toy prize included in boxes of Captain Crunch the cereal, from which the hacker took his nym.
The tone was used to disconnect an existing long distance call. Your local end of the trunk knew it was still in use because your local loop was still active. The remote end thought the trunk had gone idle and disconnected the call from that point onward.
When the tone was stopped, the distant end believed it was being asked to initiate a new call and started listening for the DTMF in-band signalling that would route the new call. This was not the same set of tones as a touch-tone phone produced, so a device called a "blue box" was used by the hacker to generate the correct tones.
There were codes used to route the call via specific paths, so one game was to see how many trunks could get involved before the call was completed. Or you could force specific undersea cables to be used.
This was all described in a paper published in the Bell System Journal, intending to inform other Bell technical employees of the internals of the system. Hackers discovered this information and designed a simple tone generator system (the "blue box") to take advantage of it. Bell attempted to scour all the libraries where this journal was shelved to remove that article, and it is hard to find a bound copy from that time period that still has the article in it.
Because it was the local end of the call that maintained the record of called number and time spent on the call, it was usually a toll-free number that the hacker used. The only evidence of the hack would be extremely long calls to toll-free numbers.
If you practiced, you could actually whistle the disconnect tone yourself. It was somewhat fun to walk past someone who was on a long distance call and then whistle 2600 Hz for a few seconds or even less. If they were engrossed in the conversation they wouldn't notice the whistle, but the phone system did. Their next words were usually "hello? Hello? Are you there?"
That is ancient history to most folks these days.