hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0699.txt

Episode: 699
Title: HPR0699: r0xy interviews Cap'n Crunch on cacti radio
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0699/hpr0699.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 01:14:55

---

Hi all.
The following interview was forwarded to HPR by Brad Carter.
Roxie did a live interview with Captain Crunch on Cacti radio a little over a month ago.
Before playing the show I'd like to read you some extracts from Captain Crunch's Wikipedia
article to give you some context if you are not familiar with him.
This is going to be a long episode so here we go.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia available under the Creative Commons attribution share
a like license.
John Thomas Draper born 1943, also known as Captain Crunch, Crunch or Crunchman after Captain
Crunch, the mascot of a breakfast cereal, is a computer programmer and former phone freak.
He is a legendary figure within the computer programming world.
Draper was the son of a US Air Force engineer.
He described his father as distant in an interview published on the front page on the
Jan 13, 2004, 2007 issue on the Wall Street Journal.
Draper himself entered the Air Force in 1964 and, while stationed in Alaska, helped his fellow
serving icemen make free phone calls home by devising access to a local telephone switchboard.
He was honorably discharged from the Air Force in 1968 and did military-related work for
several employers in the San Francisco Bay Area.
He adopted the counter-culture on the Times and operated a pirate radio station out of
a Volkswagen van.
Heading
Freaking
Draper was driving around his Volkswagen Microbberster test a pirate radio transmitter.
He brought cast a telephone number to listen as feedback to gauge his station's reception.
A callback from a minute, identified in the discovery channel documentary about hacking,
as a minute to receive, resulted in a meeting with the blind kids and caused him to blunder
into the world of the phone freaks.
A wanted him to build a multi-freak once-it-own generator, a blue box, to gain easier entry
into the AT&T system, which was controlled by tones.
And they would not have to use an organ, and cassette recordings of tones to get free calls.
At least one of the blind boys had perfect pitch, and had identified the exact frequencies.
A informed him at a toy whistle at was, at the time, packaged in boxes on cap and crunch
serial perimeter to at precisely 263rds, the same frequency at was used by AT&T long lines
to indicate at a trunk line was ready, and available to route a new call.
This would effectively disconnect one end on the trunk, allowing the still connected side
to enter an operator mode.
Experimenting with this whistle-inspired vapor to build blue boxes, electronic devices
capable of reproducing other tones used by the phone company.
The class on vulnerability's vapor, and others discovered, was limited to call-outings,
which is at employed in band signaling, whereas new equipment relies almost exclusively
on out band signaling, the use on separate circuits to transmit voice, and signals.
Though they could no longer serve practical use, the cap and crunch whistles did become
valued collector items.
Some hackers sometimes go by the handle, cap and crunch, even today, 2600.
The hacker quarterly is named after this whistle-free frequency.
The hacker spends on sustaining the unreal phone calls, the redesign on the line protocols,
and the accelerated equipment replacement due to the blue boxes difficult to calculate,
or even to separate from something as complex and dynamic as the telephone-long distance network.
The 1977 S.Y. article, which told the world about phone-freaking got vapor in hot water.
The vapor was arrested on toll-fraud charges in 1972, and sentenced to 5 years' probation.
The article also brought into the attention on Steve Woznerak, who located vapor, while
working as an engineer at KKUB, a Cupertino Public Radio station located near the future
Apple Campus.
In the mid-1970s he taught his phone-freaking skills to Steve Jobs, and Steve Woznerak,
who later founded Apple Computer.
He was briefly employed at Apple, and created a telephone interface board for the Apple
2 personal computer.
Woznerak has said the reason the board was never marketed was that Woznerak was the only
one in the company, who liked vapor, and partially neutered vapor's arrest, and conviction
for wire-fraud.
While at Apple, vapor also wrote a cross-assembly used by Steve Woznerak, while developing
Apple 1 and Apple 2.
Heading
Software developer
vapor wrote easy writer, the first word processor for the Apple 2, in 1979.
According to the Wall Street Journal, he hand wrote the code, while serving ITS in their
name the county jail, and entered the code later into the computer.
vapor's personal website furnishes a more detailed version of the coding of easy writer.
vapor was in prison, in California, at the time, but under a work-for-low program.
This meant that, while he had to spend every item prison, he spent each day working a
regular job outside prison.
This job was at receiving studios, a small band practice studio, and while there he had access
to a computer, where he coded easy writer.
He did take copies of the code, home, to prison overnight to work on it.
vapor later ported easy writer to the IBM PC, beating Bill Gates on the bid for the IBM
contract.
vapor's company, Capen, software, posted less $1,000,000,000 new over six years, and
he subsequently sued his software's distributor.
vapor still maker, over an authorized version of easy writer at vapor released without vapor's
permission.
A settled out-of-court.
vapor's OCD-like behavior, and incredibly creative mind-per-mat-times letter difficulties
with potential clients, who find him too encompassing on the original California software community
ethos, which he sticks to until this very day.
Fourthly after Apple released Macintosh, he taught an online course in Mac programming.
Currently he writes computer securities software, is a senior developer on-can-talk exclamation,
Though IP client built around singer, and actress Candice Melon Arcos, and host an Internet
TV show, Crunch TV.
Skipping ahead to the heading Legends.
On-off repeated story featuring Captain Crunch goes as follows.
vapor picked up a public phone, and proceeded to freak his call around the world.
At no charge, he routed a call through different phone switches in countries, such as Japan,
Russia, and England.
Once he had set the call to go through dozens of countries, he dialed the number of the
public phone next to him.
A few minutes later, the phone next to him ran.
vapor spoke into the first phone, and, after quite a few seconds, he heard his own voice
very faintly on the other phone.
vapor also claimed that he, and a friend, once managed to place a direct call to the
White House, and spoke directly with someone, who sounded like Richard Nixon.
vapor's friend told the man about a toilet paper shortage in Los Angeles.
vapor was also a member of the Thombroo Computer Club.
Hack this movie.
The upcoming documentary Hack this movie, which features John Draper in a film being created
using a modified open source model for creation, and distribution.
Inspirations for the model are Kickstarter, the GNU project, the age on stupid, and
the theater sings the blues.
The film is being crowdsourced for individual contributions of art, time, energy, money,
and thought.
Heading.
Current medical situation.
According to savingcaptincrunch.com, Draper has developed trapped nerves in Rome, which,
if not alleviated, could potentially cost vapor for use of his arms, hands, and fingers.
Draper has been known to neglect his personal health for decades.
But the website was created by Sanjiv Bhattacharya, and I media candidate Ralivahaka community,
or just friends, to donate $10,000 to help pay for the surgery that took place on December
21, 2010.
It extensively details the surgical procedure, as historical photos from different periods
in Draper's history include a blog by Draper discussing his suffering prior to surgery,
and a means for donors to converse with Draper directly.
Linking to this site in a half hour long web came into view with Draper in the online
episode series Draws List, episode 3, posted January 6, 2011.
It includes an explanation on the donation website, and future uses on the site.
According an update he made on his personal Facebook page last March 6, 2011, John still
needs six-eight months of physical therapy in order to get back to normal functionality,
and it's a very big financial drain he can't afford.
His Medicare coverage ended, and he needs either $175 per therapy visit, or $35 an hour
to hire a personal trainer.
The donate button at http savingcaptincrunch.com can still be used to donate funds to help crunch
men.
Heading
In popular culture, John Draper appears, as himself in the unreleased documentary Haka's
wanted.
John Draper's story has also inspired several mentions in popular culture.
Elements of the movie Sneaker Free Call Draper, and Joy Bubbles.
The character Erwin, Whistler, in more report raid by David Trahtion, as well as Cosmos
experience of offering freaking services to criminals, while in prison, were based on
them.
John Draper is specifically mentioned, as Captain Crunch in one scene in Cowboy Bibob.
The movie, in which Haka mentions that Captain Crunch broke into the national phone system
with a plastic whistle.
He is portrayed by Wayne Payrim in the movie Pirates on Silicon Valley.
Captain Crunch is being searched for by Rockford, during a murder investigation on the TV show
Rockford Files.
Season 5.
Episode 5.
Kill the Messenger.
Okay.
That's it.
Onto the interview.
All right, this is OMG from Cacti Radio, and I am on the phone right now with Captain
Crunch.
Hello.
How are you out there in Radio Land, or should I say, Internet Land?
We pretend to be a real radio station here.
That's funny thing about Internet Radio, is they all like to pretend they're terrestrial
radio stations that have frequencies and frequently and all that stuff is crazy.
Yeah.
I was joke about, if we lose the stream or something, I say that a RBC became an intern
off the whole station.
So yeah, we're really glad to have you.
Everyone's all psyched, and we're going to take calls after we're done with the interview.
The number to call in is 484-240-4050, but let's go ahead and get on with it.
My first question is, how did you find out about phone freaking?
It was sort of like an interesting call.
I was experimenting around with an FM transmitter, and I get this call from a listener or a person
who picked up the transmission.
He was only about two kilometers away, so I wasn't expecting it to go very far.
Actually, the antenna was in my bedroom, so I went out about two miles, and he picked
it up, and it was quite clear.
He wanted to know whether I was a real radio station, and I told him no, it wasn't a real
radio station, and I was just experimenting around with a transmitter.
I wasn't really intending to signal to go out very far at all, but I did want to put
a real antenna on it instead of a dummy load.
A dummy load is something that emulates an antenna, but doesn't radiate to signal.
It's like a load, and you dump your power into this load, and it heats up.
It's a decoy.
Yeah, it's just something to absorb the radio frequencies.
Okay.
And he told you that we have enough of that.
Let me finish.
So he basically, and I gave him the information, and then all of a sudden I got another call,
two weeks later, with the same guy on the phone, and I said, hey, you aren't you guys,
you aren't you the one that called for the radio station, because he gave me a phone number
that ended in 4-0044.
I called that number, because I wanted, the next day I wanted to do, and I made a change
to my antenna, so I went in and changed the, I went in and tried to call him.
I asked him what his phone number was, and he gave it to me as 044, but that was the
A side of a loop around number, a loop around number is a number where you, it's two consecutive
numbers, 044, 045, 264, 044, actually.
And you call the 044 side, you get a tone, and you call the 045 side, and tone goes away
and you can talk.
Right.
So after, after, I got his number, I went, I went ahead, a couple days I tried to call
him back, and I got this tone, and then when he called me two weeks later, I asked him
what that tone was, and he said it was a loop around, and I said, what's a loop around
number, and that's how I got started, phone freaking, because he was a phone freak, and
then I said, what's a phone freak, and he told me what a phone freak was, and I said,
you guys make free phone calls, and I said, can you make free phone calls?
He says, yeah, I've got about 20 different ways of making free phone calls, and I said,
oh yeah, and this is interesting, I wasn't really working, so I could really, I really
had a need for making free phone calls, and trying to find a job, so I was looking for
a job at Motorola, and they're in Phoenix, so I had to make a lot of calls to Phoenix.
So I asked him, I said, is there any way, any way I could learn how to do this?
He says, yeah, I said, well, can I come over and visit you, and he says, yeah, so he gave
me his address, and I said, can you give me directions?
He said, no, I said, why not, because I said, I'm blind, I said, okay, fine.
So I go over, I knock on the door, and his father answers, and here I am, 26 year old
guy, knocking on the door, asking for, to talk to his son, to go to his son, and I didn't
go over too well, his dad, but he let me in, he asked Gordon to be back to his room, and
here I was, I go in his room, it's totally dark, there's four phone freaks in there.
One of them was partially blind, that was Denny, and then the other two were totally blind,
and I said, okay, here I am, but tell me what to do, tell me how to make free phone calls.
And Jimmy, the organist, about to play the organ, was happy to show me how multi-frequency
has worked, so he used this Hammond organ to make a free multi-frequency call, he says,
first you call an 800 number, and then you whistle it off, and then you dial these numbers,
and I said, well, how do you dial it, obviously, and they played two notes simultaneously on
the keyboard to get the notes. And I said, gee, that sounds like touchtones, and at the
time there was really no touchtone service, I really didn't know how touchtones sounded
like. I had not been exposed to touchtones until very early on, almost, I'd say maybe
a month or so after I had gotten introduced to multi-frequency.
Oh, is that because you had a rotary phone?
Yeah, yeah, we did not have phone, we did not have touchtones service in the area where
I was living. So I said, great, well, how do you do this? As you call it, like a toll-free
number, I said, okay, and you whistle it off like this, and you go, he whistles, and he
goes, chink, and this is our little chirp sound. I said, oh, this is interesting, I remember
hearing that sound when I was on the autobahn in the military. I said, okay, well, then
what you do next is you have to do an opening tone, this is key pulse, and then here's
the number, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, and it's start. I said, can you
give me the frequencies of the tones? He says, yeah, and he gave me the frequencies of
the tones, and it was really easy to remember. It was 700, 900, 1115, 1117, 1117, 1117,
1117, and used two out of the six tones, make number. Like, for instance, 700 would be
a zero plus 700. I mean, one would be zero plus each number, each 700 would be a weight
of one, 900 had a weight of two, 1100 had a weight of four, and 1500 had a weight of seven,
and 1700 was a special, that was used in key pulse at start. All I have to do is just
mix, put the two numbers together, and add them together, and then that would bake by
number, so 7 plus one is 7 plus one would be 1500 plus 700. The digit three is two plus
one, so I'd be 700 plus 900. And then there was this row, of course, better than no. Okay,
so that's anyway, so I knew the frequencies, I knew the keyboard, I knew the key equivalents,
so then I went home real quick, and I started to build a blue box because I had all the parts
that I needed, I just needed oscillators, and I had to know what frequency oscillators were,
and so I just used the piano keyboard as the tuning device, we were doing it, and I got it
accurate enough to actually work, and I was really surprised, I mean, I freaked out, oh my god,
it works. I was screaming and running like a, like a fancy with this head cut off.
Did they ask you to do it for them, or what? Did they ask you to do it for them, or are you just
doing it for your own use? I was doing it for my own use, I found it very intriguing,
the only thing I needed for was to make a few phone calls to Phoenix and save a couple bucks,
after that there was no idea to call, so who was I going to call? You know, I had friends overseas,
or that I learned how to call overseas, or as he's calling what didn't exist at the time,
we didn't get that until later. Oh, and so I had a few friends in the military, from the military
base I was at in Maine, and so I'd call the military base operator up and ask to talk to some
GI I had a friend with. And so those were the, basically, the only numbers I called,
I had a few scattered friends throughout the country that I could call, but there wasn't
that many people that I really had a need to call. And once I call them up, I talk to them,
so I'm tired of talking to them anymore, and I say, okay, I've got to go, you know,
and then you'll call them again, right? You just call them one time, and why should I call my
friend Mike again the next day, when I've already been talking to him for two hours of previous
time, I've got to cut up with my friend news and all that stuff, and there's no reason to call
anybody else twice. Right. I make to call once, talk to him as long as I like, and that's it,
usually it won't have to be anywhere between, you know, I don't think any of them took any longer
than an hour and a half. Ah, I understand. So the way that you found out. The question,
the next question is, let me answer that as well, what is a blue box, and why did I make one,
a blue box is the device that actually sends those tones out, and why I wanted to make one was
pretty obvious. I was very intrigued in what it can do, and the number one, and other reason
of why I did it was because I wanted to save a couple bucks on a call to Phoenix because I hadn't
been working. Okay. Well, did you ever get that job, or? No, actually, I didn't. Okay. Well,
you said that you found out about phone freaking while you were, while you were in your van.
And let me explain the van, and what was in it. Yeah, everybody asked me about the van.
Yeah. It's just a standard Volkswagen van with the seats cut out of the front two seats were
removed in the back, and there was a section in there where I could flop the seat down,
and I could put my radio station DJ unit on top of that. So it had, it was like a DJ set up,
facing toward the back. It was next to the back seat, facing toward the back. I had a mixer for it,
and the transmitter was in a special little, hermetically sealed metal box so that it wouldn't
interfere with anything. It had all kinds of, you know, wires coming out of it and stuff, and then
it was put out over a, and then I had an antenna connected to it, and the antenna was up on the
sunroof of the card. Roll the sunroof down, put the antenna out there, and roll the sunroof back,
and put the cable through and get it through the transmitter. I had a problem with the radio
with the RF getting into the audio. You know, the transmitter of power was 75 watts, and we have
75 watts signal next to your radio, next to your audio stuff. Your audio stuff contended
really kind of freak out. I had to put all kinds of filters and bypass filters and stuff like that
to filter out the RF. So it was, was there any sort of freaking equipment that you ended up putting
up? Let me get to that. I had a little patch unit that would patch to my thing. The idea was that
I could pull up, okay, they have these phones. They're called phone from car, and you can drive up
to the phone, you could pull out the phone, you could make a phone call. Right. There weren't very
many of them, but they were enough around the area that I could make use of, and be reasonably safe
in using it. So what I would do is I would drive up to the payphone, and payphone, you couldn't
dial an 800 number direct from payphones, because TSPS, which is an old operator handled long distance
system, which has now all been replaced with more new modern stuff. I'm sure. The TSPS
operate, anyway, so the operator would come on, and I would say I'd like to make a call please,
and she connected me to the 800 number, but every time I whistle 2600 in the phone, the operator
would come on the line, and I said, whoa, what's going on here? I said, what's, uh, operator,
I'm not done with a call, but she says, but your supervisory light went on. It looked to me like
they hung up. I said, operator, that those those supervisory lights you got on your border
are caused by a data transmission, so just ignore the data transmission and wait for me to hang up.
Only go by my light, don't go by the other light. So from that point on, I learned how to place
a call from a payphone through an operator. I'd say, hey, operator, I wish to make a special data call
on an 800 number, would you please connect me to 800 yet, yet, yet, yet, and it says, by the way,
your supervisory lights will flash, and if it does, just ignore the false supervision. She says,
how do you know all about this stuff? Operator, I've been making data calls for the longest time now,
and believe you me, I've had this problem before, trust me, it's all I can tell you, and it's all
I know if you put the call. That's great. That's great. So you got around that. So the little
special patch panel was kind of cool because it was it was set up so that I could operate it from
the driver's side. It was this little box connected to a cord that would go out to the payphone.
Now, I would like to directly couple to the payphone. Now, there's only one way to do that.
You had to get in the back of the payphone, and you had to peel away the wires
of the payphone, and you have to clip the direct wires directly into the tip and ring of the
payphone line coming in. In some of these payphones, the metal conduit thing, it was going to the
payphone, was worn off or chipped off, I could get access to the wires. So what I did was, on all
the different payphones that had that particular kind of conduit, I could get access to the wires
inside there, and I clipped small little quickly onto the payphone. Again, there's a little cap that
covers the conduit. So what I did was I unscrewed the cap, pulled the cap off, and there were the
exposing on the wires. And then I put, I made the screws tighten, loosen up where I can easily loosen
them up. All I had to do was to pull it up to the payphone, go outside, hook the conduit up,
did little clip leads, and clip leads to the cables on my pay on my car.
So then I would go back to the, and the cables would easily, easily remove, so that when I drive
away, in case I had to make quick getaway, it would just, the wires would just simply break off,
though, really easy. For quick getaways, because I knew that, I thought that maybe,
did that ever happen? Did you ever have to get away quickly?
No, but I understand from earlier court documents, from one of the experts, from one of the
witnesses that came up, that the police came literally seconds after I had left.
Wow. Wow. That was on there, especially a long time. I was on it when all kinds of tandem
stacking and experimenting around with trunks of splashing her, splashing her supervisory
signals up above the wazoo, and she had, she had to try to take the temptation not to go up there,
and try to take the call down. Wow. You know, later on, Las Gattas became
freakable without using an operator, and then I did it over on, over at Las Gattas, it was
a much better, but all Las Gattas didn't, didn't have those car phones.
I had to pull it, all I did was, I pull up to the payphone, okay, and just simply run the wire
out of my car, which was a pretty thin wire, really hard to see. I ran it along the ground,
under kind of, I'm between my, in between the two tires of the front car and ran it around,
and I kind of hit it, kind of behind the grass, and made it look, kind of make it look
into, and then those were really freak, really good because those didn't require an operator,
and I could stay on the line, and no one would know about it, because I'd be, I'd be, I'd be,
I would make the call cleanly and not cause any problems, and in Las Gattas to get on a trunk,
all you had to do is hit the foot, cook, switch, flash, roll, that's, just wipe your finger across,
switch, just like that, and trick, clock, plump, and you're right in the trunk, just like that,
so it never, it never really looked suspicious, because I was wondering about that.
Technically, no, there, it would not look suspicious at all, there was no way that any, any of
the switching could tell, because I'd, I'd demulated exactly what the switching could do,
there was just a fraction of a second there, where I dropped, where, where, where I released a
hook switch, before the local thing, before the local switch magnetism in the phone would give me
the dial tone, okay, but I mean, but the, but the, but the distant circuitry would see that
supervisory shift, where I would, you know, hang the phone up, it would see that, hang,
phone hang up sooner than the local switch would, so it would, it would then drop the local
dial tone and drop me in a trunk, instead of just drop me off locally, it was just a very,
very small little split second of time in it, you could do it right.
Well, I meant visually, they didn't, you're saying it's a very thin wire, nobody really
noticed visual. No, and I usually did it at night, and if I saw a cop car, cop car pulled up,
I'm already in the driver's seat, so I'm just, I would just start the car and pull away.
Oh, okay.
I have to play the wire would still be there, but yeah, but you could replace that.
Yeah, of course.
Now, during this time, or I guess any time, were you ever homeless and you used braking, I guess,
it was a time when I moved out of my parents place, I moved in this house with a bunch of
hippie guy, hippie people, and I was really not homeless, I would pretty much just live in my van
just for the convenience of it and all that. And so I didn't really, didn't matter to me,
whether I had a place to stay or not, other than, of course, wanting to take a shower, I could usually
do that by going home to my parents and taking a shower or go to the gym at the school because I
could go, you know, I was going to college, I could just go into the gym any time and use the
use of shower. Okay. It was open until five o'clock, it was actually open until seven o'clock
every night. So I was going there if I was not living, you know, and I had access to Stanford,
I had access to city college, I had access to the ads or gyms and they're easy to get into,
you just walk in and use a shower like you're a student, nobody ever questioned me.
Yeah, it's it's pretty easy to blend in and places where there's a lot of people like that,
I've done that. So that's what I had to freedom because that that that I didn't have to stay
home. I would go to any city I wanted to go in. You ever seen if they locked back a long time to
go back in the late 60s, late late, these there was a program called Then Came Bronson. It's on TV.
Oh, no, I didn't see that. It's about this motorcycle rider driving around in the country,
goes from place to place. He pulls up, he pulls up next to this car, this commuter guy and he says,
where are you going? I said, wherever I wind up and the guy says, I wish I were like you.
So it's like I was like I was like that guy would go from place to place. So I didn't have an address.
I didn't have a home phone. I didn't need a home phone because anytime I needed to make
own call, I would make the phone calls and I had some, I had one or two people that I knew really
well who take calls for me. There was no need for answering machines. They didn't even exist
and I didn't have one at all about six months later. It was a whole mechanical device.
It had just, you put this telephone on its little device and there were these little two fork
fingers that come underneath the hand set of the phone that lifts the thing off the phone.
There's a speaker next to your piece and then there's a magnetic coupler. You put around the
around the earpiece. Oh, okay. So you put the magnetic ring around the earpiece and just
and and and that was all it would and it would just connect to the box and it would automatically
it would detect the ring somehow and it would just pick up the phone and an audio voice would come
on the speaker into the mouthpiece of the phone saying, John's not here right now or press.
So did you have to build that or? No, this was somebody that somebody gave me. It was called
Ansa phone. A-N-S-A-F-O-N-S-A-F-O-N-E. Oh, okay. It's a full mechanical device. I got it at a
flea market actually. It paid about a hundred bucks for it. It's really cool. It's worth
about five or six hundred bucks. Oh, they were pretty expensive. Well, what about the jail time
that you spent? What was that like and and how did you survive in jail? Well, one of the first
things I had learned was before I went to jail, I had time to think about it and I met with Timothy
Larry who just gotten out of jail and he was still in the end on what jail time is like and what
you should do. And so I pretty much followed his suggestions. Pretty much this.
Find the biggest and strongest person in the jail who runs it. Find the master inmate who controls
every other inmate. There's usually one leader. He's usually a big guy, big muscular guy,
gang leader kind of person. Make, make friends with this person. And it was easy for me to make
friends with anybody in jail because everybody wanted to make free phone calls in jail. Yeah, you
have the knowledge. Right. So that's what protected me. So I got the biggest and meanest and
beefiest person in the world to kind of like protect me. And no one would give me any shit in
jail from that point on. And I just you know, I was in my room. I was busily I was busily
riding down all my notes on the phone system. And then I was sending it to my attorney as legal
mail, which they can't open. And then later on, I would later on, I would say that the tap.
Okay. So the news letter for phone freaks, it was kind of like, it was kind of like the precursor
to 2600. Yeah. Okay. So while you were in jail, I guess you taught everyone about the system.
Yeah, I had classes of retuse the in Thursday night right after, right after just right after
count. They had a seven o'clock count and right after seven o'clock count, you had two hours.
We're allowed to go after going to certain bounding. This was like a long path or a vision.
Yeah, certain boundary lines you can go to. Okay. They have the inner boundary line where you can
go between A wing and B wing. And you can go to the rec room. And were people watching or?
Well, yeah, they got, yeah, of course there was. They've always got, they got night vision people
watching. Yeah, I'm sure. And but then after that, during that, that, that was before four o'clock.
And then you had, you had the four o'clock count and then you had chow. So right before the four o'clock
count, you could go anywhere between anywhere in this big wide expansive field. And in that field,
you would have like baseball diamond and basketball courts and a running track and a park course
and all that. But after the after chow, you do want to go between A building and B building.
And then to the rec room there, I would have, I would have lessons at a certain time.
I see. And it was pretty easy to find because we'd situate ourselves in the rec rooms of the
cops couldn't hear us. And just remember, this was a minimum of security. All of us around,
they're always there. There's at least one cop in the rec room, but they're not going to listen to
what I'm saying if I'm, if I'm just sitting around at a table playing cards, somebody or playing
backgammon with somebody. And I was, we always do this over like a card game or a backgammon game.
Okay. Me talking to these guys. So they never really knew because you think after a while they
might catch on. No, no, no, everybody would protect me. Nobody would snitch on me because
they definitely wanted the information. Yeah. Were you guys actually able to use the information
while you're in jail? Oh, yeah, exactly. No, no, you can actually do it from in there.
It was pretty easy. I had a huge collection of loop round numbers. And every week I'd give out a new
loop round number to use for people to use for making calls. And in jail, the only way you can make
a call is to make a collect call. So what you do, what you do is you make a collect call
to the to the B side of a loop. Right. And then my friend is sitting on the A side of the loop
ready to accept the charges of a call. That's very clever. Go fill it to the loop round number.
So to the to the system, they could hear the audio of the person accepting.
Oh, of course. Yeah. That sounds that sounds very very good as those automatic collect call systems
have to have audio somewhere. Do you think it you think it would work today? I think I might
if you knew loop round numbers. So the trick is getting is trick is getting loop round numbers.
So they're often called cheese boxes. Often often people who do who do horse racing and stuff
like that or illegal betting would use these often. And what you do is you have two phone lines
set up that emulate the loop round number with a two way amplifier on the phone line.
So if you call one side of the phone line, it would sit there dead or it would sit there with
some type of an audio source coming out. And then when an audio source goes away when somebody calls
in, you can get notified by that. Oh. So then so then I call coming in. I go over and I pick up
the other line. I can say I know that I know what I know where the calls coming from. They call
from one place. Right. So the automatic recording will come on. Would you accept the call? Press
such and such. Yeah. Sure. I accept the call. Why not? So actually the other day I was looking
for loop round for loop numbers and I couldn't find any. The best I know you can't get them anymore.
They don't use them anymore. The best the best way is to make your own. All you need is two phone lines
and you just need to use two way line tie two way line tie. That's it really. And those are on
the end of the day. You can probably find them pretty easily. I remember the last time that I used
you want to have them you want to have them computer control. Yeah.
Take man with with this you could probably make you could probably make an incident number loop
round number by having a by using a an anastrix pdx and programming it. Okay. But I remember there
was a loop. It was about five years ago that I used to call. So I guess it's a very recent thing
that they've gotten rid of. Yeah. I would have been I would imagine so yeah. That's a shame.
Well, we had with the questions here. If you got that's where the answer to the homeless thing.
Yeah. Yeah. I was going to ask you. Well, you're in jail. I read that you actually wrote a program
for Mac. That wasn't until later. That was the second jail term. How did that come about with Apple?
Okay. Now you got the time. You got the you got the timeline right. It says here. How do you
how did I start working with Apple? Okay. I can tell you how I did that. I met Steve was the
act at the time was wasn't working for Apple. But he was at the home brew computer club.
And he built this Apple one computer. And he was he was he would be typing it in in hex.
Just before the thing he said it was 2k for integer basic. He wrote integer basic in 2k of 6502
assembly code. And it took up about 2k of memory. Wow. So it's cool. And so I met him there. We
we talked that was once a person by the way who I had met even before the home brew computer club
because he called me up. Okay. KPFA had a radio program on. And I was on the radio program.
And during the radio program I would demonstrate 10 them stacking. Wasn't yet heard the program
because this was at UCLA. This was used. This is UC Berkeley. Okay. And it was not out of your ban.
No, no, no. This is regular. It commercial. It wasn't commercial. But it was educational and station.
And I run by Stanford. I'm not. Is that what you did? It was a public service station.
Oh, okay. APFA. Okay. And so I got on a KPFA. One of the persons on KPFA invited me on.
And so yeah, I went on. And so he gave me the number to call in. And I called in from a very,
very discreet location by the way. And I demonstrated 10 them stacking. And that would do is I would
call KPFA up on their number and stack a whole bunch of tannins. And then I would hang up and they'd
get here all the chirps disconnecting. Hello. Yeah. I'm still here. Okay. I'm just listening.
Okay. Then after that. Okay. So it was, it went off pretty big. And that, that was the,
that was the thing that was heard. Was as I got to contact this guy. And all they knew was that
I worked at KPF at KKUP on Saturday night. The was found out about it from the, there was
another person that KPFA that interviewed me. But this other person, Alan, who also worked at KPFA.
New Steve Wozniak. And told Steve Wozniak that he knew, he knew of me because I told Alan that I
was working at KKUP. So Woz calls me at KKUP, KKUP, when I was on the air. And I talked to Woz.
And he says, hey, I heard you want KPFA. And I was wondering if we could get together. And,
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I just really want to meet you. And I said, well, you know,
I really got to, I really got to be kind of discreet with this. So yeah, I could probably arrange
a meeting with you. So why don't you tell me where and when you want me to meet. And I'll,
and I'll meet with you. I'm available after six any evening, but I'd prefer to do it later because
of traffic. So he said, fine. So I arranged to meet with him in the dorm room at UC Berkeley,
in the dorm room. And he had his, he had his blue box there and he asked me to show him how to use it.
And I said, well, is there, you know, I mean, what are we on here? We're on your UC Berkeley,
UC Berkeley dorm phone. He says, yeah, he says, what do you do to dial out? He says, you dial nine.
Okay, fine. Who now? How are you going to be able to, are you going to make your calls from the dorm room?
I said, that's pretty dumb thing to do. That's going to be unless you can somehow make it from
another phone somewhere else on the dorm. So what they won't, they won't recognize it as you.
Because every, every, well, every dorm had their own phone number. See, on the UC Berkeley PBX system.
Yeah, it's much better at a pay phone. Well, yeah, but it was too complex for me to tell
him how to do it from a pay phone because he didn't understand the concept of doing a data call.
Okay, you want to show him first before I will. Yeah, I wanted to show him first and it wouldn't hurt
to do it from a dorm phone because he assured me that he could tie into any of the, any, he tied me
into the, into the B box downstairs where the PBX lines come in. And so he was, he was able to find
a safe line to clomp onto. So he did that. We dialed nine to get out. We dialed 800. Remember,
I said, okay, now you send your 2600 tone here. And then it didn't work on his box because his
box had, he was using square waves for the 2600. And if you send a square wave into the phone line,
it's probably not going to be a very good thing to do because it's going to generate all kinds of
sub parmonics and, you know, all kinds of, all kinds of other superglist noises. So it took us
a while to figure out how to, how to get to get around that. So we want to have him to correctly
having to correctly do that. Hang on a minute. My other first friend's coming over once me to text him.
Okay. So let me do it real quick. If you'd like, I can go through this all quick.
What's that? I can go to music and we can come back. You can talk to me. I'm almost done. Okay.
There you go. I'll just, I'll just make music with my mouth.
Okay. We're back now. Okay. You're back. Yeah. Sorry about that. All right. I just want to say,
you have a really good ear because all I did is mute my Skype because my kids are kind of
up in a wake for some weird reason. And all I did was mute my Skype and you thought that the call
had dropped. And I don't know. You must have like magic ear. There is, there is an ambient background
noise you usually get when there's a Skype call from the microphone noise, things in the background,
even like a small fan motor running. And just ambient noise in a room. That microphone can
pick that stuff up. And when you mute that microphone, you're disconnecting from that ambient noise.
And I felt I, I can sense a very small change in that background noise. Okay. Let's go on with my
question here. Okay. Okay. Sorry about teaching. We're sorry about Apple. Sorry about Apple.
Yeah. Okay. We were teaching him. So the next thing. Yeah. After I taught him about boxing,
about several years past, and I was, I had a job working at call computer. And this was
during the microprocessor age. I went to several homebrew computer club meetings. And I figured,
and I knew right away if there was a need for somebody to have an assembler to write assembly
language instructions using op codes, rather than using the, rather than remembering what the
hex code is for the number. So I wrote a, wrote an assembler across assembler. It was written in
basic. It was working on call computer, which is a BTI basic system. I did one for the, I did one
for the 6800, one for the 8080. And then Randy Wigginton then did the 6502 because he was
working with WAS. And WAS needed this 6502. So I didn't have time to do it because I was working
somewhere else. So he took off, he took the task of doing it. Then that 6502 assembler code
was what WAS used. And that same code that print out, you get in the, in the famous red book,
when Apple first came out, they published a documentation, a document called the red book.
In the back of the red book was a 6502 assembler language source code for the monitor ROM.
Apple, you know, WAS is an open source guy. He wants everybody to know, it wants the computer to be
totally open, so people can dabble with it and play with it. And so he actually wrote the
monitor ROM codes. You could understand how to, how to talk to the, how to talk to the IO and
stuff. You have to poke into certain memory locations and things to happen.
And so that was how, that's what I meant WAS. So I worked with WAS, and then after a while,
I went to, then I went to the, to my first, my first sentencing. I got sent to that point.
And then I had to go to, I had to go to Lampock. But when I returned from Lampock,
at that time WAS had already gotten the Apple 2 done. And so I got immediately hooked up
back with WAS on the Apple 2. And WAS asked me, do you ask me what, if I could make a phone
interface board? And I said, sure, why not? That'd be a cool thing to do. So I designed the
phone interface board around certain kind of digital switches, analog switches, and stuff like
that would switch on and off the phone, and relay. It had a couple relay, isn't it, stuff like
that. And you could then, and then I had it set up so that you could, if you poke a certain
memory location on the Apple, the relay would click, it would drop off and get you a dial tone.
And if you poke the, if you poke an adjacent memory location, the dial tone would go,
it would disconnect from the phone line. And then I had a little audio amplifier set up,
so that, so that you could pass audio from the board itself, because they had to have a touch
tone generator. So I, I am, I, I did the tones in software. I made all the tones in software.
By, uh, making the sixty-five or two, so the Apple two would actually make the tones in software.
And then the, even the, the touch tones and the dial tones, all the, the dial tone detection
was using a phase lock loop, a program of a phase lock loop that I could use to detect the dial
tone. I looked for the major frequency in the dial tone for two phase lock loops. And we went,
one tone, and the dial tones went 400 and some 480 and 360, something like that.
So I would take those two tones and, and program the, the, the programmable, uh,
phase lock loop lock onto those two tones. So when it, so when it would hear those two tones
from the little amplifier down the board, then you would know that they picked up the phone and
the other end had a dial tone on the other end. And then I figured out how to detect ringing and
busy and touch difference between a ring and the busy. And these were little simple sixty-five
or two sub sub-routine, so they had used. Okay. But something in the A register. And it's something in
the, uh, something in the X register, it's something in the Y register. And then you, you made a call
to a certain memory location, call minus something or other minus 256, whatever it is. And you,
and you call a, you, that goes to the assembly language routine and you go out and talk to the
board and pick up the line and stuff. Later on, a couple of, it did an integer basic. But I made
the call standardized so they could just do it with integer basic or with just regular, you could
go, I did it and I did it at sixty-five or two and then I did it and integer basic was easier.
Now, um, then you went on to, uh, write a program while you were in jail for Apple.
Uh, I didn't write the program for Apple. I wrote a word processor program. Yeah.
Uh, that was when I got sent to the work, work furlough program and they would let me out during
the daytime to go, go to a job. Mm-hmm. And then at nighttime, I'd go back to jail after five,
thirty. I'd have to report back to jail before six. And I was given a certain amount of time to
get back into the, into the jail was allowed to stop off anywhere and go to the store. I was only
allowed to go directly to and from work and they would follow me and, you know, they did follow me.
I can tell you that. They do follow you. They do, they do keep close tabs on you for sure.
And there was one time when, when I got a flat tire on my way back to work.
And, uh, I got it fixed before, I got it fixed in enough time to go back and not miss my curfew.
Well, they, they would know that you had a flat tire though. They, they did it. They told me the next day,
they told me the next day, they saw me out there changing the tire. Oh, okay.
Uh, can we go ahead and go to, to a music break for about five minutes? Do you mind holding on?
Yeah. Can you do the right? Yeah, sure. Okay.
As long as I get to you with the music. Okay. Uh, I don't think you want to do that. I still think
you'll be able to hear the music. That's okay. What, what are you playing? Um, I'm going to play,
let me look at what it is. Um, well, actually, what I can do, I can play new edition Mr.
Telephone, man. Do you like that song? Sure. Why not?
You know, listeners like it. Sure. Oh, I'm, I'm sure they pretty much don't have a choice.
Sometimes I play backstreet boys for them. Whatever that song. So,
that's fine. I'll be right here. All right. Thank you. Yeah. Okay. And now, now we are back.
And I'm still with Captain Crunch. I want to thank everyone for holding on.
Now, we were talking about, um, I think we've covered just about everything pretty soon.
Oh, I'm not the right easy writer. Um, uh, I basically wrote easy writer when I was in jail.
I had, okay, here's how that worked out. That worked out quite well. I was really amazed I was
able to pull that off and get away with it. Uh, I needed, I couldn't find, I couldn't, of course,
you know, I was, since the work and I had to, of course, find a job.
And if I didn't find a job, I would have to stay at the work furlough program all the time.
And from there, try to find a job. Oh, okay. Didn't have a job. He had to. So they would,
yeah, so I had to find a job. So what I did was I found a, quote, unquote job. The job was
working for receiving studios. Receiving studios was nothing more than a practice space for the
bunch of Berkeley hippie band, band players who had this nice big practice space.
And on the front door, it says receiving. And that's why they call it receiving studios.
I got to know them from many, many years ago. Uh, they asked me to help them build a mixer
board for their recording studio. I had, I've always been able to help them out with their
computer work and stuff like that. And they, they were reciprocated by allowing me to so-called,
unquote, work for them. And they would vouch for me. So what happened was they had letter
head already set up on there. And they wrote a letter. They basically had to write a letter
as an employer at the right letter to the work furlough program saying, we're hiring this person.
We agree with your terms. Because I had, I had basically, I was required to give my employer
that list of things I wasn't supposed to do. It was all that I was supposed to go out. It wasn't
supposed to go anywhere. I was supposed to stay in the work site or in the work area where I,
I could leave the work area as long as it had to do with work site, which means I could go off
site. That was cool. I was even allowed to go to the west coast computer fair.
Okay. Today. Because it was considered work. Exactly. So all I had to do was just
basically let them know if I, it all I had to do is call them up and tell them where I was going
and when I was going and when I was coming back. Mm-hmm. It sounds like boarding school to me.
From what I was doing. But it was. It was almost boarding school except they kept a really close
eye on you. Yeah. They didn't really keep a close eye on me. I got an all sorts of trouble.
Anyway, so what happened was basically they have, they also had a commercial checking account.
So I would get, I would ever I would find work from, I had, I had money coming in from some
sources and I would take that money coming in and pay it to receiving studios because then they
could then pay me back that money by writing a check on with the receiving studios name on it as
my paycheck. That's what I was wondering. I told them that this was how I get paid and I,
it was a job getting paid $650 a month. Oh, okay. Which at the time was probably a pretty good,
a pretty good, yeah. Sounds like a good gig. It was, it was basically entry-level programming
wage roughly at that time. Okay. And so I told them those programming computers and all that and
I told I asked to work for a lot of program. Can I take some of my listings home with me so that I
can study more. They said fine. So after, after every work day, I would take a heart, I would take
and print out the entire source listing of Easy Rider. I was written in fourth by the way.
I would take it back to the dorm with me, back to the jail with me and I would go over it with a
fine tooth comb. I would draw a stack diagram for it to be word. I'd print it out double spacing
to have enough room for the stack diagram. And then I would mark up the sheet of paper. I would
test it out. I would test it out by visually running the running code visually as if I was a computer.
And I found all kinds of errors and mistakes and wrote down changes on the source listing
described on the source listing what the changes were. And if it was too much to change to fit in,
then I would draw a one or two or a three with a circle around it. And that would refer to an
external page. And that external page would have the code on it that I'd have to put in.
At this point, you are really hoping for a word processor.
No, I was writing the first product. Yeah, that was kind of a joke.
And it worked very, very well. It was actually the ideal programming situation anybody could ever have.
It allowed me to get away from the computer and gather my thoughts and figure out what to do.
It worked out really well for me. It was amazingly done. So then when I went back, I took the code.
I re-typed in the changes to it and then I ran it through a debugger and I stepped through the
single step and looking at the stack as I was stepping to the code. And I was very careful to
get all the little pieces working correctly. And so that was how I worked. It worked out quite well,
actually. I designed it in such a way that I separated the display and the keyboard functions
from the machine itself. So then I could do it on other machines and using the
transportability of fourth, because it was a very transportable language to work at another
machine. So my plan was to do it on a CPM machine or also on another machine. It turned out to
have IBM beat me to it. And they wanted it on their PCs. And so the EasyWriter was really
taken off. Good. We made number two in the soft socket parade as the word processor to get.
And IBM people were sneaking around looking for the best people to do a word processor.
They snuck into the our publisher without me knowing about it.
Oh, wow. It got a demo of EasyWriter with the with the appropriate people and they liked it.
And it said, well, what will it take them to port this to our new,
went our new computer that we had to be? If you bill it already signed the non-disclosure,
but I hadn't signed it yet. So bill was bill said, well, I don't know how much, but what it's
going to take for John to get this on for our programmers. He called it our programmers.
Got IBM. And IBM culture, it's no one person writing a program. It's like 20 people writing a
program. Okay. So that's IBM's train of thought, you know. That's they thought it would probably
take 20 programmers a year to do it. Well, it only took you to do it. Bill made a quote to say
six months and they accepted that. They basically, they basically worked out some milestones.
milestone number one was the port, the port, the port fourth to the IBM PC.
milestone number two was to port the editor on to the IBM PC without the printer system,
subsystem. And then, and then milestone number three was the file system on there.
And milestone number four was a print subsystem to get the printer to working.
So these were the four milestones that we had to go by and bill it all worked it out,
how long it will take and bill consulted with me without telling me, by the way,
this is by the way, when we went, he says, he only told me that it was going to be on an 8080 and
the 8086. It's all I knew. Okay. So I says, how long will it take? I says, well, bill, I got a
port at the 8086. There is a fourth source available for the 8086 already. I can take that and I
could put it onto the onto onto this machine. I says, what's the machine? He says, I won't tell
you yet, but I will tell you it's an 8086. So I did some swooping around and I found out that
there was an 8086 machine that I could buy that I had 8086 on it and it had Seattle computer
products doss on it. And so I bought the machine because we had the money to do it and then I
went out and hired an 8086 programmer and he helped me get forth running on the machine. So we
ported the fourth over by taking the actual assembly language of the fourth and we converted it into
fourth assembly language and then we took that and then we put it onto the machine in binary.
So then we made a bin hex file of it out of that dot ATX file out of it and which was way of
getting binary data that's with from a text source in the binary into the machine. Oh, okay.
So it's using hexadecimal stuff. Okay. So let's see, what are you currently working on right now?
What's your big project? I think I saw something on Facebook today.
Well, right now my biggest and my major major problem, major major thing I know I'm spending about
95% of my time healing myself. Oh, okay. Yeah, most unfortunate situation when I was at DEFCON,
some douchebag in DEFCON, grab, pull down on my neck really hard. I mean it was a friendly gesture
and all, but he was pretty, pretty rough on me. Was this just last year? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay.
He broke something. Oh. And so I had it with a doctor, the doctor didn't have an MRI and I found
out that the vertebrae was misplaced by about three millimeters. Oh, wow. And I was pinching my,
pinching my root nerve in my spinal cord and it was and those were the nasty nerves and they
went out on the, it went out on the root nerves for my hands and arms only. Gosh, that's the
most unfortunate. Almost my, my hands started getting numb. Wow. After four days, it started
getting hard to type and then I had to go to the doctor and then I saw the surgeon and then I was
investigating and the scopic treatments, which were noninvasive, but I found out later on that I
had to have surgery because the vertebrae's themselves were displaced and it could just clear
out the root canal. I had to clear out all that other stuff. I would, I don't want to call it a
root canal because you're going to associate that with teeth. So I would call that a, I would call
that a little groove inside your spinal cord where the root nerves come out that could go down to
your arms and hands. I did a lot of research and body anatomy. I studied up on the particular
thing it's called RSD. It's called reflexive, sympathetic dystrophy. Google it if you want.
And it's called an initial trigger was that pinch nerve. Once that happens, there's no cure, okay?
The only thing that can make that better is physical therapy and physical therapy can maybe fix it,
maybe some part of the time, but it's going to be permanent. I'm going to be permanently fucked by
this. Oh, man. Just by some guy giving you a really, really bad note. He's very up on me. He's
overweight, very heavy. Put a full weight on my neck. Nothing I could do but collapse and drop
down and try to take the weight off as quick as possible, but it was too late. I just can't believe
it only affected, you know, your, your fingers and your arms, like the most important pieces for
a program. For your body anatomy. Look at the herb diagrams. You'll see that the nerve diagrams
go from the C4, C5 vertebrae, the interface between the C4, C5 down through your hands and arms.
And that was, there was a big spur right there. There was pinching that nerve. There was no,
there was no way there was, there was, there was so much pressure on the nerve that was just
going completely berserk. It's like a short circuit, basically. And so the brain saw that short
circuit tried to patch around it, but then that did, that did permanent damage because once that
happened, there was, wouldn't go back to the original nerve signals. The only way to make that
happen is to pick a better neuron connection between the brain and the muscles by using physical
therapy and kinesiology and other forms of healing techniques that have been, that are known to
fix this in previous patients. So what did you do about it? Well, of course, I saw the doctor
about it and did a lot of research on it. I spent a lot of time researching the web. I went to
many, many, I read many, many papers on it. I read many, many, many, many medical journals on it.
I had to get my Latin English, I had a medical Latin English website that I could go to to help me
translate the words from Latin in English. Oh, yeah, terminology. So because they were all using
Latin. And so I had to figure that out. I learned a lot of Latin in the process. Yeah, medical
terminology is full of that. Oh, there's also legal terminology also using Latin. So yeah,
it helps you in both situations. Pick myself and I'm learning that language in school,
even though nobody's spoken at the time. Yeah. Except the people at the Vatican. So
Okay, back to my, going back to my current situation is that I'm not really doing anything right
now, except I'm planning to set up a consortium of people to solve five basic, right? You had
surgery? Oh, I had surgery. Yes, I had it on the 21st of December. Surgery was over almost,
it's the pain went away. Wow. On the hand, my hands, except the residual pain was still there.
So you can think of the pain dropping from like a 9 or a 10 down to a number 2 or a 3.
You were relieved. Yeah, big time. Yeah, it didn't matter that I hurt a little bit.
I had to be very careful about how I moved. I had to wear a neck brace. I couldn't drive.
I had to wear a neck brace for two or three weeks after that. I could take it off.
After about another two or three weeks, I sort of proved me to drive, but I had to be really careful
not to turn my head. So they operated on your vertebrae, and it fixed your hands?
Well, yeah, of course. Yeah, that's very good.
After they did the surgery, all that pain sort of went away, but I was going to say what's
going to say? Well, you're working on a book or a movie or something. Yeah, I'm working on
my book. I'm just working on the timeline right now. In order to write a biography,
you have to write a timeline. Timeline is basically a date and who I met, what I did,
where I went. Right. So it's person location and what I did, person location, what I did.
Chronologically down the line. Okay, that should be really interesting when that comes out.
That's what Excel is good for. Then I could sort by name and sort by date.
I see. Well, I hope that goes well. I know your surgery and your injury probably delayed that
a little bit. Well, I'm just not getting excited to pack my first meeting with my co-author in
minutes. You do over here like now. Okay. Well, do you mind if do you have anything else you
need to talk about or do you mind? Let's see what we got other questions here. What I'm with the
music I listen to. I like to listen to psychedelic trance, house music, techno, when I'm dancing,
when I'm doing my yoga and the quiet exercises I listen to a station called Groove's Kitchen or
Groove Salad. It's on Somal FM. It's on the internet. Oh, okay. What kind of music did you
play when you were doing your private radio thing? Mostly just rock and underground rock. If it was not
played on Castile and all the other stations, I would play it. Oh, I see. I would play what they
don't play on the commercial radio stations. So do you have a favorite TV show that you watch right
now? I'm getting to that. Oh, yeah. TV show. Well, when it's on, I definitely want to catch
survivor. I'm a survivor panda. My favorite. I like to watch a lot of documentaries. One of my
most favorite TV programs and it's kind of a wake repper was called the hang on a minute. So I have
it right here. I just look it up. Hang on just a sec. Oh, okay. I'm looking for it. Um,
it is called. Well, I want people, I want to people know about it. Well, if this were
jeopardy, it's called profits of doom. Oh, okay. Watch it on the internet. Is that like some sort of
religious thing? No, what it is? What it is? There are four, there are five basic experts. One
person is an expert in food and maintaining sustainability and how people can get food in the
future. If the energy grid collapses, how people are going to generate energy? Okay. If we lose
our gas pipeline, how stores are going to get their food? It's a survival. It's the guys talk
about really interesting stuff about what you can do to basically locally among yourself and your
family or your close neighborhood can get together and maybe grow gardens for food. I have,
I have an expert already online who is an expert in water purification systems.
Uh, I have, I have, uh, I'm really doing heavy duty research in a battery technology.
And Stanford, not Stanford, but MIT has done some amazing work in, in the, in the field of
nanotechnology and they came to have a battery that they can do that has six times the normal
battery capacity of lithium ion battery. They can electric cars more feasible. Now you can drive
from Las Vegas to now you can drive from LA to San Francisco on the single charge. Wow. Okay.
I still wouldn't want to have other things. Other things we're talking about also is the, uh,
is how, uh, how general motors should get out of the car making business and get it to the
battery making business and lease their batteries instead of rent them or people buy them.
And that would reduce the cost of electric car by ten thousand dollars instead of paying
virus eight or instead of, I'm sorry, instead of paying 20 to 30 thousand dollars for your
volt, you lease the battery instead of buying it. And now what you're doing is you're,
is you're, is you're saving the money on buying the car. You're not only, the battery is not owned
by you. The battery is owned by general motors. So then general motors and you have a leasing
arrangement with a battery. So you pay general motors up a monthly fee or use of a battery,
but once you have that battery at battery's guaranteed to the life of the car. So if you have a
problem with it, by the way, the biggest problem electric vehicles is one or two years you have to
replace that battery. It's ten thousand dollars. Oh, shit. That's about the price of what your car
would be worth probably. Yeah, probably. My idea is, is that they're leasing fee. Now that means
it could go up to any participating service station and replace the battery. So now you can drive
across country in your electric car. If you have, if you can know which gas stations have leasing
arrangements with your, with your, with your car, make a model, then you can drive into a,
into a service station and then you get the battery out. You pay at exchange fee and off you go
and you're off on another three or four hundred miles. It's, it's, it's much like how they do
propane paints right now. Exactly. Exactly. That's a great idea. These are the ideas that we're
trying to nurture in our, in our, in our brain incubator, you know, our computer of ideas.
Well, we don't have our website up yet or we have our URL. We're keeping it a secret.
So there's what people can do. They can go to my website and no, they can go to my Facebook site,
Facebook dot com slash JD crunch man. It goes there and go to my wall and they can read my status
on the wall. There is where you're going to catch the latest scoop on what I'm doing and when I'm
doing it, where I'm doing it, I Twitter a lot, but I don't usually don't Twitter. I don't usually
tweet my locations. Yeah. Excuse me a second. I gotta take this one. Well, would you like to go to
music and come back and people can ask you questions? Yeah, go to music. We'll see you in about five.
Okay. Okay. Okay. We, we are back and we're back with Captain Crunch. We're going to take
calls in about five minutes. We just wanted to finish up a topic about the consortium.
We're interrupted by a phone call. Sorry about that guys. So anyway, here's here's basically what
I want to do and this is what I want to let you guys know out there. No, there are so many things
you could do with very little costs to help help your family and yourself maintain sustainability.
You can also make money on this if you're if you are really cool and if you have maybe access
to a hacker space that you can build stuff. Okay. Visualize this. Okay. How many people in law,
how many people go to Las Vegas and they find they want to find a shady place to park their car.
It's always a problem. It's always hot and sunny there. All the way. I have to take with you a
big different with you because I was in Vegas yesterday and was freezing cold. Well, there's a
little little cold front coming through. Yeah. So the idea is is why not have a car shade, shade your
car that was solar panels on top of it. You can now plug into your car, charge your car batteries
while you're gambling or while you're shopping where you're taking in a movie while you're at work
or whatever. They pull into a car shade. These car shades only be made available to people with
electric cars. They pull their car into the car shade and they plug their car in and the sun
now shines and generates electricity that can put a charge in your car. It's not going to fully
charge your car because it takes how it takes acres and acres of solar panels to charge your car
really fast. But if you're there for two or three hours, maybe four hours, heck, that'll probably put
anywhere between five and 15% of charge on your car better than nothing. Yeah.
That charge on your car is a charge you don't have to suck out of your wall socket when you get home.
Well, it adds up to. Absolutely. It can add up. That's just one very simple project that
somebody can do. It probably wouldn't take more than a thousand dollars worth of parts and PVC
piping and plus the cost of the solar panels. You can probably build one of these things very
quickly. It could probably make your own car port. I don't know whether you could have to do that
without a construction permit or not. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Okay. Anyway, so that's that's
one item. Many other items. Let's get on with the questions. Let's get on to the questions.
Anybody can call now. You might have to keep it concise because I don't know how much time
Captain Crunch has, but the phone number is 484-240-4050 and I'm going to try to take as many calls as
I can. I call her here on the air. Oh, hi. My name is Chris Tomkinson. Is it my on the air or
what? Yes. Yes. We can hear you. Oh my god. Yeah. It was sudden. My Skype actually woke up. Did you
actually conference me on on Skype? I called in on Skype. It's my fault. Oh, so you're,
don't know. You're cool. You're cool. Well, please. I can hang up. I'm sorry. No, don't worry about it.
Please to meet you. I hear you fine and that's what counts, right? Okay. Okay. Now. So what's your
question? I actually have two if that's all right. I want to know like, like, you know, hackers are
known for like doing pranks and stuff. So what's the last really awesome prank you did? Or like any
of that? I see it. Or a trick or something. I can remember a long time ago when Waz pulled a
prank on me. I wanted to get even with Waz. So that a party was had this big and big dish antenna
who's going to pick up satellite TV. So I built a gun diode. I don't know whether you're
familiar with a gun diode, but a gun diode and microwaves don't go don't get along together if you
don't use them right. And all I did was put this tiny little thing on his on his and a wiped out
a satellite TV reception for a few minutes just enough to get him pissed off. That's awesome.
What's it is? Hello, Ellie. Can I can I ask one other question? Yeah, yeah, big quick. Okay,
are you going to leave things out of your book for legal reasons or like? No, I'm not. No, no, no, no.
There's no there's no restriction on the book. I'm going to be going to be open about it. I'm
going to talk about any. I'm going to talk about all the gory secrets I've ever done. There's no
reason at all why I should keep it keep for why I should not put this information in their
legal reasons. There is nothing in that book. Because remember the time that books a lot about
phone freaking, but it's also about me. It's a life of about my life. And it's about how I was born
and what I was high was raised and and my trials and tribulation as a kid. What I did when I was
a kid. A lot of that's going to be about the technical part of the book will be totally free and
open. I have no restrictions about what I can say because I don't think that there would be any
legal problem at all with me saying anything I want about my did about what I did. Has it has
been long enough since you've been freaking absolutely. I mean there's there's a statute of
limitations involved as well. I'm probably protected by that as well. But there's nothing that I could
say. Number one, because a system that I work on does not exist anymore. It's totally irrelevant.
It's just totally like a mood point. Why should I not talk about something that doesn't exist?
Why I'm calling in on a blue box with through seven loops by satellite. No, you're not. You're just
kidding. You know how I can tell. No, I can tell because I can tell from the microwave.
Because you're the fucking captain. That's right.
Castle. Oh, okay. What just one. Oh, come on, Chris. Tomkinson.
Why doesn't snow plow rhyme?
Stop on plow. Let somebody else call in. No plow.
Chris, Tomkinson, we've gone through we've gone over this before.
We need to call a show. They're still the same. You don't get it.
I'm sorry, Captain Crunch. That's that's actually common caller we have on our show.
Nice. Well done. He's a bit of a troublemaker. I was giving him a chance, though.
Okay, I have somebody calling here as well.
On the phone? Yeah. Oh, on the on Skype.
Caller. Okay, let me pause my radio. Oh, my goodness.
Lou. Yes, go ahead, caller. What's your name?
My name is Chris. I'm not going to say my last name.
Okay. Okay. You don't have to. You can call yourself Tomkinson, or see money.
Okay. What is your question? See bucks.
Okay. So I wanted to know if you know if you talked to the steves anymore.
Okay. Yeah. I talked to Steve was quite a few times.
I had a need to call him last week to ask him a question about the Mac.
And some new Macs that were coming out and whether or not they had certain things on it.
He didn't know because he was kind of out of the loop there.
Uh, as far as Steve Jobs goes, I don't believe that Steve Jobs will ever want to talk to me again.
Why would happen? I don't think that, uh, that I rate enough clout to deserve his attention
because he's so rich and famous. And besides that right now, he's on his medical sabbatical,
and he has his own problems to deal with right now. Yes, he has to respect that too.
So I even before his medical leave, I'm sure that he would have a lot more important people
to talk to than me. Yeah. Steve Jobs was a douchebag. And, you know, I'm not going to say that
he's a douchebag. It's just that I haven't talked to him. It don't, it don't be so down on yourself.
I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't trust him.
Do you have any other questions, uh, Steve Jobs? I was fighting in that turtle neck.
Yeah, that's his classic trademark, his turtle neck.
Thanks. Thanks for the call, Seba. Yeah, I didn't say I was done.
Ah, you can call one more. You can ask, uh, actually, I have another caller calling.
Uh, well, can I, can I just listen? Yes.
And I'm sorry. It's okay. I'm not here. All right. Uh, hello, caller.
Hello. Yes. Go ahead with your question. We're with Captain Crunch.
And see my name. Yeah. Hey, man, I met you at Defcon, dude. I give you that big old hug and broke you back.
You're fucking rock. I wish if you man.
All right. That obviously, obviously, he didn't want to stay on long because if he did,
the first question I was going to ask him was how to contact him.
Right. Because he owes you a bunch of money. Yeah. So my attorney will contact him.
Well, I have a question that comes from actually a guy that goes to my tombstone. He can't call in.
But he's, uh, give him your phone number. Whatever you do.
Yeah. He said, uh, over the years, did you experiment with cellular phones?
What is your prediction for the future? Will it be harder to freak?
Or will there be new ways to freak if the old ways die out?
So basically he's asking, uh, what does this new technology mean for freaking?
Okay. If you get right now, when you get into new technology here,
this is probably going to be where you're going to leave me because let me explain.
Cell phones came out in the, uh, very early 80s.
I got experienced with a cell phone I think was in 1980, 81.
I went and visited somebody in Chicago who had a cell phone in his car.
And he actually had a BBS system hooked up to his car, a computer with an inverter,
who's the only mobile BBS system.
Oh wow.
He worked for a cellular phone company so he doesn't have to worry about minutes.
And he, and that was the first ever, uh, exposure I had to a cell phone.
Now in 1980 was when I stopped blue boxing.
I actually stopped blue boxing actually in 1978 was the last blue box call I ever made.
Why is that?
Well, it was really risky.
And in 1979, I started Captain Software and I, and then I had to go to the work furlough
program. That was where I had worked in my work, you know, so it was right around the work
furlough program that I, before the work furlough program, I might have made one or two.
But back then, more and more systems were blocking blue boxes.
In other words, it was not possible to whistle it off anymore because we're all going to go to
CCIS, uh, inter CCIS out of band signaling, and I'd say 80% of the network was already out of
band by the time I stopped. And I felt that by doing it anymore, it'd be a great risk to me.
And, uh, so I just stopped doing it at that point.
I think that was, that was in 1970, on 1980, then cell phones came out.
I never had a cell phone so I really didn't have a way of baking cell phones.
They were very expensive at the time. My first cell phone was a cell phone in my car.
Portable pocket sized cell phones were not available at the time.
The only cell phone that was available was what they called the brick.
It was a motor roll of brick. And that was the first portable cell phone I've seen.
And those things are more than a thousand dollars and a contract on these suckers were $250
a month. So it was not really feasible or cost effective for me to have or own a brick.
So, once I did an own a phone, I had no desire to try to hack it because it's no opportunity
to do so. In order that I know of any hacker who actually worked on this cell phone,
the network could give me enough information to where I could use to really hack the system.
And then later on, they started cloning phones and they had a code for the phones,
not a clone the phones. And there was all these different ways and do it.
Each phone had its own way of going in and changing the idea of the phone.
So, by that time, I just lost interest. I mean, that wasn't interested in freaking after 1980.
Oh, okay. So, you pretty much 1980 was pretty much the end of freaking for you.
Yeah, because I was working with Easy Rider. I was very busy with making money on Easy Rider
and developing it and developing the Windows. I mean, I'd be on PC version of it.
And so, I was very busy, so I didn't have much time. In fact, there was a time during the time I was
working on Easy Rider when I was not at the work furlough program. I'd go to sleep every other night.
So, I was pulling all nighter every other night.
Thank you, Steve, I was calling in. Thanks.
I have a, so pretty much you haven't experimented with the cellular technology that much.
So, I met and talked with a bunch of people who kind of used to work for it.
Had a few people who worked for the system. I wasn't that familiar with it.
Although, I could get technical journals on it. I had access to the technical journals out of
about how it worked and how it all worked and all that, you know, manuals and stuff.
Not on the cell phones of cells, but descriptions on how the cellular network worked in general.
Without that, you can't do anything. There's a lot of fundamental written stuff about that.
And it's not readily available, too. You have to get it. You have to get it through, you know,
all kinds of nefarious sources.
I see. Now, somebody asked me a question in the chat room.
SIGFLAB, SIGFLAB asked me a question, but I don't see it anymore.
So, if somebody remembers that or if I don't think SIGFLAB is in the chat room anymore.
You can't scroll after something.
Yeah, I can't seem to find it. So, if anybody can see that, just go ahead and copy and paste
that for me. From the chat room, Gunner is asking, do you have any, oh wait, somebody's
somebody's calling. Hold on a second. Call her. You're on the air.
Hello. Hi. Hi. I want to know Mr. Crunch. If you've ever done any mad hacks in Canada.
Mad hacks in Canada. Now, I went to Canada back during the early days when Van Coover.
Oh, hold on a second, SIGFLAB. Sorry. Go ahead, Captain.
I went to Canada very early on in my days of blue boxing. And just before going into Canada,
I ran across a, it's called Blaine Washington. It's the last city you go to before crossing the
border into Canada. And Blaine Washington had the most strange response system ever.
But once I got into Canada, my biggest problem was I did, there were no 800 numbers in Canada.
But I could call 5551212 numbers and blow them off and make a call using a blue box in Canada.
It was the same system as North American system. And that was pretty much the extent of my
Canadian freaking other than, of course, getting into the 604 trunk and single frequency.
Because back before they upgraded their 604 area code exchange,
they had an old step exchange in there. And you could dial out. That was where the famous 2111
conference was. They had a bunch of test codes. And once you dropped into that special trunk,
you had the single frequency 01 that would drop you into another trunk. And then you had the
single frequency, the number you wanted to call. And that was how we got into it through mostly that.
So once you dropped into the trunk, you could then dial 21111 and get into a conference.
There was no limit to how many people could get on it, limited only by the number of trunk lines
going into Canada. They had another interesting number, 1121 or 1211. I'm not sure which one was.
And it would say, a little recording of this says, 5 cents, ding, 10 cents, ding, ding, order,
gong. And basically an operator's training tape, operators would understand the recognition of
the signals going into the phone when you made calls from payphones. And I thought that was pretty
funny. There are all kinds of other test numbers in there too. They had a lot of really useful
features. I remember reading that in the Esquire article. Anybody wants to look that up online.
I think it's linked on your website. Captain Crunch. Yeah. I think there's a link to the web.
Okay. I have one more question. Yeah. Yeah. Why don't be and head. Thank you. Thank you, Samantha.
My name is Christine. Oh, I mean Christine. I'm sorry. I'm good. Thank you. Thanks for your questions.
All right. It's like fuck. I'm coming on you guys. Please be a little more serious with your
questions. My time here is limited. Do you hear the really one? I really want to ask questions.
I'm sorry. If you need to go, just let us know. No, I'm okay. My friend has arrived yet.
Even if he does, I can continue on for a few more minutes. So we're cool. Let us know if you need
to break or anything. Yeah, we're cool. We have only 30 minutes left. Okay. Okay. It's safe.
Okay. So my question was how you were introduced to the opponent and how you originally got onto it.
Oh, that's an interesting question. I've never had that question before, but let me answer it.
Okay. Well, I ran across this online service from the INR Vermichigan called Mnet.
It was a BBS system running Pico span. And they had use net. Okay. So I was able to send the message to
IHNP4.ATT.Apple, you know what I mean? Through that news group. And that was how I was able to
get on. They had dot commands instead of that commands for email addresses.
Yeah, it's okay. And from there, from there, then I ran across another service which had the
same Pico span, which was a local call for me. And I'm much better and bigger and more powerful
system called the Well, W-E-L-L. It stands for whole reflectronically. Well.com. There still exists
today. And I got an account on the well. In fact, it was very interesting. Now that you mentioned it,
I got kicked off the well because somebody, some dickheads, subscribed me to more than 6,000
mailing lists. And then the mailing list, the major domos of these mailing lists would not
verify who it was that they would not verify that this was a subscription request.
They would just accept the request outright without giving you an opportunity to cancel out of it.
So I started getting zillions and zillions of messages that was clogging up the wells, clogging
up my mailbox in the well, running huge, humongous amounts of storage that I had to pay for.
Well, so I got into a fallout with the well and they said, I can't pay that. It wasn't my fault.
Somebody subscribed me to all these mailing lists. Why should I have to pay for storage? Why can't you
deny the bill or cancel the bill out? Because why should I pay it? I got into that kind of a thing
with me. And I had a free account with them anyway. The only thing is I had to pay for storage.
I'm glad we have Gmail now. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And unsubscribing.
Yeah, right. Oh, well, here's the thing about that. You can't subscribe another person to a mailing
list because what happens is the major domo will mail back a confirmation message saying that
you just now subscribe to a mailing list. Do you accept this subscription? And we have to say yes or no.
So they fixed that pretty darn quick. It's good. Because they subscribed to Whitehouse.gov
to many, many mailing lists as well. That caused a bit of a problem. So would the government
have an issue they'll resolve it? Well, actually, I actually the Secret Service contacted me to ask
me about this. Whether I knew anything about it, I said, yeah, because they saw me on there as well.
And so they contacted me because it was a message that I found in all the resilience of messages.
How I found that I don't know. I told them, yeah, I'm also having a problem. What can I do for you?
It says, well, keep track of all these messages coming in and let us know if there's any more
coming in. And I said, yeah, sure, no problem. And he said they would try to put a stop to it.
I don't know whether they did or not. I changed my email address and that fixed that problem.
Yeah. Yeah. Do you have any additional questions for him?
No, no, not really. Perhaps I would probably be a little bit curious as to what sort of modems
you're using at time or using a teletype or what you're actually using to connect.
I was using a DCA compatible 2400 God modem.
Okay. All right. Well, thank you.
Thanks a lot. And I believe calling.
Yeah. And I believe Mnet that Arbornet is still still around.
Wow. That's really amazing. Do you know who runs it now?
No, I don't know who runs it. I know I have an account on it. It's probably been cancelled
sometimes. I have no ideas. Yeah. What if I account still exists?
All right. Well, thank you.
Thanks a lot for listening.
Bye. Bye.
And we have another caller on the line. Go ahead with your question.
I'm always going to ask, do you think you've always been kind of attracted to counterculture
or kind of breaking the rules that exist? Or do you think it's just out of your curiosity
by exploring things you ended up kind of breaking rules and running into the law,
stuff like that? I think it was pretty much both. I mean, I've always been somewhat
attracted by the counterculture. I got discharged out of the Air Force in 1968,
right? I've read about the time Woodstock came out. Woodstock inspired me to get caught,
but get to know a lot of these hippie freaky people, which I found pretty interesting people
to be very smart, even though they probably did drugs and turned me on to smoking pot and all that
stuff. But heck, you know, these people did have regular jobs. And some of them, of course,
were feral people. Most of the time they were reasonably well-abiding assistants,
but they would just not, they would, they would, of course, smoke pot, and they thought that
that should be legalized anyway, so. And, you know, the pot probably... Yeah, inside with the rainbow
gatherings and stuff like that, you know. But I mean, do you think that you ran into the law
because of curiosity that you were just going along or... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, curiosity was
definitely a major part of it. Curiosity and my inability to tell, in my inability to detect
a snitch, basically. Oh, then I wanted another question. So along the way, I guess,
playing with phones or anything, did you run into any interesting pranks, like basically just
messing with people getting to do stuff? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, many stories about that.
Yeah. Well, yeah. There was a conference call. I was on a conference call. And some people
were being really, really belligerent, and they were really being an asshole. And so, but I said,
look, I know your phone number. So I'm gonna, so I'm, and so what I'm, let me call you,
what I did was I duked them into calling me on the phone. I mean, I duked them into, let me have
one of their numbers. So they got their number, and then I called them up. I called them up on a
special holding tandem. This was a trunk line that I could use to call them up on it. When they
hang up, I would hold their line indefinitely. I feel like hung up there. All they did was pick
up the phone. They wouldn't get a dial tone. They would get me. So I held their line for several
hours. So did, did people call the line or it was it? Well, yeah, they couldn't use their phone.
They had to go use another phone. Oh, so I see. So when people called it, they got a business
signal when the person, oh, no, no, no, they were already on the conference on another line.
But I got one of their phone lines and they held their phone lines. They couldn't do anything with
it. I see. So every time they tried, you were just sitting there. There was other instances where
I did a phone trace on the network. I actually traced their phone line social engineering
with switchboards along the way. So I went through and I told them that we had a trace.
I didn't mention who it was for. I said, this was a special enforcement trace,
yet, yet, yet, and it bullshitted them. But I was special detective from some,
some Bowdoch police department that they couldn't check up on very easily. So everyone's scared
to do that. Well, back then during the time that I was around, it was easy to do because you could
easily easily make pretend you're some Bowdoch police department from from Grasshopper Junction,
Arizona. That was for always my thing. I said, this is a Sheriff's Department in Grasshopper
Junction, Arizona. And it all I was was had a pay phone or a pay phone, a restaurant, a gas station.
You know, it's called Grasshopper Junction, Arizona. And that was the, that was the city that
I had. And I said, okay, what's your phone number? So, you know, they always want to call you back.
So I had a loop around number in Grasshopper Exchange. And then I used that as the phone number to
call and they called me to verify that I was a police department. I said, yeah, Detective Jones
here may help you. He says, yeah, we want to just verify about this trace you want to run. Yeah,
yeah, please, go ahead and run it. And if you want, you can call me back when you got the trace
completed. I'll be here at this number anytime. So call me back and I just sat away and I waited
for the loop down call to come through it, come through about 10 to 15 minutes later and I got
the guy's phone number and I said on the, and then it was during the time that he was talking on
the chat line, I said, hey, by the way, Mr. Jackass, prick whoever you are, I know your phone number.
He said, no, you don't. Oh, yeah, it's and I read off his phone number. He kind of got freaked out.
So I counted you know, well, yeah, there are ways to do that now, but it's tricky.
Well, what I find amazing is that there are so many things you can do with the phone, even today,
where people think it's magic or they they don't know how you you did it. I always find those
things very interesting. Oh, yeah. Yeah, just like last week I was talking to a guy and he thought
three-way calling was magic. He goes, this is some hacker shit. You've got two people on the line.
Well, Mitt and Mitt next new book supposed to come out pretty soon is going to have a lot of
interesting stuff in it. I'm told Kevin Mittnik. Well, guess what? Just a few days ago,
I met him in person in Las Vegas at the special private geek party put on by a person whose pseudonym
is vampire killer. Oh, okay. I don't know. That's all I got to say. It was a special private geek
slash elite party where a lot of people were flown in from all over the country and I was one of
the lucky ones that got into this party. That's that's pretty cool. Had you met him before or
actually no. I had not met him before. I had met him only a couple of days before and he says
he says, come on down to my Tuesday party. I had to cancel a lot of stuff. I had therapy.
I had to catch up on. I had a doctor's appointment because all of my time is being spent in
this therapy. I go three days a week and it's always a hassle that they have to do it but I got
to do it in order to heal myself. How long do you think it will take for you to heal?
They said somewhere between six and eight months. You know what?
And there would be some instances where I wouldn't have the use of certain
nerves in my hand. Well, some people in an IRC, they didn't know about the the story about how
it happened and all they have to do is go up to my website. JD Crunchman on Facebook Facebook.com
slash JD Crunchman. Go up to my wall. Go up to my status and read my wall and go back as far as
Facebook will let you go and just read up on what I did because everything I did was up on Facebook
and on Twitter. I would, there was something important that I put up on Facebook then I would tweet
and say, hey, go over to my Facebook page and check this out. And I gave a tiny URL. I'd just
click on that and they go right directly to Facebook and there it is. I see. Well, what I was going to
say is they actually want to find the guy is that what was what they're saying. So everyone's really
let that guy wants to come out of the woodwork and admit doing it and just willing to pay a lot of
pay me more than $12,000 because that's how much it costs for me to get this therapy done so far.
Almost all of the money that I raised up is being used. In fact, I might even be quite a bit short.
I cut it off at 10, but two more 2000 came in before I had to cut it off. I said, okay, that's enough guys.
Yeah. So I said, okay, I don't need it anymore. I don't want to take any more of your money.
Well, that was really nice of everyone to do that point and that was really important surgery.
Oh, I know. It was really amazing the day. I mean, I raised all the money in 10 days, 12 days.
Most of the people who responded were from Italy. The company from Italy had put it out on a
put it out on a TD program. And then they started contacting me on Facebook and Twitter because
that was where I was on. They gave out my Facebook page and I sent all these friend requests from
Facebook. Yeah, they're all coming from Italy. Wow. That's Italy and also also from, let's see, well,
quite a different Germany and France. Well, and also I think not that many from Asia because I don't
think Asia has Facebook yet. Well, so are having trouble eating that. Well, we have a collar on
the line. Do you have a question for Captain Colonel? I'm more just a statement. Oh, my
talking to this is Madeloc. I think I think I seen you. I think I've printed you on Facebook
because at your picture in the middle of the screen here. Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, guess I think I've
I've seen you before, at least I've seen your picture before on Facebook because, you know,
when people friend me on Facebook, I do read a lot about, I mean, I go up to their pages. I read
their pages and they're all accessible. I can make their wall. But I get a very good idea of
looking at their pictures, whether or not I want to, whether I want to friend them or not.
And then I, and then when I friend them, I go to their wall and I look at their wall and I say,
all these guys an interesting guy. So, and then what I first think I do is I post to their wall
and I usually try to promote myself. I mean, I'm, I am, I am, I'm very selfish. Yeah, it's marketing.
Sure. And I would, and I would plug, of course, this hack this movie, hack this movie. I'd plug
that and plug my course back then during my, my, my raising money for my operation. I would plug
my operation. But yeah, no, I said, hey, come on, donate today. Go to, go to this, go to go to,
go to saving captain crunch and donate some money, you know, uh, we, we just, I know you're
almost out of that. I just wanted to thank you for doing so. I'm, I'm going to be here as long as
you'll have me or tell my friend arrives. Which ever comes first. Do you have any interesting
questions or anything that you want him to talk about in particular? This is basically just a
thanks. Uh, yeah. Oh, just a big hug, but not bad enough for your name. Yeah, that, you know,
like people come up with it and they try to shake my hand. I try to like cringe away, you know,
because it hurts me. If it's right, it would shake my hand and just a normal pressure. Oh, that's
very pain. Uh, no, I have, I have a guy. I could even put on my backpack. I can't even put my
backpack on without help. So that's how bad off I am. I can't believe that one guy did so much damage.
Yeah. Well, that guy comes out of the, whatever funerary this guy is. I'm going to certainly hear
from my attorneys. Uh, well, thank you for calling in, Matt. Cool. You all take it easy.
Thanks. It's nice to talk again. Bye. Uh, we, we still have a sea box on the line. Um, yeah,
it's going to ask another question. Go ahead. Hello. Hello. Are you doing overall?
Health wise. Um, I want to start living as a gay woman. And I want you to
do this. Uh, this is not sea bucks. Yes. Um, actually, I think that was a fake one. Uh, yeah, let's,
let's try to keep these questions really focused toward hacking guys, because you're just waste
all you're doing when you ask a question, when you're asking those kinds of questions,
you're just taking away the time from somebody that's got a legitimate question. So let's kind
of let your people please. Um, and I wanted to ask you about your hobbies. Um, if anyone else wants
to call in the number 484-240-4050, maybe one or two more callers, but, uh, what kind of hobbies
do you do? Uh, what's what? I don't have any really specific major hobbies right now, because a lot
of my time, of course, is being spent on my healing and working on ideas. So I guess my biggest
hobby is, is catching good ideas and trying to see them take place and, uh, hopefully making
these ideas useful for not just me, but for a lot of other people is, there's going to be some
situations in the next couple of years where it's not going to be the same folks. It's going to be
different. And you got to, you got to prepare for that and people are not preparing for that. A
lot of my ideas are getting towards that. Oh, I don't know. I have no idea what I'm going to do.
Do you do all this stuff breaks down? Do you have a website where you, uh, list all these things,
or do you think maybe I have a blog already? And it's called crunchcreations.com. So go up to
the blog and read that. Crutchcreations.com. I talk about alternative energy. I talk about,
uh, talk about capacitor batteries. I talk about some new Tesla wireless transmission systems.
That recently released from Tesla's, a book on Tesla. It's called, it's called the wheels harnessing
the wheels of nature. It's an amazing book. It's just fascinating because it's got all the Tesla's
most recent, uh, patents and ideas that were just recently released from the government and
they're all really fascinating. You should read it. I, the diagrams they're using are not really
of this time period, but I think you could figure it out. Uh-huh. Um, let's, that's some really
interesting stuff. Um, questions or questions. I think, uh, I don't know, nobody else. Nobody
around. Oh, I guess that's, yeah. We, we do have, uh, 32 listeners that was the total number of
listeners. Uh, well, that's how many people are listening right now. So if anyone,
city of your radio station, how many can you have total listening to it? Um, actually, I'm not sure,
but usually during a show, uh, it's around 30. Um, but we, we record it and we play it. Uh, so,
and, and it's also going to be available. Um, I also want to talk to you how you are able to
patch the Skype into the radio. Did you use a special program for that? Well, what I'm, what I'm
doing is, uh, I have a program that broadcasts my, um, my voice, I guess, um, basically a broadcast
anything that goes through my computer. So what you're doing, then, is you're, is you have your
microphone, uh-huh. You patching your Skype through your microphone and then, and then, and then
the output goes to the station. Um, well, it's, it's a stream, uh, to internet stream, uh,
streaming from your microphones. I'm, I have a program that I use that streams whatever comes
out of my computer. So if I play a song, I, I put the song into the program, but I can also play
files on my computer, uh, or Skype or whatever. Or the pure Skype or whatever. Um, my microphone,
actually, um, how are you able to make the sound coming in from your listeners?
And, oh, it doesn't matter. Cause Skype does that. Right. Skype. I can hear every, it's just
the comments calling Skype. Right. Where'd my head go lately? Oh, it's okay. It's okay. Um,
that's something calling in here. Who do you have? Do you have a question? Oh, hey, this is, uh,
six vehicles, the ETA, man, I just want to say it's really freaking awesome that you got John
Draper on the Caddye Radio. Yeah. Um, dude, you're legendary. Oh, I'm honored. Oh, why, I,
I am honored. Wow. I'm actually talking to Captain Crunch. Yeah. You can talk to me anytime you want.
You know, I'm always on chat. I'm always JD Crunchman, uh, just don't call me on Skype, okay?
Cause it don't accept Skype calls unless they're coming in from any of my donors. And the only,
if you're, if you're a donor to my, if you're a donor to my mom, I want to say this. If you,
if you were a donor or even now a donor to, uh, saving Captain Crunch and get on my donors list,
all you have to do is go up to saving Captain Crunch, click on a private conversation with Crunch
and book your time with me. And you can talk to me face to face on, on, on, on, on Skype, only if
you are a donor. Okay. Uh, Brad, uh, RBC, he just told me the capacity for the radio's, uh,
stream is 50. Oh, so are you getting this, are you getting this from a service? Um, I believe he buys,
uh, the, he, he pays for the stream. Uh, so he could pay for so many streams, so many streaming
channels. Um, he, he can stream 24 hours. Oh, I know that, but, but, but the amount of the, the,
the amount of people that can, they can stream or watch, you know, they can stream two varies.
And all you have to do is just, if you want to pay more, you can get more, right? That's basically
how it works. Uh, yeah, I think it's, yeah. It's like 1500 or something or a thousand, I don't know.
You can choose a 500 users, a thousand depending on how many you have.
And how much you had, how much you get to pay with like 1000, uh, listeners?
I don't know. There's different, there's different services. You just go online and look for,
for streaming. You can actually run it yourself off of any server, or just cheaper. If you have a
server anywhere, you can, well, yeah, you've got to have a bandwidth, you know. Yeah, we, we,
we have a lot of space on Cacti radio. So if you ever want to do a show, uh, just let me know and I'll,
I'll ask, um, I'll ask a RBCT if, if we can have that time slot and we can talk about, you know,
whatever you want, because I know you have a lot to say about, um, the whole, uh, future types.
What about GN and R? Is that GN and R just called in? Oh, yes. This is Gunner. Um, he called in,
but I couldn't answer. So I called him back. Um, did, did you have anything to say Gunner?
Oh, um, so you were saying you worked at KKUP. Yeah, KKUP. Kupertino. 91.5.
Because I'm in the Bay Area as well. So I know a lot of the stuff like, um, you're talking about
the homebrew computer club, obviously I'm a lot younger, but, um, well, I don't know whether you
remember those days or not, because they were back in days that you were not even born probably,
that I can, I can say this, the KKUP is on 91.5 out of Kupertino. They had their transmitter
on a mountain top behind Saratoga up in the hills somewhere. They had a pretty good range.
They were heard mostly in Santa Cruz and Monterey much, much better than in San Jose.
The closer you are to the Saratoga, the harder it is for you to pick up the signal. So if you're
out in San Jose and Eastern part of San Jose, you probably pick it up pretty good. It's on 91.5,
which is next to quite a few other other strong stations. So you might have trouble picking it up,
but it's, it's, it's certainly listable throughout all of San Jose and most, mostly the Bay Area.
I was just starting if you did music for the radio station or radio.
Yeah, I played a lot of underground music. A lot of the stuff I played was not broadcast on normal
radio. I would play songs from heavy guns. I would play songs and stuff from a lot of these,
a lot of these off-the-wall bands, but a lot of them were local bands actually. I,
we were able to get the records and there was one of the, what are two people that worked at KKUP,
who got, who basically supplied the station with the records and they had contacts with
the record companies and record distributors and they were able to get records. So they would
listen to the records and they would deem it. And if it was something that was not being played on
PSJ or on the other stations and I would play it, but KKUP in itself was not just a rock station.
It was a station that played a large variety of music. My, my, my show from six to nine at
the PM on Saturday nights was pretty much progressive and underground rock. And then the art at play came
on after me and went from, went from nine until midnight. He would play a lot about esoteric stuff.
He would have a call, a thing called the week end news, the W-E-A-K-E-N-D-G-N-U-Z as spelled
on a KKUP program guide. One other random question. Do you, do you go to Burning Man now?
I think I saw some pictures. Yeah, I've been to Burning Man quite a few times. The only
feeling good. Well, it's great if you're fit enough to deal with it. I'm not. I have to be
careful. I can't go right now. I mean, I'm not going to go unless I get on a bicycle and ride it
without fucking myself up. But, you know, like I said, I have to be really careful.
Yeah. And you don't know who you're going to run into. Who might give you another hug or something?
Oh, I don't care about that. Burning Man is not about that. Burning Man is about a bunch of naked
people running around in the desert doing anything they want. But I mean, as far as public,
you know, public events go. I don't know. I guess you can't live into here.
I have no problem with Burning Man. Trust me. Yeah.
Burning Man, it's something that I always feel.
Hmm?
Stewart, if I can find somebody who has an RV,
they want to offer me a space in their RV, I will go. I will go only if I can get an RV
and get an incumbent bicycle that I can ride. I will probably go.
Well, maybe next year, because I think it's already, um,
Well, tickets are already on sale. They're already up to $250. So what can I say?
Yeah. Um, all right. Well, Gunner, did you have anything else that you wanted to say?
Gunner. Hello. Gunner. He there. Yeah. Thanks a lot. It was good to talk to you and everything.
I don't have any more questions. Thanks. Thank you, Gunner. Uh, if anyone else wants to call 484-240-4050,
uh, we have net house lives coming up with RBCP, but he is running behind. So we'll answer calls
until he gets here. Unless do you have to go Captain Crunch? I have no plans. Keep me going as long as
you like. Okay. All right. Um, let's see. So you're working on, uh, what is, what is hack
this movie? I never went to see what. Oh, you got to go check that out. Hackthismovie.com.
It's, it's, it's a collection of a lot of interviews from some of the more famous persons that I've met.
Interviews with Steve Wozniak and I think are in there also. There's also a lot of interviews
with other people that I've met that are really, really interesting people. Some stuff that I'm doing,
B-roll, and stuff with me doing cool things and all that. And a lot of the stuff that's going to
come up and there's going to be new stuff on there too. And, and what we're trying to do is we're
trying to raise money to complete it. And that's why when you go to hack this movie, there's donate
button there. So click on that donate button. Donate some cash roll up folks so we can get the thing
completed. We have at least another hour and a half of good video that just needs to be edited
and narrated and reviewed. And, you know, because you can see video stuff. If you don't know what
it is, you can narrate it, right? Right. You're going to watch that and see how there's these people
doing whatever they're doing. They're not going to know that, hey, that this, that this guy is,
they might know me. Sure, but recognizing me. But they might not know who I'm talking to. Right.
So I have to announce what I'm talking to in case that's the case. So the narrator has to do
all that as well. Putting music between each of the different pieces. The music's got to be,
we got to get the rights to the music and all that stuff. So the music on the hack this movie
also has to be, you know, clean and clear legally. We can't put music on there. We don't know or
have rights to use. So we're careful. So we want to put music with it and all that. And there's
a lot of music that I could do, but I can't do it because I don't have access to Ableton Live
because I can't afford to get it. That's what there's money for. It's money so we can
got and buy the stuff we need to put the music to the music to the thing. And I am so looking forward
to the time when I can make music. I've actually made a song. I have this print. His name is
the James Steppman. He invited me over to his house when weekend. And he knows Ableton Live
really well. And we hacked out a trance song and a six minute trance song over a weekend.
And I did the arrangement and he helped me. He helped me because I didn't know how to use the
program. He said, okay, how do I do this? He said, okay, cool. I want to do it right there.
I want to put this sequence of music here. I want to put this there. And I just, you know,
all it is, you know, making music with Ableton Live is you're putting certain bleeds,
songs in the right places. So I did that. So I found these all these different sounds.
He's got a huge collection of sounds. So I pulled off these sounds off his library of sounds
and I just put them together into a trance song and to a beat. He got the melody and
the melody on the keyboard a little bit and put it together. I mean, the sequence was simple.
It's like three keys. That's why I had to play over and over again.
But, but you've got about an hour and a half of a movie that you need to finalize.
That's why we raised money to complete that. I mean, video editors cost a lot of money. I mean,
I can't get really good rates for use of video editing. Carl's been doing most of the video editing.
I'd really, really like to see that movie and I can't wait to go up to hack this movie.com
and see a trailer right now. Oh, okay. And what we got done is up there. Okay.
I'll watch that. And then after you watch that, then just imagine what else we can add to it.
You know, we got tidaline to do. We got music to do. We got a lot of stuff to do to make it feel
movie, you know. There's a lot of things that go into a movie that people just think are just
magic. I live right here where they're all made. I mean, I mean, within five, within three
kilometers is six movie studios right next to me. I'm writing. I'm a few blocks away from Warner
Brothers. I'm a hot skiff and I jumped from Disney. I walked by Disney on the way to my therapy.
The Walt Disney Company right there on Alameda Avenue right next to NBC. So I live in that area.
And I'm just walking by NBC, the old NBC building, which by the way is no longer there. It's pretty much
vacant. It took NBC and they moved it over to Universal because Universal bought NBC. And they
moved them over to the Universal City Studios. And that's where they all their stuff's over there now.
Jay Leno did his program over there when Jay Leno left NBC. And before he left NBC,
I could see him from my window, you know. That's pretty crazy.
Well, I had one more question. Actually, I have a really bad memory. So I kind of forgot it already.
I was going to ask you what precautions did you take when you were freaking besides the whole
making sure you could get away quickly. You know, what were some of the precautions you took because you
Okay, very simple, very simple. Being invisible. Not attracting attention. Don't attract attention.
That is the key. Don't attract attention. So I thought of all the different ways that I could attract
attention. If I'm on the phone system and I'm whistling 26th Senator Bloya connection off,
there's a flash. There's a wink. That wink is observed by an operator. If I had the operator
placed the call, that was impossible to mask. In that case, I had to think of an alibi to talk to
the operator and say, Hey, this is a data call. There are other times when you make calls that you
get a reorder or disconnect. If you make a, if I were to let's say make a call with a blue box
and it's not tuned properly. And I go into a, we're sorry, your call cannot be completed recording.
That is attracting attention. Because normally that would never happen.
So you hurry up and leave. I'm not necessarily hurry up and leave. Because if I hung up on,
on that trunk and go make another call, then that's a, that trunk is operated by the tandem that I
went through. Let's say, let's say Phoenix or LA or something like that. And so I've went through
that trunk and don't think I'd call through LA. I can make, I had many different ways that I can
make calls through. So if I did get a reorder, what I wouldn't do is I wouldn't make, I wouldn't
try to make the same call twice. Well, I wouldn't make the same call twice. Maybe I'd try it three times
right away in succession because I want to try to get this blue box to work. And then in fact,
that's one of the reasons how was this blue box got caught. One of these persons, it got one
of Steve job, one of, he bought one of was blue boxes. He was a friend of mine.
And he used it, he used it from home. It, it was not tuned. It was tuned absolutely perfect.
The frequencies were absolutely with intolerance. The problem was the waveform. The waveform was
not readily detected by the system that you're doing. There was a lot of, there was a lot of harmonics,
a lot of subharmonics. And the equipment detected that and said, well, we can't have subharmonics
these two. And they could, they could be not recognized. They would drop the caller, drop a
trouble card. Oh, okay. So if you made a call on a blue box call and you blew it off,
could chink. And you could keep all, you could number start. You're a bleep. We're sorry,
you're called and not completed as dialed. More than likely, it is a problem with tones in the
blue box. It could be many, any, any number of reasons. Remember when the tones are not intolerance,
number two, the amplitudes, the tones were not, not intolerance. Number three, the tones were not
pure enough to be passed through the filters. There's many different reasons why the equipment would
fail your call. If you went that blue box and made that call, you, you do, you would attract
attention if you kept trying to make your call. So the rule of the game was no more than three
times per tandem. And we followed that rule. And we never got caught. At least nobody got caught.
Did that. Oh, that rule. I see. Okay. So did you have to, when you were on conferences or when
you were talking to people, when I was on conferences, there's another thing I had that we had to
be worried about in attracting attention is on conferences. Yeah. A lot of the times these
conferences got started and set up by phone freaks calling the switching office. A bold step
exchanges and asking them to defend the sleeve of the connection. And when you do that, there's no
DC current going into the line when you make the call. So you, you call the ring it and it rings
and it goes into the recording. We're sorry. Your call cannot be completed. It is done. That
recording is not coming from the tandem itself. Recording is coming from the local exchange.
The local exchange, she's at recording, but you're still connected to that number. You're just
getting that recording. So if you called yourself, you, you called your same number on a different phone.
You can knock yourself into the call. Once you knock yourself into the call and you got control
of the conference call, anybody else can call into that same number sequence up by one.
So if I had the number started ending in 12, then 13 would be a number, 14 would be a number.
And you have to try to pick one of those numbers that wasn't busy. And when you call that number,
you didn't have to, you would have to bump yourself into the conference by calling on a second
phone line that same number to bump yourself in. Those were called bump in conferences.
Those were used during my day. A lot of other conferences are being put up specifically. Mark
Brunei, Richard Cashden. Oh, they still do them. Set up conference calls. Kind of a conference
call. But those conference calls were charged conference calls. But these conference calls were not
charged because they wouldn't suit. They wouldn't go suit. They wouldn't go off hook. So you could
sit on the conference call and not get, you know, I'm not, you know, if you were on an ESS exchange,
you'd probably get, you'd probably get dropped off after five minutes.
Well, were you ever worried about somebody listening in and you had to just kind of warn someone or,
or not warn them, but kind of have like a disclosure, like, oh, this is for educational purposes only.
Not really. No. You guys just popped freely or? Yeah, yeah. We,
they were, we wouldn't say, well, who would we say that to educational purposes? I don't know,
I just, I don't know, you know, you had to, you know, make some sort of statement just in case
somebody was listening. We just assumed that they were listening.
Uh, okay. But we didn't care. Okay. As we weren't breaking the law calling a conference number.
Yeah. We weren't calling the number with the intention of making a free call. We were calling
that number with the intention of the staff's conversation with one or more people.
Just sharing information. Yeah. Nothing. Yeah. Well, you remember, there was no internet back then.
Yeah. There were OBBSs back then. The only thing that you had were conference calls.
Conference calls were like the IRC's of today. Mm-hmm.
I see. Um, I, I think we do need to go. Madhouse Live is about to come on in a few minutes.
Sounds like a plan. Carry on with your programming for sure. I, I'm so glad that you agreed to this.
We'll, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And we, yeah. And we might do this again, depending on the response.
If you get it, if you get more response to other people, they're listening to it over a, we're a period of time.
And they call up and ask for another show. If I get enough responses, hey, I'll, I'd be willing to do another one.
That'd be great. Um, if you have a particular topic that you want to talk about, we can cover that.
I know I had to write that. Yeah. We covered that through email.
Um, yeah. Or we can do a broadcast. Um, I just want to thank everyone for listening.
And I'm going to go ahead and put this up. Uh, you'll be able to, uh, download the recording on my Facebook page.
And also, uh, there will be a link on omghacks.net. Uh, thank you, Captain Crunch.
And thank you very much for having me.
Okay. Well, you have a, you have a great night. And coming up next is Madhouse Live.
Thank you. Bye bye. Thanks.
Thank you for listening to Hacker Public Radio.
HPR is sponsored by Carol.net. So head on over to C-A-R-O dot
C-A-R-R-O dot
C-A-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R