hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2600.txt

Episode: 2600
Title: HPR2600: Special episode on 2600, Blue Boxes, Phreaking
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2600/hpr2600.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 06:25:59

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This is an HBR episode 2600 entitled Special Episode 2600 Blue Boxes Freaking.
It is hosted by Ken Fallon and in about 53 minutes long and can in an explicit flag.
The summary is, we celebrate the history on Hakan with a nod to the old school freak community.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by an honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15, that's HBR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at An Honesthost.com.
Hi everybody, this is Ken Fallon and you're listening to another episode.
Today is episode 2600 and as such we are going to be dedicating the show to the phone
freaks out there who, if you go back far enough, were responsible for laying down the ideas
that led to Hacker Public Radio itself from Wikipedia the Free Insightly PDF.
In November 1954 the Bell System Technical Journal published an article entitled Inband
Signal Frequency Signalling which described the process used for rotating telephone calls
over trunk lines with the then current signaling system R01.
The article describes the basis of inter-office trunking and the signals used to start route
and end calls. In November 1960, further technical details were disclosed by Bell System Technical
Journal in the article entitled Signalling Systems for Control of Telephone Switching.
This article identified specific single frequency SF and multi-frequency MF tones used
to start and end call and to transmit the number on a long distance connection.
The engineering design assumed that these signals would only originate in automatic switching
equipment. The designers were aware that in band signaling method was subject to false signals
arising in the telephone headset from ambient sounds and chose 2600 hertz frequency because
it was not present in normal speech. This choice performed well in normal use of telephones.
This success did not foresee the possibility that the telephone user would insert control switches
signals into the switching system by sending unusual tones into their telephone headset.
This possibility was discovered accidentally and eventually became widely known.
Before the technical details were published in the Bell System Journal,
it was discovered by many some very unintentionally and to their annoyance that a 2600 hertz tone
used by the AT&T Corporation as a steady signal to mark currently unused long-distance telephone lines
or trunk lines would reset those lines. Joe Inuresia, known as Joybubbles, accidentally discovered it
at the age of 7 by whistling with his mouth. He and other famous phone freaks such as Bill from
New York and The Lich train themselves to whistle 2600 hertz to reset the trunk line.
They also learned how to root phone calls by causing trunks to flash in a certain pattern.
At one point in the 1960s, pockets of Captain Crunch Breakfast cereal included a free gift
small whistle that by coincidence generated a 2600 hertz tone when one of the whistles two holes
was covered. A freaker named John Draper adapted his nickname Captain Crunch from this whistle.
Others would utilize exotic birds such as canaries which are able to hit 2600 hertz tone
with the same effect. With the ability to blue box, what was once just a few isolated individuals
exploring the telephone network started to develop into a whole subculture. Famous phone freaks
such as John Captain Crunch Draper, Mark Berney, and Al Berney used blue boxes to exploit various
hidden codes that were not dilable from a regular telephone. Some of the more famous pranksters were
Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, founders of Apple Computers. On one occasion Wozniak dialed the Vatican
city, identifying himself as Henry Kissinger, imitating Kissinger's German accent and asked to
speak to the Pope who was sleeping at the time. Wozniak said in 1986,
I called only to explore the phone system, phone company as a system, to learn the codes on tricks.
I talked to the London operator and convinced her I was a New York operator. When I called my
parents and friends I paid after six months I quit. I done everything that I could. It was so
pure. Now I realized other were not so pure. They were just trying to make money. But then I
thought we were all pure. Blue boxes were predominantly the domain of pranksters and explorers.
But others used blue boxes solely to make free phone calls. There was also a popular
with drug dealers and other criminals because the calls were not only free but were virtually
impossible to trace with the technology available at the time. Blue Boxing hit mainstream media
when an article by Ron Rosenbaum titled Secrets of the Little Blue Box was published in
October 1971 issue of a square magazine. Suddenly many more people wanted to get into phone freaking
culture spawned by the blue box and it furthered the frame of Captain Crunch. Two major amateur radio
magazines, 7-3 and CQ published articles on the telephone system in the mid 1970s. CQ magazine
published details on phone freaking including the tone frequencies and several working blue
box schematics in 1974. In 1975 issue of 7-3 features an article describing the rudimentaries
of long distance signaling to networks how to construct red and blue boxes and put them into
operation. In November 1988 CCITT now known as the ITCUT published recommendation Q140 which
goes over signal systems number 5's international function once giving away secret frequencies
of the system. This caused a resurgence of blue boxing instance with a new generation.
During the early 1990s blue boxing became popular with international wear scene especially in
Europe. Software was made to facilitate blue boxing using a computer to generate signal tones and
play them onto the phone from the PC where blue beep, LTO and others and blue boxes for other
platforms such as Amiga were available as well. In the 1970s and 1980s some trunk were modified
to filter out single frequency tones arriving from callers. The death of blue boxing came in the
mid to late 1990s when telephone companies becoming aware of the problem eventually moved
to out-of-bound signaling systems which separates data and signaling channels such as CCIS and SS7.
These packets systems separated the voice and signaling channels making it impossible to
generate signals from an ordinary telephone line. It was rumored that some international
trunks still utilize in-band signaling that are susceptible to tones although orphanages 2600
plus 2400 and then 2600 CCIS. Sometimes the initial tone was a composition of three frequencies
a given country may have in-band signaling on chunks from a specific country but not from others.
Now what you're about to listen to is the first episode of Radio Freak America and it was
first aired on the second, the 20th of the second, 2002 and published on oldschoolfreak.com, oldschoolfreak.com.
All right, greetings. This is Drew Parallel. The meeting was last night and came up with this cookie
idea of having a radio show, not a radio show. It's going to rock right now. I'm sitting
outside a big switch, big telco switch and a big metropolitan city and I'm going to do something
groundbreaking. Something historic or something really stupid because I'm doing it in the data.
Okay, what am I doing you ask? Well, I'm walking down an alley behind the telco switch. So, yeah,
oh yeah, you guessed it. I'm going to go down stack. This is a long alley. Have you ever done this before?
I don't think it's ever done before. So I do think it's historic. Okay, getting close. No one's
gotten it back yard. No dog is barking. Everything looks good. I bet you there's a big telco
guys that have got to be working. Right now. Okay, here's the yard. It's a bucket truck right in the corner.
I don't see the cameras on the daytime. So it cares. Oh, there's a dumpster. Okay, hold on. Okay,
get it to right now. Okay, I'm at the dumpster. There's a lot of trash in the dumpster.
There's a lot of shit out there. We got here. It's a little bit different.
With this telco, NID, NID people work. I got tons of those. Lots of cables.
There's a lot of paperwork. There's a jack. There's a couple of jacks.
Shit, I want to go to the other side. I got to get something back.
Got this shit's movie. I'm a French. Okay, that's something I don't have.
But I'm taking this jack too. It's a nice jack of hearts. Like a duel.
Like me, do a parallel. This is do a parallel. That's the tiny historic event.
And a large switch. A large, let's call it in. I think that's it. I think I have
one more welcome. I'll see you here. I am done. Wait.
I'm walking away and I'm not looking back.
Did I not wait? Before I drove up to it, I saw a telco. I saw technicians that
in the yard zone. They're working the day. It's not bad. But I got a really nice duel jack.
And then a whole lot of paperwork here. I think it's just another idea. It's just another
idea in the instructions. Hang on. Still very fruitful. And again, I hope you're
an exciting push statement to the show Radio Freak America.
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there we go welcome to the first episode badadio freak america props to racks
the name. You can find us at oldschoolfreak.com every week. I'm joining right now by Rax and Condor.
Rax, you there? I'm here. What's up? Excellent, Condor. It looks okay. Excellent. Excellent. We've got a
lot to talk about. We're going to have some important issues. We're going to have some deep issues.
And then we're going to have a lot of fun with a capital pH because that's what this is about.
First, I want to, you know what, I think I told you guys about this. Rax and Condor that I thought I
was slammed. Hey, you were slammed. Yeah, it was horrible. I got this phone bill for,
Jesus, well over $200. And I finally noticed it came from a USBI. And just all these companies,
I had no idea there's numerous companies on there. And I was mad. I was livid. So I started
to make some calls. And I eventually found out that I received a number that a former dancewear
company had had. And I was still listed in AT&T as this business. And I was getting my phone
service through business discount plan with rates like 40, 50 cents a minute. It was absurd.
So, you know, eventually I got it all figured out. AT&T gave me an hour a long distance for six
months. I got actually got a deal on the long distance that I used before. I got a big discount.
And it just goes to show you read that bill. Look very closely. And don't trust phone companies.
I want to explain what slamming is to for me when I was listening in who might not be aware of what
it is. Slamming is when your phone service, when your long distance carrier is changed without
your authorization. And actually what I've learned from this is that slamming is actually not,
it doesn't occur that frequently anymore. It's very difficult I heard. But you can still,
you can go to, I think you can go to FCC.gov slash slamming and learn all about it. And there's
actually an 800 number two. I was going to call it today. Maybe I'll do that at the end of the show.
And you can get all this information about slamming and cramming and, uh,
and telephone fraud in general. And there was supposedly, too, when this thing was running rampage,
you know, people would call to say about switching phone companies and they say,
who do you want to use for long distance carriers? They say, well, I don't care. Well someone
allegedly set up a company called, I don't care. I heard about that. Or, and then they also
had, uh, when you hit, oh, for operator, they had, uh, a company called, uh, you choose for me.
And whichever one is the cheapest also. What do you choose when the cheapest, you know, it will
be charged like, you know, maybe a dollar a minute. Yeah. Oh, man. I can't imagine. I'd be so upset.
And you know what? And it was actually a little upsetting. And a doubt. I mean, just the fact that
somebody was changing things your life, you know, probably not quite as bad as identity
after something like, or getting robbed. But, uh, but still, disconcerting nonetheless.
Still getting a business discount plan. That doesn't feel really comfortable. Yeah. Yeah. You know
what? You know, who really got stuck with the bill with this business discount plan? They,
like, ate it. And I asked them to, this AT&T compensation for their mistake. And they said, no.
So they're, they're eating quite a bit. I actually mean out like a bandit.
Because AT&T's regular residential rates to be upwards of 30 cents a minute. So, and I was
getting it for 16 now. So, uh, I just switched to, um, now like a commercial now. Now word for
a sponsor. But I just switched to IDT for long distance, which uses global crossing frontier for
doing all their backbone stuff. And they're like, you know, it sounds pretty good. It's like,
you know, they build like in six second increments. And it's like five cents a minute and all
this other stuff. Wow. And I was feeling pretty good about that until I heard, uh, and they tried
to pull like another N run and like the CEO left with like $500 million in his pocket or something
like that. A company that's IDT, uh, international data and telephone or something like that.
Um, this guy I know, he's in my Cisco class. His, uh, dead works for, uh,
global crossings. And I actually applied for an internship there. And, uh,
unfortunately, I didn't make it. And I'd like to get money because I'm not, I'm an unemployed student.
Yeah. We know what we all were. One time. I think everybody is. Yeah. Global crossing made that, uh,
if I'm correct, they have worldwide fiber optic network all over. Yeah. Yeah. They're big.
They're real big. That's really why I want really why I wanted to join them. So yeah, you could
like run their Cisco routers and the elite router guy. Now, uh, I also had a little trouble with quest.
I ordered, they had this big ad campaign on broadcast TV, free caller ID, free security screen
and a free box for a month. Try it out. See if you like it. Let's try it out for a month.
And it doesn't do anything for me. You know what? I got my bill. They still build me for it.
I had to call and cancel it and tell them, Hey, you offered the free trial. Why are you charging me?
I couldn't believe it. Not to mention, if you're ordering services, you can order for anybody.
They'll just give services to anybody, even if it's not you. But if you want to cancel something
or change it, man, it puts you on hold. You're on a back burner, baby. It's horrible. So like,
if you want to get somebody, you just call, uh, call up, say you're them and order all the
services for them. He's a cake. And if you want to be anonymous, just go to a pay phone,
opt of hurt. Uh, sure, all you need is a name and address of a phone book. That's all I ask for
for authentication. It's sick. Yeah. It's sick. So, uh, to all our listeners, please read your phone
bill and watch out for phone companies. I'm sure some of their products are good and I'm sure they
do good things for you and it's nice to talk on a phone. But you know what? You know what? You could
be totally wireless now. Is anybody totally wireless? Rax condor on that. I don't have a phone.
Wireless phone. Because that's because he's a poor student, but uh, yeah, sure. We're not,
we're not quite like Scandinavia where, um, you know, like I forget what the statistics are,
but like 80% of the people carry phones and very few of the people have hard landlines in their
in their houses. Exactly. There's almost no need for cell codes. I'm sure you could get satellite
internet access. Like, and I've heard that it's synchronous. The, um, you know, the telecos are
worried about all that kind of stuff. They're working on, there was something I was reading about
over copper being able to put like, uh, HDTV. So, I was working on some head end equipment for that.
So, the telecos can get into the cable TV business and using the, uh, four pair wire they have
coming into your house because they're going to start losing a lot of business. Not only, you know,
as people are switching, uh, you know, cell phones and doing everything else and all that. But, uh,
so they're, they're looking to make a buck or two still. No doubt. They're losing all the money
to that and they're losing all their money on payphones. Yeah, I can see them. Payphones are really
listening. They're starting to charge, yeah, 50 cents. They did that a while ago in Phoenix. Yeah.
Yeah, local calls. And they're, uh, well, you know, they're taking, they're taking the amount
and everything else in that too. But, uh, you know, speaking of quest, um, for, for those people out in
the, I guess the 14 states that, uh, that quest controls or monopolizes on or whatever.
Right. Um, the quest was, uh, going to sell, get this now. Quest was going to sell your personal
information, um, and, uh, and make money on them. What they did is they put in on one of the phone
bills that unless you notify quest by such and such a time, you will have assumed to be opted in.
Yeah, by default. By default. And, um, you know, so someone, you know, one of these, uh,
investigative reporters, I think people got a hold of it. It was in, you know, all kinds of news
things and so on and so forth. They had their quest representatives on TV saying, well, it's not
like we're going to stand on the street corner and sell your information. Well, of course,
not they don't have to stand on the street corner. They sit in their nice corporate offices
and other companies come up to, up to them and say, well, you know, hey, we'll, uh, we'll pay you
for this information. From what I understand, they're just built to other quest companies so that,
that way, say you have regular quest TV or something like that, they're going to call you and say,
do you want quest wireless? Well, you know, that's what for my understanding, because I mean,
we use quest and we really don't have a choice. I mean, there's not many telephone choices out there.
Yeah. Well, you know, they, they, you can almost understand a being within their, within their
own organization, you know, and I almost don't even mind that, but I'll tell you about that in a second.
But on top of that, you know, they, they would literally have the right to, you know, sell that to,
oh, I don't know, you know, magazine companies, you know, insurance companies, you know, you name that.
Once, once that Pandora's box would be opened, it'd be impossible to close. So, um, they talked
about that on TV and then they extended the time and of course they had an 800 number that you
could call in and opt out. And that was busy all the time. So I found it, found it on their website,
opted out and of course printed out my, uh, my, uh, confirmation from the, the web browser,
including the date and time that that was done. So if you ever do anything like that, uh,
just as an FY to everyone listening out there, you might want to keep a hard copy of this stuff as
well. But anyway, long story made short, Quest was getting a real big black eye. And then on
January 28th, here's the press release, Quest Communication International Incorporated. Today
announced that it's withdrawing its plans to share private customer account information among
different divisions in the company. Society customer concerns, the company said the decision
on when and how it might share information within Quest would be made after the federal
Communications Commission has an opportunity to issue new rules expected later this year.
So, uh, they were catching a bunch of heat and they had to back off.
But now the FCC, and they got so much attention, the FCC is now stepped in. So that's a good thing
in my book. It is. And, you know, Vermont also changed, I don't, they either have a law or they're
proposing a law where people are opted out by default. It's, it's, it's fail clothes. So they
can't just automatically give out your information and, you know, because what if you never know about
it? What if you never call? Then all your information is just flowing out there. All of these
companies. It's horrible. So Vermont is actually on the ball, props to Vermont. I, uh,
I want racks to talk about vomit.
Is that really a, is that really a big new conversation? Like what you said at nights about
one o'clock in the morning, like, no, no, no, no, not hugging, hugging the cold toilet in the,
wee hours of the morning. I want you to tell. The personal and God. Exactly. I want you to tell
the listeners all about voice over misconfigured IP. Yeah, voice over misconfigured internet or
IP for left for me is vomit. And, uh, it's actually kind of neat. Cisco has IP telephones.
And, uh, it's actually a very cool technology. Uh, very, very small actually. It's about 4K per
seconds. And then when you add the, the overhead for TCP IP, it's like about, I forget it's like
5-8K. So it's actually very interesting. And, uh, companies are starting to do that in schools
and everything else. But, uh, basically, you know, think about it. Everything traveling over
your network is just all zeroes and ones. So, um, someone at, uh, the University of Michigan came
up with this, uh, idea. And what a little utility for Linux. And it's called vomit. Voice over
misconfigured internet telephones. And, basically, here's what it does. You, uh, plug in your Linux
box, plug it into them in the network at work where they have, uh, Cisco IP telephones. And,
you just kind of happen to, uh, about the packets, capture the data stream and save it to, uh,
save it to a way file. Just by happenstance, you capture a bunch of packets.
Happening by your, you know, through the wire and you just happen to find them.
Now, Condor, speak up. Have you ever just happened to sniff some packets on any network you've
been on? Oh, never. Never. Okay. Continue racks.
Anyway, so, so you can, you can save the files. Now, get this. This is, this is, I think,
and then we were talking about this at, uh, the 20, 600 meeting before. But everyone out there's
probably seen Hogan's heroes at one time. And if you remember, Ken, who was the, who was a
tacky guy, you know, of that back, my hero, the 40s. Yeah. And he had this coffee pot that had a,
had a, uh, to it or something. You know, they would, oh, they always had kernel clinks off
as bugged and they would tape what was going on in there. And then they would get up their
little razor blade and re-snip up the tape and, uh, you know, play other conversations back. Well,
think of what you can do when you save these phone conversations to your handy-dandy hard drive,
take your favorite audio editor, slice and dice them up. And, uh, you can interject those messages
back into the phone system like it's a telephone call. Hey, that raised. Just record your boss
talking about someone else giving, you know, giving someone else a raise. Edit, put your name in
there and send it off to the HR department. That's right. He's the cake. Fun for all the listeners.
You know, old voicemail, you used to be able to do that with old voicemail systems. I,
I was listening an old off the hook. And that's where, uh, a manual met Mr. Franch on this IBM
voicemail system. And you used to be able to do that right with the, right with the phone,
you used to be able to cut and chop and paste together any kind of, uh, any kind of voicemail message.
I think vomit, boy, I wish I had access to, uh, to, uh, IP telephone network. I'd want to try that out
right away. Everything's, it's all IP. Yeah, probably. There's a lot of places doing it now.
And there are, uh, Nortel does some IP-11ing stuff on that as well. But I guess this is just,
just with Cisco stuff for now. But if you're looking at that information, just type in, uh, vomit
and Cisco in your favorite search engine and it'll pop right up there. And I'm sure duals
going to probably put links up there for everything we talk about on the show here too.
Definitely. Definitely. In fact, I'll, uh, I'll write synopsis synopsis for each show.
And you can get the shows at the HTTP, WWW old school freak that school with a K and freak with a
ph.com. And we're going to have this show up every week. Right now it's recorded MP3s.
Hopefully we're going to start broadcasting. And, uh, it's going to be great for listeners.
In fact, we'll start having call-ins. Uh, you know what, is this weird? You know what I've
always wanted to do is build my own switch. Build my own telco switch. Just get a bunch of, uh,
I wouldn't even know where to begin. I actually do know where to begin. I've thought about it.
But it'd be really sick and twisted. But I've always wanted to do that.
Yeah, I suppose, right? Yeah. Well, that's why you're an old school freak. You want to build a switch,
man? I do. Man, I just, I want to, I want to have my own telco. That is sick. That's really sick.
I've heard about these, um, I don't know, maybe two years ago, these, like teenagers that,
they made their own, uh, ISP. And, you know, that wouldn't be a bad business to be with. Of course though.
Yeah, you know, I think, uh, I think running an ISP would be easier than running the telco.
And I think, uh, you know, if you've got enough boxes and, uh,
got enough copper going into your house, I think you could do it.
There's an interesting, um, thing on, um, if anyone's read, uh, uh,
Robert Kringling and they're on pbs.org. There's this thing I Kringling. But he had an interesting idea
talking about how, um, people could set up or someone is a great business opportunity for someone
to set up a DSL service. And he goes into the fair bit of detail. But basically, uh, you buy up
one of these, uh, alarm monitoring companies in, in your favorite city. And they have what's
called dry lines going into everyone's house. So it's another pair of wires that's going.
And it's a dry line in the sense that there's no dial tone on that. It's exactly what you need
to set up DSL. So what you do, buy up the company that has the alarm monitoring system, use those
dry lines and I'll start off with the people DSL. And if you think about the, uh, capabilities
beyond that or put the possibilities beyond that, uh, you know, voice over IP and the people
tell us, you know, into their homes and mix that out into, uh, the regular kind of internet
telephony thing. Of course, when, when the, uh, our box of the world would find out about that,
they probably want to stop you from doing that. But it presents interesting business opportunity.
And they will be crushed under the giant, um, a big business. But yeah, if we have any,
any alarm companies listening to this show, I bet they're taking notes right now.
Yeah. I, uh, I also rags brought something up to me.
Well, I'm sure, I'm sure all our listeners are familiar with
raisethefist.com getting rated a couple of weeks ago. You've heard it on, uh, off the hook,
you heard it on Hackermind. Uh, by the way, we're on Wednesday nights. So, because personally,
I can't get enough of off the hook in Hackermind. I mean, I just, I can't stand TV. Uh, I can barely
stand radio. Maybe NPR. Uh, screen TV. That's, uh, that's the one shining line on the dish network.
How do you have, who do you, who services you? That sounds like a rather personal question.
Yeah, you know, well, you don't have a choice anymore. You can't really choose. I mean,
are you talking about cable? Well, no, I'm talking about engine companies like services.
You only can't choose anymore. Oh, you mean telephone?
Well, phone, uh, cable. You're right. Well, a lot of it, I believe that a lot of it is a
benevolent monopoly. Look what happened when power was deregulated in California and went into
the hole. I believe that your local utilities are, are, are, like I said, basically a benevolent
monopoly. We do actually quest is looking into becoming a long distance provider. And I think
if they do that, they have to open up their local markets to other companies. So I think that
is around the corner. I think for telephone service, I think that'll work. Power, no.
You know, of course, other stuff, basic economics. You can't have companies defending your country
or paving your roads at one work. Um, condor, if you could, first of all, speak up a little bit and,
and tell us, please, we've been talking about phone service. There's a website onebox.com
that first gave great service. They, they, free email, free faxes. It was wonderful. They
give you a voicemail number, but it was, it was a toll number. Now they've given, and they made
it even better service by giving a toll free number to all of their subscribers. But,
unfortunately, on the other hand, it doesn't work. Every time I dial that 866 number,
it's always busy or it'll ring, it'll ring forever. And it's cool, though, to have it, it'll
be back to your email in a computerized voice. And I, I enjoy that one of the most, except
whenever you put like a, from what I understand, from experience, wherever you put like a number,
been a period, it gets that next line, it gets that whole line thing goes to the next one.
Oh, it does. I didn't know that. It's kind of weird, because you gave me instructions on the
freaking part, right? AT&T-based, free fun. And it just, I decided to listen to it,
and my news, I wasn't getting the whole thing. It would say six. There we go. Five.
There we go, the next one. And then until you hear another period, they don't tell you.
Really? See, I didn't know that. It works, it works pretty well, though. Regardless of that,
I think it works very well. And it reads, it'll read everything. It'll read, you know, right
bracket. It'll, it's cool. It's very cool. I sent back two emails, I think. One,
using one box on a telephone. And I think you get the, you get the notification of it,
you click on a go-through, you can play it as a wavefile, or as the audio stream from a quick,
from a quick time. It's actually very cool. Yeah, it is. It's totally fun. And it's actually
real useful service. If only the number worked. I know that everybody, everybody heard about it,
loved it, because I mean, what's better than 800 voicemail? There was actually one place, and they
just recently went bankrupt. They're, you know, maybe one of the last dot coms closing, but it was
called dial pad. Do you guys hear about that? That's the internet phone call. Right. Yeah, you would
do, from your computer, either computer to computer, obviously, which anyone can do, or a computer
to regular telephone. And they were giving out 800 numbers for that, and facts, and voice, and
voicemail, and everything else. And it was a little bit laggy, you know, depending on how your
connection was to the map. But it was very cool. So it was often Hawaii and calling back on that,
and, you know, no charges. Very nice. I think next time I'm in Hawaii, I'll give it a call.
Think of now if you can't. Oh, man. Actually, I actually had been in Hawaii, and it was a blast.
It's great. It is. It is. Now, speaking of traveling, we were at the last point in
the country meeting. I'm sure all the listeners were there too. At the last meeting, we were talking
about, we were talking about the show, and we were talking about, oh, you know, I was on travel,
and I couldn't really get access. Well, I went to Fry's, Fry's Electronics, great store,
and I signed up with Earthlink two months free. So I'm very happy. They've got nationwide numbers,
and of course, I'll cancel it when the two months are up. But then Rax was telling me about
Linkshot. Yeah, I once said Slashdot. So it's called Slingshot. Now, can you tell a listener
something about Slingshot? Linkshot is great. You go to your office, apply stores, your computer
places now. You can go to Slingshot.com and see it. And basically, it's two cents a minute.
It gives you 600 local minutes or 120, 12 free minutes. So if you're traveling, or even if you're
broadband connection goes down, I've had broadband for so many years now. I have no other
dial-up connection anymore. So you get this and it solves this little dialer and that you don't
have to create a username and password, everything else. And it takes care of it for you, but
it's prepaid internet access. You can be totally anonymous, right? You buy it, you pay cash
for it at the store. They don't know who you are. All they know is where you're dialing from,
obviously. And of course, they could see where you're going or whatever. They give you a couple
of free email accounts and that. And it's like 10 bucks for the 600 minutes.
That is so sweet. It's totally anonymous because that's what I love about the track phone and all
those prepaid cellar calls because it's totally anonymous. So this is totally anonymous.
You can opt avert. You could, I mean, no, none of our listeners or we would ever do this,
but theoretically, you could basebox your dial-up. That is very sweet.
The one downside to it, that's only for Windows boxes right now.
Someone may be able to figure out, you could probably do a little bit of packet analysis.
Packet analysis, and figure out what's going on as it's doing the sign-up. You don't
pick a username and password. It was, right? But you need to make a dial-up from any OS.
Do that out. So, you know, someone out there gets into it and finds out, you know,
contact us back through the website and that would be a very good thing to let people know,
but it's a great deal. Definitely. I would put that right up on the site because that'd be excellent.
I know there was an article in 2600 knots and long ago hacking free ISPs with Windump.
And like you said, we're actually probably doing the same thing. You know, just find out
on assuming you would use CHAP if it's on a Windows system. You know, you could just find out
the authentication and figure it out yourself. That'd be great. So, hey, that's project, project
through the listeners. I have trios. I bought trios and this the other day, it broke. What happened?
I know. I'm not an electronic electrical expert either or anything. I've got a teacher I know.
And, you know, it would be a great project on how to build, except you need to solder like,
I don't know, maybe 200 pins because you have to cut it in like all these IDE cables.
You know, kind of once you explain what trios is for long.
Right. Trios is an operating system, a hard drive selector. You put the operating system on one
hard drive and you can press the little button and you can switch to it. Unfortunately,
you have to power down totally for it to switch. It is not really intelligent. I mean, it's just
a switch. It literally is a switch. Right. An IDE switch. No, electrical switch. It allows
the information to just go through and the electricity just goes through. Hey, that is a cool ring.
What is that? That's just my little look here. That is sweet. That is a nice phone, by the way.
So, can I ask you how much this trios costs?
Oh, $60.
What's not too bad? And how many OSs? How many hard drives can it support?
Three. But, if you have a, you can actually do four. If you do not push any of the buttons in,
you can, it will then work past trios. It will not even see trios. So, you can actually plug in
another one. But, if you have three city ROMs or three something, you obviously can't do that.
Three IDE devices, correct? Yeah, IDE only allows for two channels of two devices a piece,
normally. So, on each chain, right? Yeah, two devices on each channel and there are two
two channels on the motherboard. So, I guess, Conner, with this B, you would just take one of those,
one of those channels, one of the drives, and this trios becomes now the three different drives.
Right. Right. You're going to slick. Let me guess you got it at fries.
Yes, they did. This isn't a good of the show, but you buy fries electronics.
That's what we need to do. We need to get a big spot here. Can you hear me, okay?
I can. That's perfect. That's perfect. I don't know if our listeners will appreciate it,
because we're here for listeners. We're here to spread information. We're to spread the word
about curiosity and acting upon that curiosity, and how it should not be illegal to act upon
curiosity. You know what? I brought up earlier, raisethefist.com getting busted, and somehow we got
the subject. I'd like to bring that back up. That's actually a really important topic. It's been
talked about, I don't know if the hook, it's been talked about, on hacker mind. It was, from what
I believe, an anarchist website, an event, he's being watched by law enforcement agencies,
and eventually, the gentleman who ran the site posted, while making information. Of course,
he was busted. He's probably in the hole, longer than Bernie S. and Faber Arctic combined.
It's not right. You can get any, you can get a, well, you actually can't get a blaster's handbook
very easy, but you can, you can go to the library, you can get a structural engineer's book, you can
get anything you want in the library, on the internet for crying out loud. What's,
what's the deal with this one website? Why did they have it out for him? Now, Ratch, you were telling
me something, another website that has information like that. So, Congo was telling me the same type
of thing. Another website, you can get tons of information. Why weren't they busted? Why did they
pick on this guy? Well, you know, the thing is, you know, once it demands someone's attention,
once something happens, it calls someone's attention to something, but usually try to make an
example. Yeah, it was probably becoming popular. Now, you were at Condor, you were at what site,
and they'd had tons of bomb-making materials. Tons of everything. Tons of everything. Textspiles.com.
Yes, I've been there. And has lots of stuff. There's textspiles.com, and you can choose a
near, and those will be old textspiles, and you can go to web.txtspiles.com. And that has
newer stuff, and it's a great site. It really is. Yeah, it's a great site because it's basically
got free information, all kinds of information. And this guy hasn't really been busted for anything.
I think he would. Yeah, I would think so, especially after 9-11.
Well, there's a, I was talking to Duel about this before too. There's a company that's been around
for a long time, and it's Loompanics, L-O-O-M-P-A-N-I-C-S. And they have tons of books, and even publishing
books on things like, you know, how to reload your own ammo, and everything else in between. So,
at DeathCon this year, they were there, and they picked up a little catalog, and they had all kinds
of various assorted types of things, including, you know, weird and wild things like how to make
your own bazooka down to, you know, how to change your identity, and how to do all these other things.
So, they have catalogues, you can go to their website online, and see the various information as well.
But there's another site I came across today, and I think it's pronounced T-O-T-S-E.com.
And they've got tons of things there. There's, let's see, bad ideas, which has all kinds of things
on how to make explosive devices, and to friend, and hack, and freaking, and viruses, and technology,
and everything else. So, there's tons of information out there.
Yeah, and people aren't getting arrested for it every day. You know, I wish I would have seen
the site. I just heard about it from 2600. You know, if the feds, if the FBI, if they want to shut
something out, want to shut down gun shows, you know, why don't they... We talked about having
taken your first trip to one of those? Yeah, it kind of was horrible. People, I went to my first
gun show, not too long ago, and, you know, basically to get that type of information, you know,
identity changing, lockpicking, stuff like that. And the people were very unique. I'll say that.
The people were definitely different, and that type of information was all over that place,
tons of it. It just blows my mind. It almost frustrates me to see stuff like that happen,
to see the satellite... What was that newspaper? Satellite daily news of something,
the guy who would publish information about satellite systems, DSS, and then have general
molars just crushing legally, just because he printed information, just because he shared,
frustrated technology that he learned about, that others learned about. Sure, you can...
I guess you could use that information to do bad things, but he wasn't doing anything bad.
He was just putting the information out there. It's unbelievable. Go to a high school, and you'll find
tons more illegal stuff. I mean, really? Yeah, go down. No, go down. Oh, man, the stuff
I did nice. Holy moly. The thing that falls back to the thing that's, you know, in line with
your gun show theme and that, you know, they really say guns don't kill people, people kill people,
but it's like anything else. Any kind of tool that you have can be used for good or evil.
You know, airplanes can take you around and make you get from point A to point B a lot quicker,
or they can be used for bad purposes as they were on September 11th. So that applies exactly
with information. That's exactly the same thing. It's just another tool, and it's how you choose
to use that information. Yeah, but no matter what anybody does, you're not going to stop the
spreading of information. You're not going to stop people from creating it. You're not going to
stop people from distributing it. It's, it is going to exist. And I believe it should be open.
It should be free. Okay. All right. Now, I'm off. Let me hop off my soapbox. I'm done. You know
what? I want to make some phone calls. I want to show the listeners a couple of things, a couple
a couple of cool things. And I guess one of you, I tell you what, I'm going to stop this,
and I'll make the phone calls. Maybe one of you can come on. And then, and then we'll, I'll come back
together again for the last part of the show. Is that cool? It's a wish mate. All right,
listeners, hang on. Okay, we're back. Rax has left us, condors here, because it's only three way.
And I want to make a few phone calls. I've been doing like retro. I've been real retro lately.
Using DOS and Procom and dialing up everything I can. And I call cocax. And I get some really
cool noises. So I'm going to call one right now. Hang on, condor.
Can I know you there? You have this one. I've actually, I dialed up the
few. There it is. You still there? I'm still here. Yeah, that is so cool. I actually, I dialed up
a few. Some, when I, some cocax, and these are all cocax, you get a busy single if you dial up
most, most Arbok payphones. Now I dial up these cocax and a couple. One would do nothing. You
would just drop me as soon as it, as soon as it picked up on hyper terminal. Yeah, this is
hyper terminal. I tried with old school program Procom plus on my 36 and I didn't do anything.
But I used regular hyper terminal and a couple would just drop me, it would just drop me instantly.
One would, one would just echo an N every time I tried an AT command. And then this last one,
this phone I just called, it would actually connect and it would just send garbage to my screen.
Now again, I read an article in 2600 where I think there's a program I can get and maybe
I can talk with these workers cocax. I'm going to look for that program but it's totally fun.
Dial up everything. I mean shoot, maybe you could even, oh I don't know, dial up an air conditioner.
Is that, is that true? Is that room or true condor? Is true, is true. And I was in there at the same time,
it went, no you didn't, no you read about this, right? No, I, no, no, no you read about this, right?
Yeah, yes, yes. Well, I, I heard somebody told me about this. That's right. And what did tell you?
Well, they told me that they're actually dialed up, it made all the sound and he told me
it in such detail that I could actually picture myself being there. That's phenomenal, that's
phenomenal story. I read that if you, if you use the terminal program and dial up one of those
things that it might connect at like 9600, I think that's the connection speed of those environmental
controls. Now the next call I want to, I want to make and want our listeners to check out is,
it's pretty minor but it's kind of, it's kind of cool, just the differences. And it has to deal
with the 1,700 number to see what your lot is, see what your carrier is, your long distance carrier,
on any phone and that's a 700 number. 1,700, yeah, I think you should meet that one.
Yeah, and it's 1,700, 555 and then XXXXX, any four numbers will do it. But you'll get different
messages for the same carrier and I'm going to prove that right now.
Thank you for choosing AT&T for your long distance service.
Okay, now that AT&T is my carrier and I just dialed 1,700, 555, 1,212 and that was the message you got.
Now if you dial for AT&T, thank you for choosing.
Okay, enough of that. You still there, Condor?
Condor?
Back here.
Oh, you're, I wanted to be quite a little bit longer but I didn't really want to.
Do not fool the host. Okay, now that was 1,2,1,2, now I'll try 4,1,4,1.
Thank you for choosing AT&T for your long distance calling.
Oh, you're very welcome.
Okay, Condor, do you hear the difference?
In AT&T.
Okay, you there?
Do you think AT&T and the other one did a little cheap sound effect?
Yeah, I like the latter. I think it was much more soothing. She was much more friendly.
I'd rather have a cup of coffee with her.
All right, how about we bring back racks right now?
Er.
You know what? How about I stop it so people don't get his number?
That's right.
Oh, wait, hold on, I'll just cover the mic.
I'll just cover the mic.
Okay, we're back.
Rax is coming back as we speak.
It's much more fun this way.
What's up?
Hey, we just dialed you over the air, dude, so everybody can bust out their DTMF decoders and get your number.
Oh, not really.
You saw it?
Not really. We covered the mic.
We call a couple of cool numbers.
I've been going retro, dialing up everything, dialing up some co-cuts.
I think I've said that co-cut sound for you at the last meeting.
I connected to a few and got some garbage from Tom, some weird echoes from others,
some just dropped me.
And then I showed listeners what happens when you dial one in 700 number, different one, 700 numbers.
With the same carrier, you can get different messages.
There's just no consistency.
This is a great show.
Making the first segment was so exciting.
I mean, not that it was exciting, dumpstime.
I mean, every I'm sure all of our listeners have done it a hundred times.
Well, I hope you took a shower before you started the show.
Oh, of course, of course.
Yes, sanitize everything.
But doing it on the air, you know, it just added a little bit to it, you know, narrating it.
You know, it was a little exciting.
This is a great first show.
It was an historic event.
And I hope there will be many more to come, especially live broadcasts over the internet.
You guys have anything else to say?
Go for a Condra.
Do we lose them?
I don't know. Condra, are you there?
Condra, are you there?
I'm here.
What do I get to all of them?
There he is.
I keep getting the flashbacks.
Didn't hear all that clothing.
What did I mean?
You did.
You missed all the cl-
Don't worry.
You'll be able to hear it on the net.
All right, I will.
This is a great show.
I want to thank you guys.
I want to thank our listeners for downloading the show.
This is the first episode of Radio Freak America.
In your hard drives forever.
Be with us.
Thank you so much.
Thank you very much.
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