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PHREAKING AMONG THE GAUCHOS
By Viktor Arevalo <viktare@well.com>
I told myself I was lucky when I returned to Argentina after
ten years in Europe. I had read in Ed Krol's The Whole Internet
that Argentina rated BIUF, an international connectivity rating
better than Australia and much better than New Zealand.
Gophering, I even discovered a couple of Argentine addresses:
the Foreign Ministry and La Plata University. "Argentina equals
Switzerland as to Internet capacity," I celebrated in advance.
"An internaut will miss nothing down there." The only minus point
listed, compared to the USA, was the absence of OSI/ISO
connectivity, of no consequence whatsoever for TCP/IP or the
Internet as a whole.
When I arrived in Rosario on the Parana River, I found
just a conventional phone jack in my house. I verified the jack
right away: an old pulse line, with international access only
feasible through an operator after waiting half an hour or more.
The next day, I went to the nearest office of France Telecom
S.A., the telco monopoly. A dour girl with a hare-lip and the
body of a Greek goddess assured me: "You're fortunate, where you
live you can tone dial internationally just by paying us $50". I
signed a form and paid. Then I asked cheerfully, "Can you give
me the addresses of some Internet access providers in the city?"
The girl turned red and uttered back angrily, "Please, sir,
don't make me such proposals! I'm a decent woman, I don't provide
such things!" I didn't dare to inquire what the Greek goddess
with the hare-lip had understood I wanted from her.
I returned home baffled and worried. Nobody I met had the least
idea about Internet.
Weeks passed. I noticed one day that I could tone dial
internationally on that phone. I fired up my modem, called
halcyon.com in Seattle and opened a common dial-up account
and a SLIP account in less than 5 minutes. Then I connected to
pipeline.com in New York and downloaded a file, 1,544,070 bytes,
with ZModem. The download took 24 minutes, at a speed of
about 11.000 bps-not bad for a place so far-and away. Before
jogging, I called the international operator and asked, "How much
cost per, minute to USA'?" He answered: "3.52".
"3.52 what, explain, please!" He stressed back: "3.52 US dollars,
Sir, do you understand Spanish'? Dollars, Sir." The stupid 30
minute test had cost $105.60. My usual two daily hours on the Net
would gulp more than thirteen thousand dollars a month. The only way
to reach Internet from Argentina: dialing international calls at the
outrageous rate of $3.52 a minute. No way.
After months of total incommunication and frustration, I met
Kurt, who described himself as "a German visiting professor in
Argentina from the University of Leipzig." His specialty was some
obscure branch of optical links beyond my understanding.
Even if he weren't a German scholar in such an unnatural and odd
place like Rosario, Kurt would cut an imposing figure: black suit
with a neatly knotted tie over a snow white shirt. Hovering over
the suit were piercing black eyes framed by shoulder length black
hair and a beard worthy of an Ayatollah.
When I told him about my isolation because of the phone rates, he
responded: "Internet, Donnerwetter, my colleagues and pupils pass
hours and hours on the Internet, they don't pay a cent. Please,
Herr Kollege, come next Friday evening to our workshop about TCP/IP.
I'll show you everything. First, I had to help a little bit,
but they don't need me now anymore. These kids are really smart."
What an outspoken jerk I'd been. Of course there was Internet at
the University, like everywhere in the world, with one or several
64K high speed links and racks of modems. Surely they'll loan me a
point to point line, if I know how to ask for it. Why not? How
foolish to have lost so many months with snail mail and faxes!
Next evening, I went to the Technological University clothed like
an IBM executive of the old times with my darkest tie and my whitest
shirt. The facilities reminded me of some cluster-bombed buildings
in Abadan, South Iran, during the Gulf War. All window panes broken,
all walls cracked. One could see and smell the decay and dirtiness of
decades. I asked a fellow, some kind of guard or janitor, about Prof.
Kurt and he answered with mocking disdain: "Ah,the German that looks
like Rasputin, yeah, he's down there in the cellar with his lunatics.
Is there some special show that you come so costumed?"
I tried to find the cellar, but got lost. All of a sudden, behind
me,I heard to my relief the metallic voice of Kurt in impeccable
Hochdeutsch: "Oh, Herr Kollege, you're here, quite early, people
arrive in Argentina mostly an hour late. Come, please, we are
about to begin the session." We went down a dimly lit flight of
stairs. A massive, rusty iron gate, a piece of ancient design,
offered access to the cellar, a totall underground construction,
most unusual in Argentina. Perhaps it was the remnant of some
older building swallowed by the foundations. Six personal computers
rested on a long table against one wall: cheap clones,mini-tower
cases, 14" Samsung color VGA screens, rank and file in Argentina
all running Windows 3.1. I couldn't see any cables and couldn't
say if they were networked or not.
The atmosphere of the huge vaulted cellar reflected order, almost
obsessive order, an cleanliness of the humblest sort. Greenish
lights shone from side wall niches, indirect lighting perfect for
working at the computers, but weird for anything else. How the place
looked, nobody would say we were in Argentina. The setting was
typical East European.
Four young Men and two girls, all in their twenties, sat
before the screens, The acted polite, neat and grave, as though
they were performing a ceremonial task. All greeted me respectfully,
too much so for their local customs. They all stood up and gave me
their hands. One told me: "I'm Nathan, we just assist Prof. Kurt.
We worked as a team to learn abou the Internet and it's protocol.."
Nathan explained further: "we now run Windows in a peer to peer
net. We usually call sirius.com in the USA on our V34 at 28800
We try at least, sometimes it fails and fails".
Nathan dialed a common touch phone, and When he heard something on
the other side, he, threw a sharp screech through the phone
mouthpiece with a walkman headphone connected to an IBM notebook.
Then I perceived again the characteristic playing of phone numbers
in tone. "This is CCITT five"' Nathan said.
A short modem negotiation of screeches came, sirius appeared and
popped a SLIP node number, Nathan registered it and jumped to his
desktop computer. he fed the address into Trumpet Winsock and ran
Eudora to fetch mail. It suprised me how much mail they received
and how much they sent back.
I asked Kurt if We could run Mosaic or NetScape.
It took no more than a minute to load Mosaic and it's, "What's
New" page; the speed impressed me. "What's New" suggested a
new Web page devoted entirely to cats. There we went: a center
for cat owners and fans, where you can peruse all aspects of
feline existence and ask counsel about your cat, even if it is
on drugs like Prozac. We were roaming the Net until late,
about 5am. An exhilarating experience after, so many months
of exclusion! I could even log into CompuServe with WinCom through
the Internet SLIP connection, using a small shareware program
called comt that emulates a Hayes modem on TCP/IP.
Mosaic and NetScape brought images lightning quick for such a
forgotten corner of the world, astoundingly quick. We used the
Swedish telnet, freeware Ewan for telnet, which was excellent
For email, Pegasus and Eudora were constantly checking in the
background. For News they had the classic Trumpet News and Win News.
All programs ran on all six pc's without a glitch. Time flew.
My backached, my eyes were swollen and my hands missed the keys.
It was late, very late. All of a sudden I realized how different
these people behaved from the hackers and internauts I knew.
their commentaries were objective, sparse, and unobtrusive:
about download speeds, better logging scripts for Winsock, or the
advantages of PPP over SLIP.
They never bragged about what the accomplished. Kurt sat all those
hours somewhere in the dark and didn't speak a word. He was working,
perhaps writing at his tiny Toshiba protege'. Silence could be
absolute in the cellar for 20 minutes, the mushy keyboards didn't
even click. sound came only through the walkman, creating an eerie,
ghastly atmosphere.
After the amazing session, I invited them all to a coffee breakfast
in a shabby, dusty bar. All bars were shabby and dusty in these
surroundings, but the coffee tasted great and the pastry was still
warm from the ovens.
I felt exhausted. buoyant and worried. I told Kurt:
"Great, this technological university seems ahead of all others
in Argentina. How do they manage the phone bills? Do they enjoy an
optical link with a flat rate? Where's the backbone?"
Kurt answered in his too-correct, cacophonous Spanish: "The
University pays nothing. The cellar itself lies outside the premises
of the university, it is a leftover of a mansion demolished 30 years
ago. We use it and nobody objects. We wired and air-conditioned it
using borrowed materials, the university provides nothing and opposes
nothing. How do we call long distance? I thought you knew.
We simply phreak, Viktor, phreak and phreak!
We have gathered some 135 direct country services, 800 numbers for
collect calls, we seize one or several trunks and stay online all
the time we wish".
"Is it legal?" he continued. " I don't know. Is it fair? Yes. it is.
We harm nobody. The phone company, a private French monopoly,
voracious like a school of piranhas, charges $3.52 per minute to the
USA. University teachers, students, young people, don't have a
choice: if they want access to the Internet, they must phreak.
We don't need any special hardware like the old blue boxes or the
modern demon dialers from Holland. BlueBeep covers all our wishes.
BlueBeep is a freeware from Hamburg that generates the trunk
tones through the cheapest SoundBlaster clone. If you have the
smallest doubt, you phone its author, Uncle Dittmayer, for help
and he never asks a cent for support. We opened, of course, some
SLIP and PPP accounts with American service providers on the West
coast. We navigate the Net at a modest but acceptable speed
under Windows. Internet is here a matter of survival, not like
in the USA or Europe ... the university is totally bankrupt in
Argentina, textbooks in the library are 20 years old, if you can
find them. All subscriptions to scientific journals were canceled
a decade ago."
I was shocked. Where I worked more than ten years in Europe, they
punished phreaking as a federal offense, a crime. On the contrary,
Kurt described phreaking in Argentina as the only path to Information
Justice against the monopolies. The revelation took me absolutely
unprepared.
The only backbones I had found where those in my own back and
they began to ache terribly. I felt depressed and giddy.
I showed the most sincere mixture of understanding and confusion.
I slept that Saturday ten hours and dreamed nonstop about Tolkien's
stuff: elves, dwarfs and orcs with phones but without a happy end.
I never returned to that cellar.
I needn't resort to phreaking. Providence, personified by some
old pupils of mine and friends in Switzerland, rescued me from the
isolation of the Pampas. After delicate negotiations with German
and Swiss banks, they hired for me a callback service with no time
limits and at a flat rate, they say. They pay. The best present I
ever had. I ignore how much it costs, but it works transparently
and never lets me down. Kurt didn't comment much on my absolute *callback
legal solution. He considered it morally inferior compared to
phreaking and too dependent for his values. He told me: "You have
to thank somebody for getting your rights, you degrade them to
privileges and your solution remains purely personal. You harm
nobody indeed, but you help only yourself."
At the end of November 1994, I met Prof. Kurt once more in a
dilapidated pub near the harbor. He wanted me to help him in
debugging some C++ routines; the problem was tough and we
worked five hours on it with our notebooks. Then we ate dinner
together. He commented that evening, "I understand your absolute
reluctance to phreak. Anyway, what the students do with the
phones in the cellar is very simple, any kid could do the same and
phone all over the world without paying a cent.
But the real possibilities, the great changes, are in the future.
We could install here a cloaked Internet node with all the facilities
of a large service provider, say like The Little Garden in the
States or Rhein-Main in Germany. We could make a clean connection
with the main optic link, which passes some twenty meters from the
institute cellar.
Then the students will enjoy unlimited bandwidth, the bandwidth
equivalent to 35 simultaneous ISDN connections. And the telcos would
never know or suspect anything. Even if they knew, they would
never spot our cable, not in a thousand years."
It seemed to me that Kurt knew what he was talking about
up to the smallest technical detail, but ignored completely
the legal implications and the political realities in
Argentina. I liked Kurt and was distressed about the
needless dangers he ran. I told him: "The legal consequences
of your technical jump could be far reaching, too." And what
I didn't say, but pictured in my thoughts, was Prof. Kurt
without his notebook vegetating in some dungeon. But the mad
all are in God's keeping. Anyway, I admired Kurt: he wasn't
flashy, but did things in a solid dominating way. Even his
dreams based on facts, he had a fanatical dedication: he wanted
to end the Internet isolation of Argentina and the official
hypocrisy hiding it. He stated to me his principles and
I could not contend their *morality;
1) We don't harm anyone
2) The telcos bar the public from any Internet access, but
officially declare Argentina as enjoying all Internet
services.
3) People need the Internet here much more than in countries
where the universities really work. Argentine universities
are hollow shells without any resource or mission whatsoever.
4) The telcos monopolize so much bandwidth that our calls take
away nothing, just a little bit of their surplus, the
discarded dark fiber.
But principles, and reality need a revolution to coincide.
Agraule, a graduate from the cellar team, a sad-looking and
beautiful girl, told him once in my presence:
"Yes, Prof. Kurt, perhaps you're right, but it's much better
to keep a low profile, Laws and judges don't have much to
do with justice in Argentina. We have to prepare ourselves
for the future. To break into any cable would first make us
grow in numbers, and then destroy us all. It's too
dangerous. You know too much for us, your wisdom will burn
us out if we drink it all in one year. We need limits and
goals, knowledge can be like rhino ammo and blow us away."
Sunday mid-afternoon in January, torrid, unbearable hot,
a deserted city. I almost hate the cicadas now. They are
funny bugs first, then they batter the eardrums so much
you cannot think. The people, the few people that remain in
Rosario, sleep long siestas. I have to avoid siestas at any
rate, they provoke head-aches and nausea in me, I was typing
at my notebook and finishing the first draft of this article
when the doorbell rang. A yawning old maid shuffled into my
home office saying, "A foreigner, Senor, wants to see
you".
Kurt came in: "Viktor, dear chap, I'm going back home
and want to say good-bye. I hope I'll return next
winter. But perhaps you don't stay much longer in
Argentina. You suffer too much isolation, it's not the
right place for you. Go away as soon as possible!" I
responded, "Oh, yes, perhaps we meet again somewhere
else, but I'll have to remain here half a year at least to
streamline the farm. Do you return to your chair at the
university in Leipzig'?"
Kurt answered, "Yes, something of the sort, a lot of matters
pending." I asked, "How long have you taught at that university
in Germany?" "When the Democratic Republic ceased to exist, they
had to send me somewhere," he told me. "They sent me to Leipzig.
They ordered me to leave Berlin, too, but for legal reasons.
I'm under some sort of prosecution, you know, such things take
years and years to clear." I asked, "What the hell, they
prosecute you there because of phreaking?".
"Oh no, Viktor:'he said, "I wish it were so simple. I worked
all my life, even before graduating and habilitating as a full
professor, at the STASI (the East German Secret Service).
They paid me as a university professor but my chair was without
pupils and without university." I said jokingly: "Were you a
communist James Bond, Kurt?" Kurt answered: "No, I hate spying
and am not gifted for it. I was the manager of a whole technical
area for computers and international telecommunications.
We had to blow all STASI hardware and data before the takeover.
I obeyed our orders to the letter. Now they try to find fault
with such actions. That's of no consequence for my life, my
career's closed, and I'll stay as a professor in Leipzig for
life. A boring task indeed! Now, listen: I, we, could try to
crack Intellink. It's easy. It's a quest."
When Kurt left, I felt I had found the last piece of a puzzle.
I knew the local phone companies were no match for Herr Professor
Kurt. Alas! It is a great and terrible world. BIUF or not BIUF,
what does it matter. Mr. Krol?