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\ A BOM SQUAD RELEASE /
/ The History Of \
\ Hacking & Phreaking /
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By Raven
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Okay boys and girls, children of all ages...Here's a
revolutionary idear....The announcements foist!
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The file we released on smashing up cop cars and getting
away, ya know? Well, don't try it unless you got half a ton
of cocaine in the back seat, and a billion bucks on the dash!
The cops are wise, and are liable to open fire on you once
you start pulling backwards, so, don't attempt it unless you
have no other options. Another thing - now they're air bags
are quicker-draining, so they can start the chase almost as
soon as you are off.
-> And Now, On With The Show! <-
Okay, folks...First of all, I wrote this because, well, a lot
of you fellow hacker/phreakers out there do all yer
stuff, but don't know your roots. Hacking and phreaking have
been around for over 20 years now. So,
without further adue, I present, the History Of Hacking,
and Phreaking!
-=- The History Of Hacking & Phreaking -=-
Believe it or not, but hacking and phreaking have been
around since the '60s. Yep. Hacking is a legacy! Phreaking
came around some time about 10 years later.
-The 60's Hacker-
These were back in the days when a teenager couldn't
even buy a computer (because of price), much less fit it in
his house. The 'hackers' were the people the sysop's of
lamer PD boards would have you believe - people who spent
lots of time with their computer (hacking away at the
keyboard).
The true hackers came about when Massachusetts Institute
of Technology employed some nerds to do some artificial
intelligence and computer work for them. These guys actually
created the models for the terminal your working on right
now. They were the true and original programmers and
engineers.
Anyhow, these guys were working on a project called MAC
(Multiple-Access Computer, Machine-Aided Cognition, or Man
Against Computers...Take yer pick). All goes well as these
guys write some basic programs, build operation systems, and
play 4 color chess games, until the MAC programmers go public
with a computer time sharing program. The first BBS, and it
even had over 100 nodes!
Of course, only other guys with main frames could access
this thing (i.e. - the government, other big schools, and big
companies). These sysops who worked at MIT did their best to
control the badly maintained MAC system, but the hoards of
users cluttered up everything.
Then, something magical happened. A man called John
McCarthy, Ph.D., crashed the MAC system. Soon, others took
sport in crashing this international network. Companies were
able to take place in a crude form of industrial espionage on
the MAC buy 'eavesdropping' on rival's E-Mail, and those
cheap cardboard punch cards (the first computer disks) were
always being corrupted by batch-file viruses. Hacking is
born.
However, crashing the system and all other 'evil'
activities were encouraged. From them, sysops learned from
mistakes, and the hackers took place in the hackers'
obsession - the desire to learn as much as possible about a
system.
-The 70's Hacker/Phreaker-
The 70's were a magical decade, and a flying leap for
phone fraud. The first half of the 70's was like the 60's in
respect to hacking. In the second half, hacking escalated
into 80's hacking (see below).
Besides hacking, though, the 70's produced the phone
phreaks. Phreaking was born from the non-existent womb of a
blind child from Tennessee named Joe Engressia. Joe was one
of the rare people born with perfect pitch. Because of that
gift, Joe was able to manipulate some of the most
sophisticated and widespread technology in the world.
Joe enjoyed the phone system. Being a curious 8 year
old, he called recorded messages all over the world, because
it was free, and is was a good past time. One day, he was
listening to a message and whistling. When he hit a certain
tone, the message clicked off. You or I might have hung up,
but curious 8 year olds don't.
Joe fooled around with other numbers and the same pitch,
and found he could switch off any recorded message. Joe
called his local phone company, and wanted to know why this
happened. He didn't understand the explanation given, but he
did realize that he had stumbled on to a whole new world to
explore.
How was Joe able to do this? Joe had stumbled onto the
multifrequency system (known as MF to phreakers world wide).
The purpose of this system was to do most of the the job a
human could do, but done cheaper and quicker by a machine.
Joe used this system by whistling the right pitches at
the right times to get free calls. Of course, he never
wanted to hurt the phone company. He loved the phone
company. It was merely curiosity which caused him to do this
all.
Joe phreaked all the way into college (he was in college
around the early 70's). While phreaking free calls back home
for some friends, he was caught. Joe's case was a world wide
publicity case (beginning first with an article in Esquire in
1971). Soon, he received calls from phreaks world wide
asking advice on certain pitches. Joe Engressia had become
the phounding phather of phreaks.
Several years before, in 1954, the phone company made a
large mistake. They printed all the MF codes in their
Technical Journal, a book which was easily obtained then, but
has not been released to the public in over 15 years because
of the damage phreaks could do with it. Phreaks learned the
MF, and began using everything from their mouths to pipe
organs to phreak calls.
Then, the most ironic thing of all aided phreakers.
John Draper, an air force technician stationed over seas
discovered that if a toy whistle in boxes of Cap'n Crunch had
a hole covered up, it produced a pure 2600 cycle tone, the
exact pitch needed for a free call anywhere (at least it used
to be). Soon, Draper was calling other phreaks all over the
world. Paris, Peking, London, New York and more.
Using his 2600 cycle whistle and other tools of the
trade, Draper set up a phreak underground. It was a mass
node 'party-line' in which many phreaks talked to one another
at one time. In the throne was Cap'n Crunch - John Draper's
handle.
The phreakers exchanged knowledge, and soon combined
their ideas to build the blue box. The blue box can reproduce
any MF pitch. The whole thing came together in October,
1971, in Esquire magazine. Ron Rosenbaum exposed the
phreaking world from Joe to Crunch in one article called
"Secrets Of The Little Blue Box".
Rosenbaum distorted the phreaking world greatly.
According to him, Crunch had a van which was chock-full of
electronics. Crunch would drive around the country side,
going from pay phone to pay phone, stealing cash from the
coin box for money, and placing calls to phreaker friends.
Occasionally, Crunch would call his 'mentor', Joe, for
advice. Nah. I don't think so. Rosenbaum glorified the
phreaking world, making Crunch a romantic hero.
Draper/Crunch was arrested, convicted, and did time.
While in the big house, several mafia inmates tried to
recruit him into a commercial blue-box front. Draper
declined, and they knocked out a few of his teeth, and broke
his back.
After leaving prison, Draper quit phreaking, and began
programming. Last the world heard, he was head of a
programming division of Apple.
-The 80's Hacker-
During the 1980's the hacker population probably went up
1000-fold. Why? For several reasons. The first being that
the personal computer and clones were made available to the
public at cheap prices. People could afford to buy a
terminal and set up a BBS. And, where you find BBS's, you
find hackers.
The second, and probably biggest reason was the movie
WarGames. WarGames displayed hacking as a glamourous
profession. It made hacking sound easy. I once heard that
the estimate of hackers in the US increased by 600% after
WarGames. Modem users also increased, but only by a mere
1200%. This made hacking easy, though, because it was also
estimated that one third of "WarGames Generation Hackers" had
the password 'Joshua'. If you have seen the movie, you know
that that name had some significance. Many hackers didn't
like WarGames, though. They thought it made hacking sound
like a pansy thing to do. To non-hackers, though, WarGames
was great.
The third reason is because of the mass publicity
surround WarGames and hacking. If we had a controlled media,
probably the only hackers in the USA would be spies and
corporate computer techs. The media increased the hacker
population by a lot, also.
-The Hacker of The 90's and Beyond-
Hacking of the 90's have basically been crashers of
BBS's and company boards. There have been a few virus-smiths
around. Piracy is always around. Who knows what the future
brings in the world of hacking, phreaking, and anarchy?