Jamaica 11 ch11 Hacking

hacking                            iopop
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here you find two texts about hacking.
one about the book the hacker crackdown
written by the famous cyberpunk author,
bruce sterling. the other one will be
about blue boxing and who joe engressia
was.

just read on....



          THE HACKER CRACKDOWN
         ----------------------


 it was on the 15th january 1990, when
the switching system at at&t crashed.
suddenly it was impossible to make long-
distant calls.

 the phoneswitches which broke down were
all digital and directed by computers.
and it was the computers that were the
trouble. in town after town they broke
down, with the starting point on one
switch in manhattan. after some hours
half of at&t's longdistansstations had
crashed.

 three days later hit a specialforce
from secret service, together with the
local police and at&t personel, against
a known hacker in st. louis. a week
later 3 other hackers from new york got
there homes raided.

 one by one were now the homes of
prominted hackers in usa cleaned.
computers where carried away togheter
with discs, printers and monitors.

 climax came four months after the at&t
crash.

 between the seventh and the ninth may
were the OPERATION SUNDEVIL realized.
in two days were 27 houses raided
and cleaned on computer equipment. in
some cases even everything that used
electric. stereo-equipment but also
videorecorders and televisions.
the suspects got interrogated by both
local policemen and secret sevice agents
some were arrested. many where put
infront court.

 when the longdistantswitches crashed at
at&t everybody was sure that it was
hackers that where the villiain of the
piece. the problem came from the soft-
ware in a computersystem reachable from
the telenet. furthermore is the 15th
january MARTIN LUTHER KINGS DAY,
a classical date for terror and
demonstrations in usa.

 the fact is that the specialforce in
secret service, THE COMPUTER FRAUD AND
ABUSE TASK FORCE, actually was waiting
for anything to happen. during several
years had they mappped out american
hackers activity and been spying on
boards.

 after the young hacker robert tappan
morris had crashed INTERNET the second
november 1988 decided secret service
that it had gone too far. so now when a
sertain phoneswitch started to make
trouble in manhattan about a year after,
did they already have long list with
names and addresses on suspects at an
office in chicago.

to secret service did OPERATION SUNDEVIL
mean a eagerly awaited indication to the
whole hackersociety. the message was
"we still have the control". they showed
that the laws of society not only worked
in reality, but also in the virtual
reality.

 but there was a little hook. there was
actually NO hacker that crashed the long
distantswitches for at&t! somebody made
a programmingmiss in the software which
directed the switching stations.

about the MISTAKE operation sundevil and
the people around it have BRUCE STERLING
created the book called THE HACKER
CRACKDOWN. as a wellknown sciene-fiction
author and one of the cyberpunk profets
is he here giving an intresting look
behind the scenes, both on the accused
ones and the prostecuters.

 he have interviewed several hackers but
also the agents that arrested them. he
have been following the trails and gives
a portrait of the formers to THE
ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION, an orga-
nisation which was formed against
operation sundevils agressive attack on
the hackersociety. he have even been to
the school where secret service-agents
are trained before they come to the
computercrime group.

 the book is also giving a long and
thorough report what internet is and
the history of phonelines and computers.

 why you might wonder? why am i writing
about this book? the reason is that
bruce sterling have released this book
on disc! a disc which is free to copy as
long as you take no economical profit
out of it. so go to your local amiga/pc
friends and ask them if they got this
file. it's around 600 k. unpacked. it
could also be splitted in 4 files.

 but if you don't have any amiga friend
then it's just to wait. because i'm
going to transfer this file to a 64
friendly format. some day!



               BLUE BOXING
              -------------

 during the 1970's when the computers
wasn't so usual, where the telephone-
system explored by a group of hackers
called "phone phreaks". which is the
ideologic and technical precursors to
today's hackers. the group consisted of
anarchistic "musicians". which used
flutes, whistles and alot of other sound
creating stuff to explore the telephone-
system. they where much worse organised
and more outspread compared to today's
hackers. and sometimes they even didn't
know about their existance.

 the cult emerged in the 1960's and some
of the main factors was the hackers at
mit and stanford, where it was many
computers, but also a young man in
tenessee by the name of JOE ENGRESSIA.

 joe was blind and born with a perfect
musicial ear. and it was by a chance
that everything started.

 he were calling numbers with recorded
messages, because it was a way to call
around the world for free. but also
because the telephone where joe's
biggest interest. he used to whistle
while he listened on a recording. and
suddenly it just hang on. usual people
maybe think that it's things that can
happen sometimes but joe got an idea.
he tried with some more numbers and came
after a while to the conclusion that
they all stopped when you whistled a
special tone.

 after he had made this discovery he
phoned the local telephone company and
asked why the tape recorders stopped
when he whistled in the receiver. he
didn't actually understand the answer
he got. (he was 8 years old at that
time) but for him it was like a whole
new world had opened. a world that for
an eight year old kid just was as far
away as a telephone.

 that joe could direct the telephone-
company's switching system with a
whistle, depended on the technical model
american telephone & telegraph (at&t)
had decided to use under the 1950's. it
was a long-range project in the many
million dollar class.

 they had decided to base the switching
system on a serie of specific, hearable
tones. a so called dual frequency-
system. the system (which is called mf
by the fanatics) is based on, that the
digit that decide the switchingway is
sent as hearalbe tones. (same that you
can hear in a usual telephone.) some
frequences is used to find empty lines,
others to connect local-long distans and
some more to do the tasks a human tele-
phone operator can do.

 at&t didn't actually think that a
eight-year-old boy's perfect musicial
ear would adventure the function of the
system. joe found out that he could go
in the system just to whistle special
tones at the right time.

 his thought was not to make free phone-
calls. no, he just wanted to see and
test how far he could go in the system.
joe worked for several years with his
tries and never looked on himself as a
enemy to the telephone-system.

 joe were caught when whistled up a
phonecall for some high-school friends.

 when ESQUIRE published an article about
joe and his friends in 1971, came a bad
consequence for the telephone company.
a short while after joe's history were
published did he get phonecalls from
different places in usa. most from young
blind people. all had the same intrest;
a big curiosity in the telephone system.
joe put them in connection with each-
other and this experimenting youth found
after a while out diffrent ways to use
the mf-system.

 it didn't take long until someone found
bell telephone systems big mistake from
1954. in bell systems technical journal
was both the dualfrequency system and
all frequences very good detailed.

 when these things were spread, many
people started to use whistleorgans,
flutes and tape recorders to create the
tones used in the telenet.

 then did destiny play a trick. it where
spread that the toy whistles which you
get in the cardboard of CAP'N CRUNCHS
morningfalkes, gave a pure tone of 2600
hz if you covered one of the holes. if
you used the whistle at the right place
when you phoned, could the phreaks call
eachother without any need to pay the
phonecall.

 john draper, a young airforce technican
stationed abroad, was on of the curious
that used cap'n crunch's whistle. draper
used it to call to for free to usa. he
became interested in the help and
started to exprement, and found out that
together with the whistle and his other
knowledges about the switchingnet he
could control his call in some strange
way.

 he began to phone people working in the
telephone biss. they didn't take any
notice that he was an outsider and on
that way he got some information.
it didn't take long until he started to
call peking and paris, and controlled
calls for himself over half the world.
he organized secret conferences where
phreaks from all over the world could
participate. he soon became known in the
underground of the phreaks as
CAP'N CRUNCH.

 cap'n crunch learnt from others that
you could build certain electronic
tonegenerators for the mf-system. some
electronic genius started to spread the
knowledge about the devices, which at
first had the name mf-boxes, but after
some time they got the name BLUE BOX.

 the amount of phreaks began to increase
and the knowledge how to manupilate
the telephone system.

 in october 1971 where the whole under-
ground movement, from joe engressia to
cap'n crunch, know the big masses.
esquire published "secrets of the little
blue boxes" by ron rosenbaum,
a journalist who had meet the "elite" in
scene. cap'n crunch where described
romantic in the article as a roving wag
who drove the author around in his
special built car and sometimes stopped
at telephone boots to make calls to
the american embassy in moscow, a group
of blind teenagers in canada or a tele-
phone for the public on trafalgar
square.

 after the article had been published
(but not directly after) draper was
arrested twice, judged and after a while
had to visit the federal prison in
lompoe, california for 4 months during
1976. and 2 months in northampton state
prison in pennsylvania during 1977.
during his prison time many interns with
mafia contacts tried to make him join
a commercial "blue box company". draper/
crunch refused and got the front teeth
beaten out and the neck broken.

 when he was released from prison
draper decided to leave the "phone bis"
and start to program. an old friend of
him, steve wozniak, seemed to make it
out pretty good with the hardware he had
named apple. draper started to write
program to apple computer. he developed
a word processing program, easy writer,
and had another niche in the techno-
logical celebrity's big hall 1981 when
easy write were choose as the first
word processor to ibm pc.


information for this text were found in
the book called: out of the inner circle
which was written by bill landreth.





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