Hacking in Brazil

by Derneval

Before talking about hacking here, it's good to describe the conditions of living.  Right now, the country is a mix of Belgium and India.  It's possible to find both standards of living without traveling long distances.  The southern part of the country is where most of the industry is concentrated, while in the west one can find the Amazon jungle.  There are many Brazils, one could say.

Hackers and computer enthusiasts have several different places for meeting.  When WarGames came out, the real places to meet hackers and make contacts were the computer shops, game arcades, and Videotexto terminals.  The computer shops were a meeting place because many of "hackers" had no computer of their own and the shop owners would let them play with theirs as a part of an advertising tool to encourage people to buy one for their kids.  Today that is no longer needed, since prices have dropped down and hackers meet at schools or sometimes just join a BBS (most people who buy a modem end up thinking about setting up a BBS).

By the way, most schools are advertising computer training as part of their curricula, to charge more, and like everywhere, I guess, people no longer learn typewriting, but computer writing, and many Brazilian newspapers dedicate a section on computer knowledge once a week, with advertising, hints, general info, and even lists of BBSes.

A few years ago, the Videotexto terminals were also big meeting places.  That was part of an effort to make popular the use of a computer linked by modem to get services like msx-games, info on weather, bank account info, and so on.  Just like the Internet, one could do e-mail and perform some fancy tricks and other things that could be called hacking.  The difference was that it was created by the state-owned telephone company and each time the trick was too well known, it was changed.  The real trick was keeping in touch with the people who used the system like hell.  It's no different than what happens with the computer gurus.

The protocol used for that system (X.25) is the same as is used for the banking money transfers, but it wasn't possible to do anything more than checking how much money one had and a few other things.  People who used that at home (not too many, since the company didn't think it would be such a hit, and didn't provide for it) could spend their father's money discovering funny things about the system, like messing with other people's phones and such.  One could also use the terminals at the Shopping Centers to make phone calls to their friends without paying.  The guy at the other end would be heard by the small speaker.

Phreaking here in Brazil is something secretive.  Apart from the trick described in the section "Letters to Read By" in the Summer 1994 issue of 2600, where one would call through locked rotary telephones, little is known about phreaking.  One thing is that people who enrolled in Telecommunications Engineering could call Europe and USA with ease, but they would net tell you how.  It must be said that all public phones have metal cables around the wires and that the phone machines are quite tough to break down.  I guess it wasn't for beauty.

The phones use some sort of metal coin called fichas, which must be bought some where.  The trick is to use a coin with a string, so it would not be collected.  But if the police caught you...  The police don't follow rules for things like this.  Either they would fine you, or arrest you for vandalism, or whatever else they can think of at the moment.  It is a hassle.  My friend who was doing Electrical Engineering told me that boxing in Brazil was impossible.  The system is just not good enough to be boxed.  Other friends of mine told me that in the Northeastern part, the phone system can be boxed.  The phone company doesn't admit any knowledge about that.

Internet access is something quite hard to get today.  Until a few weeks ago, it was impossible to create an Internet site that was not part of some research project.  So only universities and the like were capable of putting people in the Net Universe.  In the University of São Paulo, people in the post-graduation courses could get access with ease, but graduating students would have to show some connection to a research project.  That was because the students found out that one could use the IBM CDC 4360 to Telnet without an Internet account.  Also, all the faculty had computer rooms full of i386s which were linked by fiber optic to this computer.  Another one did the file transfers between the accounts and the computer at the computer rooms and FTP was also possible without an account, but only to a few sites.  That lasted for about a year, until it was fixed in the router, but only at the Politechnik School.

Legend has it that the guys were downloading too many GIF and JPEG pictures of top models from an FTP site nearby.  That used so much bandwidth that the site started to complain and two things happened: the site stopped storing GIFs of wonderful women in swimsuits and the router was fixed to prevent FTP without an Internet account.  One can still today connect to the outside world via Telnet and many people have accounts in Internet BBSes like ISCABBS, Cleveland Free-Net, and the like.  The Bad Boy BBS was "in," until it went out of business.  This kind of access is not good, though, for it is very slow.  Also, it is hard to download something bigger than 60 kbyte.  The way I devised, downloading the file inside the BBS and uuencoding it, you could list the file and capture the screen listing, uudecode it after some editing and have a working EXE or ZIP file.

By these means one could, inside the campus, do all the downloading one wanted, from anywhere in the world.  Outside the campus, it is possible to do it by phone lines, but the modems will not go faster than 2400 without character correction (no ZMODEM at all), which makes it quite hard to download compressed files.  To try doing anything but read letters by modem is some kind of torture.  The real thing is to do it by linha dedicada, a special line for computer transmission.  It's much more expensive though, but if you have the money...  Perhaps the best way to get access to an Internet account though is to be part of the research project Escola do Futuro (The School of the Future) that, among other things, gets schools linked to the Internet.  That's what I did and they pay me quite well to search for data in the Internet for the students of those schools.  The University of Campinas is said to give all students an Internet account regardless of knowledge.  Of course, here there's BITNET also.  That's doomed for extinction, but for this or that reason, people haven't closed it down.  Most teachers use it; guess there's even some post-graduation work written about that.  It's easier to access via modem, also.  Old habits die hard.

Outside the campus, for common people, there are few opportunities.  The only thing you can get, at least until the opening of commercial Internet sites, something about to happen one of these days, is access by mail.  You join one BBS with Internet access, and your mail is sent over the Internet later in the day.  This is not direct access, as one can see, but it is easy to access by modem.  Problem is that you have to pay if you use it too much.  The BBSes that do it don't do it for free, also.  Connection to CompuServe is also possible, but it costs a lot of money.

Because of the newspapers, knowledge of the Internet is spreading fast and the number of sites is growing the same way everywhere else in the world.  Even the military people are starting with it.  There are plans to enhance it and make better connections, and some informative material is being translated into Portuguese, like Zen and the Art of Internet and made available in the gopher.rnp.br.  There are many mirrors from many famous sites, like SIMTEL20 and at least one Internet BBS, the Jacare BBS (Alligator BBS, available by Telnet'ing bbs.secom.ufpa.br (192.147.210.1) - login: bbs).

World Wide Web sites are becoming sort of popular also, but still available only to a few people who are lucky enough to get the access.  Brazilian hackers are not very fond of sharing the knowledge of how to get access and other things, sometimes because of fear of losing it, sometimes because the demand would overload the system.  There are no hacker magazines here yet, and very few people confess their curiosity about hacking for fear of not finding jobs.  Most would-be hackers either get a job and stop hacking for fun or keep their activities secret in order to pursue their objectives.