This is dedicated to all the hackers and the crackers, to the hackers and the crackers.
I see in binary, I speak source code, step on my toes, I'll post a million jpegs of you
in a fag pose, in your digital stance, getting firewalls hoes, cause I'm riding the net in
my six foes, I was a dick with my 56, now with my cable I'm able to get that stable,
on the out, my name is Ace and I'm a Leo, on the digital highway, my name is Neo and
I'm a hero, in a flash, I'll screw you on burning dreamcast, you need some ISO, let me through
my hard drive rifle, our exchange you could never stifle, in a digital hood, you just caught
the love bug, I bootlegged your CD, I carved the fight between Un and Jay-Z, cause CG, it's
all gonna be free, whether we take it by force or we take it nicely, you feel that rattle
in your bones, when I tell you we just packed out Jones, and NASDAQ leaves you flat on your
back, cause I am he who loves to hack and crack, cause I am he who loves to hack and crack.
This is dedicated to the hackers and the crackers, serial phones, source codes, ISO, RAM, this,
this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this,
Hello and welcome to Binary Revolution Radio, episode one, one six, one, one six.
You've got a nice little space there.
Anyway, I'll take, I'll take over from here on in, cause we can't apparently, Lord knows
what we'll do for the date.
Today's air date, October 4th, 2005.
I'm Black Ratchet.
I'm going to take that as 10 slash 4 slash 2-0-0-5.
Yes.
2-0-0-5.
1-0 slash 4 slash 2-0-5.
Yes, and our co-host this week is Steve, the glorious Natus.
Yo.
What's going on, man?
Nothing, what's up, guys?
This is the first time you've been on the show with us, haven't it?
With you guys, yeah.
Yeah.
We're cool.
Yeah, we got that.
So, I'll add a new level of unprofessionalism to the show.
Oh, good, good.
Lord knows we try not to keep it professional here.
We keep, we keep, we try to keep it above freak factor.
That's about it.
He's going to make us look like we wear suits all the time.
Oh, I'm actually wearing a three-piece suit right now.
Well, well, well.
And a little bow tie.
I try to, I try to, try to approach the show very officially and pragmatically.
I'm wearing a Quest polo shirt.
I'm wearing a Yankees hat and a white t-shirt.
Yeah, we won't talk about your damn Yankees.
Next on VinRev Radio, what are you wearing?
I was calling in line tonight so we can go get a, like, you know, have a little phone sex thing going on here.
Yeah, definitely.
Anyway, we're not live.
Thanks to the glory of our server and our conference bridge, I spent all weekend trying to hammer away at it, but all the time we were trying to do it, you would start, we'd all connect to the conference bridge, or well, technically, I would connect to the conference bridge with two phones, and it would sound fine.
And then, like, within five minutes, it would all go to hell, and there'd be this, you know, slightly annoying ten-second lag or so.
It was annoying.
Look at that way.
Very annoying.
And such, I really don't think you guys want to listen to ten seconds of silence between every switch of conversations.
Well, yeah, of course I want to listen to that.
Yeah.
We could sound like a bunch of other radio shows out there.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I've been going through podcasts, and some of them are very scary.
This whole internet radio thing is really getting way out of hand.
We were here first, damn it.
Stay off my lawn.
I don't think we have much for the housekeeping this week, besides the whole not being live.
Yeah, we're working hard to bring you the Binrev Radio live that you know and love.
Oh, what have you done?
I've done everything.
I've been busy, yeah, going on a lot of dates this week, but, you know.
Strom's thinking with his little head rather than his big one.
Yeah.
I do blood, sweat, and tears at this show.
And you, you know, sip mimosas.
Yep.
Well, anything for a good life, right?
Yeah, I guess so.
All right, well, I don't know, Nettis, do you have anything for housekeeping?
I don't know, really.
I really don't think so.
But anyway, so let's go right to the email.
Our first email tonight is from Digital Evolution, or from, I'm sorry, Backspace from Digital Evolution.
Kind of has a little signature going on there.
Hi, guys.
With regards to the question about new PG slash PGP compatibility, and it's on the newpg.org website.
And what it says is you have to run with a little option for your new PG to run with PGP compatibility mode.
And I'll go tiny URL that.
But anyway, the other thing he says is, I can't believe you guys would actually advocate that people keep quiet about their skills.
Your friend has grounds to sue for the wrongful dismissal based on the story you told on the show.
A boss can't just fire you because something happened to the phone system without having some sort of proof that you did it.
Your friend should contact a labor lawyer and make sure that his best interests are looked after.
Of course, judgment is also a skill you should have as a hacker, and I personally don't readily divulge information of what I know.
However, saying that you should shut up and keep your head down when it comes to bad corporate security is simply not a good idea.
It is part of the reason why many companies are unaware of the problems in their own software.
Just my two cents worth.
Well, judgment is key.
Sadly, with a lot of bad security, there's nothing you can really do about it, and a lot of people just want to put their heads in the sand.
I've caught a lot of flack from my upstairs, the head IT department, over the years that I've worked at my job,
when I point out their stupidity in certain efforts that they've made, and mine thus have pissed off more than a few people.
I do not advocate, you know, stuffing your fingers and your ears and going, la, la, la, la, la, la, when you see something that's wrong,
but I do favor biting your tongue when it's a fight not worth fighting.
I can think of a couple of things, which I really don't want to say on air because I don't want to own my company,
but there's more than a few things that they've done where I've just said, no, this is wrong.
But at the same point, they've already made their decision, and anything that I say will just fall on deaf ears,
so I'm not going to expend my effort.
Welcome to the real world, eh?
Well, one thing that strikes me, and I'm just going to prefix this with I am not a lawyer,
but check the employment contract because a lot of places, they can and will fire you for no reason whatsoever.
A lot of places actually can do that.
I believe Massachusetts can do that.
I'm not sure about...
Yeah, right to work state.
Yeah, which actually is something I kind of believe in because they're basically paying you money to show up,
and they can stop paying you at any time.
The URL in reference to your question is tinyurl.org slash 9victorbravo3.
I'm sorry, that's all about...
Not right to work state, it's...
No, I think it is right to work state, isn't it?
Is it? No, no, no, it's...
What the hell is the term?
It's not right to...
I personally...
No, because I always thought it was stupid, because I always figured it should be something called right to fire.
No, sorry, at will employment, that's right, at will employment.
Oh, that could be it.
Yes, I think right to work is something else, though.
It sounds familiar.
Yeah, right to work is something else that I misreferenced.
But yeah, at will employment.
If it's at will employment, there's actually almost nothing you can do as far as I know.
Of course, check with the lawyer.
Yeah, you guys are both wrong.
It's .org.
Yeah, exactly.
It's .org, .orgie, because that's what all...
I mean, that's the actual...
Orgy where?
That's the first sexual URL.
It's not this .xxx they were talking about.
It's .orgie.
Our next email tonight is from Sid.
I'll email.
I'll read this one.
Oh, you want to read this one?
Go ahead.
Okay.
You guys should look into Evdo, Evolution Data Only, or Evolution Data Optimized Mobile Data Services.
Verizon Wireless is marketing Evdo as Vcast, and it's hot.
I think it's in something like 12 markets, and in Denver Metro, anyway, they're pulling constant speeds of like 700K down with bursts as high as 2.2 megs.
Specs for Evdo do max out at 2.4, if I'm not mistaken, and it's a CDMA-only technology, which means no singular and no T-Mobile.
But word is, Sprint's got their Evdo implemented and switched on, but I don't think they're selling access yet.
Sprint usually likes to roll things out all at once.
Anyway, that's it.
Thanks for...
Anyway, that's it.
Thanks for the show and all that.
That's it.
Actually, that was Strom scoring up.
That wasn't like a grammar problem.
And Strom, just so you know, because I just want to make you sound like an idiot through the entire thing, it's Evdo.
Well, he's got Ev-do, so I assumed it was pronounced Evdo.
I actually think that's how Verizon abbreviates it, but it is Ev-do, and even though it's actually spelled like that, it's Ev-do.
So, yeah, I did some quick research on Ev-do.
And, wow, I was quite impressed.
Of course, I did this research on everyone's favorite world-writable encyclopedia, wikipedia.org.
I can't be here.
Tiny URL, wikipedia.org.
No, no, no, that's the actual article.
Oh, okay.
The Alpha Uniform 8 Echo Tango Yankee.
There's no echo in there.
Did I say echo or tango?
You said echo tango.
Oh, sorry.
Alpha Uniform 8 Tango Yankee.
Boy, I just can't talk tonight.
I was quite impressed with this.
I had no clue that this was out there.
I was apparently Verizon's previous, whatever you want to call what it was, that was like 144 kilobits down.
And I'm curious who was based on this, but I don't know.
You know what I heard?
I heard that it's just multiple streams of data.
It's like the slower one, but the cards have multiple channels or receivers.
Yeah, multiple 10i in them.
Yeah, so it's getting like 10 144k connections at once or something like that, whatever the slower one was.
Could be.
Yeah, I know also that the technology, I don't know if this is the actual name of the technology, but the one that seems to be on a GSM network is Edge.
Yeah.
Enhanced data.
That's like the GSM equivalent.
Yeah.
Does that go as fast as it did?
Because I was reading this one goes down to like 2.4 megabits a second.
Let's take a look.
I don't think Edge is as fast.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it wasn't.
But, of course, as they say.
Yeah, sorry.
Go ahead.
Does it say if they have that in Boston there?
I've seen people with the Vcash thing.
I don't know if anyone has Edge yet, but I've never seen an Edge deployed anywhere.
I thought AT&T was actually deploying it last year.
I don't know.
I know Edge is deployed, but I don't know if a lot of things are using it.
I know when I lived in New York, EVDO was getting kind of big, and I actually bought an EVDO card at a flea market one day for like $50.
Or no, I bought it for like $15, and I sold it on eBay for like $100.
Holy crap.
What flea market did you go to, and where can I go?
Wow.
It was a flea market in New York.
Damn.
Yeah, I'm sure there's only one flea market in New York.
It's a small town.
No, it's on the west side.
Yeah, here we go.
27th Street.
There are noobs in New York.
Anyway, Edge has enhanced data rates for GSM evolution, and it can carry data speeds up to 384 kilobits per second in packet mode.
That's cool.
I'll be waiting for that.
Yeah, like I was saying, that EVDO maxes out at 2.4 megs, but however they say that's under nominal condition.
So it's basically you staying stationary, probably right underneath the transmitter, and you getting brain cancer and everything.
One thing I didn't see is I'm curious what the latency is on this, because with wireless transmission, your latency skyrockets through the roof.
But if it's what everyone thinks it is, it's going to be pretty cool for VoIP.
I mean, heck, you don't even need the EVDO, and if it's multiple 144K streams, all you need is one 144 kilobit stream, and you're all set.
Yeah, I know someone that has an EVDO card, so I'll talk to them about it.
Yeah, that'd be fun.
Run some experiments and see what happens.
And if any of the listeners have EVDO, try it out, send a report in, and we'll get your email on the air.
They had a big special at TourCon.
Yeah, they were selling the cards.
Yeah, they were giving away the cards, basically, if you get the service.
How much does the service cost, you know?
$60 a month or so?
That's not bad.
Yeah, when I was going to get it in New York like three months ago, it was like $80 a month.
That'd be pretty cool if they came out with a contact flash card that could do that.
What I really want is I want an EVDO on my phone.
Like, I want BlackBerrys with EVDO compatibility built in.
Well, I was thinking if it was – oh, I was thinking that if it was a contact flash card,
I could put it in my pocket PC and use, like, Skype or – not Skype, what the heck they call it – SJPhone.
Just use all SIP.
That would be pretty cool.
Yeah.
Apparently, the mobile phone operators are scared shitless of VoIP over EVDO.
Well, no shit.
Anyway, enough about EVDO.
Our next email is a little bit similar to that.
Hi, BlackRatchet.
On the show, you're wondering about naming conventions that AMD uses for Athlon chips.
The name is based on performance results from integer operation comparisons between the AMD and the Pentium 4 processors.
So, if you have an AMD Athlon at 1.8 gigahertz, its integer operation performance is close to that of a Pentium 4 at 2.1 gigahertz.
Therefore, they named the chip the AMD Athlon 2100.
However, when you compare them on floating point operations, the Pentium chip would surpass the performance of the AMD because of the higher speed of the Pentium chip.
Later, Megatron.
Yep, that's what I thought.
I mean, I – if we go – I'll talk about it more in hacking stories, but I just got an AMD 2100, and it's only – it's like 1.733 gigahertz or something.
And it's a pretty – personally, I think it's a stupid way of naming chips.
Just give the damn clock speed out.
I mean, clock speed doesn't mean anything, but everyone else uses clock speed, so you can basically make apples for apples, oranges – apples to apples comparison to clock speed on x86.
As opposed to oranges to Buick.
Yes, well, oranges and Buick should be like a x86 to a RISC.
Alpha, alpha.
There we go.
So, shame on you, AMD.
You suck.
Yeah, this really pisses me off because I just – I was computer shopping like a week ago.
I just bought a new shuttle PC, and I was looking at a lot of the AMD ones, and I thought it was even worse.
I thought it was like the AMD Athlon 2700 was like a clock speed of 18 – or 1.8 gigahertz now.
Yeah, I recall having a 2000 plus, which was like 1.4 gigahertz.
Yeah, it was ridiculous.
I was just so pissed off at AMD.
I was like, all right, I'm not even going to bother.
I'm just getting an Intel.
So I got like a P4.
Well, I always see that they're kind of taking this page from Apple's playbook because they always used to like say, oh, well, our PowerPC G3 700 megahertz is just as fast as a Pentium 4 1.4 gigahertz.
And I go, no.
And you can make some arguments that the PowerPC is certainly faster in Pentium 4 in some aspects, but you're not going to say that, oh, we're twice as fast as the same clock speed of another chip.
No, sorry.
No, you just don't do that.
And even with AMD, you just can't say, oh, well, with floating point operations, we suck, but with integer operations, we rock.
It's stupid.
Enough said.
Yeah.
It's just so far off it doesn't make sense.
I'm looking at it right now and it says the 2700 is 2.16 gigahertz.
So it's like 600 megahertz off.
But they're misleading for there.
Mm-hmm.
And it's just going to get worse.
I mean, they're going to start coming off like AMD 3500s.
Yeah, what are they up doing now, aren't they?
They're already in the 3000s and the clock speed is not even like close.
I don't – I'm not sure what they've done.
I think the – I'm not sure what they have for the Opterons, but they're – I believe their latest x86 chipset are 2800s.
Yeah, Opterons are 64-bit and that's all new.
That's another fun thing to compare to.
All right, let's see.
I'm looking at one right now.
It says AMD Athlon XP 3000 Plus, 2.167 gigahertz.
So AMD, you lying, mean, people, you.
And they've been doing this for a long time too.
This isn't something like they just started.
They've been doing this for like two years.
Oh, more than two years.
No, no.
They did this about two years is what I would say on the outside.
No, I recall having – buying a used chip with this sort of nonsense going on over two years ago.
So I think it's at least two and a half, maybe three years.
Well, it's when they came out with the XP chip set.
So whenever they came up with that.
I think it was –
Yeah, because I have an Athlon Thunderbird and it's measured its clock speed.
It's a 1,200 megahertz chip and they say it's 1,200 megahertz.
Mm-hmm.
So Wikipedia is to the rescue.
Yeah.
Anyway, while Strom is researching that, we can sort of go on to show and tell, I guess.
Dennis, what have you been doing?
Nothing.
You've just been sitting there.
Are you currently located in New York City?
No, I'm not.
It sucks.
I'm really bummed on it.
But hopefully I'll be moving again soon.
Oh, cool.
Yeah.
So you're just sort of sitting there in the – your underground lair located underneath the Denver International Airport.
Mm-hmm.
October 9, 2001.
Wow.
God, I feel old all of a sudden.
Oh, yeah.
Back to me.
Yeah.
I mean, what are we going to go back to you?
You're saying, oh, I've done nothing.
I've been sitting there.
Ah, yeah.
I flew to Montreal this weekend and went gambling.
That was pretty fun.
Oh, yeah.
I saw you in the forums.
From the sounds of it, you were positive, so I assume you won money.
Yeah, I won a bunch of money.
What have you been doing, Strom?
Not much.
Not much, really.
Just been busy with school and real life.
God, you're all pathetic.
Yeah, I really like that.
I got a new computer.
Ooh.
Yeah, I finally broke the –
I'm waiting for mine.
I bought that shuttle PC and it still hasn't gotten here.
What are you going to do with the shuttle PC?
Are you going to use it for a documenter?
Are you going to use it for a desktop or are you going to be using it for, like, an entertainment center?
No.
Desktop, basically.
I want to put Gen 2 on it.
Why does everyone like Gen 2?
I don't understand why everyone likes Gen 2.
The right to repeal.
It really is.
When we were at TourCon, my friend had Gen 2 and he was like, yeah, you know, you've got to get into Gen 2.
It seems like if I'm ever going to get serious about Linux, I need to learn how to do everything on my own.
So I might as well start playing with Gen 2.
I don't know.
I like Debian.
Debian's good.
Debian handles it no problem.
My two close Linux friends are all Gen 2 now.
So I guess it helps if I'm going Gen 2 and they can help me out with stuff.
You have the Mac, don't you?
You should get, like, Yellow Dog or something.
Yeah, I have the Mac.
Well, I need a new PC, too, to play around with.
Let's delete PC things.
You can do everything on a Mac.
Steve Jobs told me so.
He can do pretty much everything.
I think so, but I don't know.
We should get Natus on one of those Switch commercials.
Hey, Natus.
I used to like a PC.
Now I'm hacking the Mac.
Yeah, I'm going to go on record right now as saying that I like Mac hardware, but the
OS X interface, just, no.
Oh, really?
I don't know the OS X interface.
It bugs the hell out of me.
It's too schmaltzy.
I want something simple.
That's, like, the first thing I'm going to try and do on my Gen 2 box is get it to look
like this Mac.
Mac's all steezy and shit, and I like the Finder.
I don't know.
I like the way it's set up.
Don't like Finder.
Don't.
I like the desktop interface.
It's pretty good.
I like the dock and all that.
Yeah, the dock is the big thing.
My PC is running Debian right now.
We are going off topic.
I'm going to pull us back to reality.
Well, no, we're talking about personal hacking stories.
We're talking about how.
That's why I have a Mac is because I like the icons.
Screw this terminal nonsense.
The only thing that drives me nuts about Mac hardware is that, well, they used to, and
now they sort of have this quasi-two-button mouse, but they don't admit it that it has
two buttons.
Oh, my God.
That was the stupidest thing ever, the mighty mouse.
Yeah, I know.
Oh, my God.
It's about time they fucking came out.
It's like Steve Jobs doesn't want to admit he's been wrong for these past 20 years or something.
Yeah, do you know how many times I've heard that Mac joke where it's like, the Apple engineers
are hard at work on a two-button mouse?
It's about time they came out with the goddamn thing already.
What was the other joke?
Name the Mac user says to the PC user, tell me one thing that you can do that my Mac can't
do, and the PC user says, right-click.
Yeah, there you go.
That one's good, too.
But now all those jokes have gone out the window.
Yeah, maybe they'll start adding it on PowerBook now, a right-and-a-left-click button.
No, but they would never, never actually make it a right-and-a-left-click distinct buttons,
because that would mean, again, they've been wrong since 1984.
Yeah, that's right.
They probably wouldn't.
They'd probably just add it so that each side, you'd be able to tell which side you
clicked.
But that would be stupid.
They're going to make it so that, like, you can just kind of, it'll telepathically decide
based on just what you're thinking at the moment that you tap, whether or not you wanted
a right-click or a left-click.
No, you don't even have to tap.
You just have to think about tapping, and it'll do it automatically.
Blueimplant.com.
Exactly.
Hoo-wee-sheesh.
So, yeah, so I got a new PC.
It's running Debian.
I finally broke the gigahertz barrier.
I can finally edit BinRev radio on my desktop.
I don't have to whip out my laptop, which was infinitely faster than my old desktop.
Yay.
It's amazing.
Of course, I'm going to have to install Windows tonight on it, so I can, actually, no, I can
just install Audacity.
I'll do Audacity for the show.
Didn't you?
Haven't you always complained bitterly about how badly Audacity handles editing this thing?
Well, I'll just have to grin and bear it and say my work plenty of times.
Of course, also, this was on my old PC, so it could just be that the fact that it was
just really, really, really slow.
For those of you who didn't know, I used to run, for the past five and a half years,
I ran a P3 733, and low.
It was state-of-the-art the time I bought it, but, oh, it's very slow now.
I see all these people coming out with, like, three...
Hmm?
I have a gigahertz app on, and I've been rocking for, like, four years now, four or five.
Actually, like, five years.
Yeah, I just missed the gigahertz train pulling out of the station, and I finally broke the
gigahertz barrier.
Yeah, I had a 750 megahertz processor, and then I upgraded.
I thought I was all lean and everything.
I'm like, whoa, one gigahertz.
Well, considering that I upgraded from a AMD...
Oh, God, I don't even...
I think it was, like, a K6, like, 266.
Yeah, it was, like, moving up from a Pinto to a Rolls-Royce.
I'm pretty sure that's what Decoder had for, like, six years, too.
Yeah.
He had one of those K6s.
Oh, man, they...
I'm sorry, they sucked.
I loved my computer, but, oh, God, it sucked.
Yeah, you kick it wrong, and it explodes.
No.
Open angle bracket slash Pinto joke, close angle bracket.
Ah, who needs this gas tank protected?
Thanks, Ford Motor Company.
So, anyway, let's go on to the main topic tonight.
And since we just brought up Decoder, I figure that's good.
We have intro to freaking tonight, which I think we previously announced.
Strom, I think you're the best person to answer this question.
What is freaking?
Well, freaking is playing with the phone network.
No, it's not.
Phone calls, I know it.
Free phone calls.
Free phone calls, red boxing, and beige boxing, yeah.
No, it's beige boxing, that's it.
Yeah, yeah.
Freaking is none of those things.
Oh, yeah, of course, blotto boxing.
We can't forget about that.
Blotto boxing.
No.
I forgot about that.
We'll explain why, for those of you who have no clue what a blotto box is and why it doesn't work, shortly.
But freaking is about playing with the phone network, learning how it works, you know,
learning what happens between you picking up the phone and getting your dial tone.
It's not about making free phone calls.
Free phone calls sometimes happen as a side effect of learning the network, but, you know,
for the most part, it's playing with the network, learning it, knowing it, loving it.
Free phone calls can sometimes be interpreted as a means to an ends, and it's never an ends to a means.
I still think I'm right.
I'm pretty sure it's about free phone calls, and I'm pretty sure Kevin Mitnick told me so.
And Captain Crunch, Steve Laszniak, he also told me.
Oh, no, for Steve Laszniak, it's all about prank calling people.
That's what he used his stuff for, and Captain Crunch is Captain Crunch, and we won't get into that.
Yeah.
Even Tom doesn't want to get into that.
Well, you know, him and Captain Crunch want him to want to hook up and do a TV show or something.
Oh, God, he's crazy.
Don't tell him he lives in Los Angeles.
He does.
No, I know.
Can you tell him that he lives in Los Angeles at DEFCON, Strom?
Well, I think the 310 number on my business card kind of gave that away.
Oh, okay, yeah.
And the P.O. Box address in Los Angeles.
I'm sure he got all excited.
I actually...
He wanted to watch you poop or something.
Yeah, I'm taken, though, so nothing is going to happen.
Captain Crunch is watching you poop.
So, anyway.
So, that's basically...
Freaking is what, for the phone network, is what hacking is to the Internet.
But it's just sitting around and exploring and figuring out stuff out.
And a lot of people think it's about, you know, free phone calls and blotto boxing and all that wonderful stuff.
And, no, it's just basically sitting there and figuring everything out about it and learning some fun things in the process.
So, freaking started?
When did freaking start?
I mean, you really can't say when.
Freaking started...
Yeah, well, I mean, the very, very, very early origins of the phone network were that, you know, manual exchanges were key.
You know, there was no such thing as automatic switching.
And, originally, you know, teenage boys have been used for telegraph operators forever.
And so, it seemed a natural progression to make them into telephone operators.
But they were not well suited to the job.
They were, you know, they behaved pretty much like phone freaks behave today.
So, they were replaced with, you know, women instead.
Well, they were a little more rude.
What they used to do is basically, for those of you who don't know, the old ways, before you had all these fun buttons and touch tones and dials,
you would basically pick up your phone, an operator would come on the other line and say,
what number are you dialing, please?
And you'd say, you know, 555-1234.
And they would place your phone call.
And the problem.
That's 368-ass breath.
Whatever.
The, uh, whatever.
The, and what the problem with these boys is they soon discovered is they would, you know,
you'd wait there and you'd pick up your phone and no one would answer, which is, which is bad because they don't make money off of that.
Or you'd give them a number and say, no, I don't want to do that.
So, basically, that's what they did and they ripped out all the guys that were, fired them all and they put women in charge.
Which was a big thing back then.
Because this was, we're talking about, like, the 1900s, turn of the century, thereabouts.
Yeah.
No, before that.
Late, uh, late 90s century.
Yeah, 1890s, 1880s.
18, uh, 1890s was really more when it started to take off.
That's what I was figuring.
Anyway.
Yeah.
Yeah, you can't trace it back to the 1880s, though.
Mm-hmm.
So, yeah, Freaking is well over 100 years old.
But at some point, uh, the telephone exchange, the manual telephone exchanges began to be replaced with automatic telephone exchanges.
And with equipment handling phone calls instead of people, you know, equipment is more fun to play with sometimes than people are.
So, you get these people who start playing with the equipment and figuring out the interesting things it can do.
And so that's the kind of the genesis of Freaking.
Although, the real fascination with the network began in the 1960s with the introduction of direct dialable, sorry, direct distance dialing, DDD, which, for those of you who don't know, before direct distance dialing, if you wanted to make a call outside of your local area, you would have to dial operator, tell her the number.
She would pick up a trunk to the long distance operator.
The long distance operator would have to place your call through manually to the inward operator in the remote city who would place your call through.
And then they would ring you back when the call was set up.
So, it was a very intensive thing.
And DDD was the system which allowed you to dial 1 plus the area code plus the number.
Or in some cities which had, you know, heavily lots of crossbar 5, mainly like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, dialing 1 plus was unheard of.
You would just dial, you know, the area code plus the number.
But I'm digressing.
So, with the advent of the direct distance dialing and the totally automatic telephone system, the phone freaks began to start playing with this and to kind of start noticing fun things you could do.
And that's the genesis of freaking.
I really wouldn't call it a genesis.
That's more of when it really started to take off.
Yeah, let me say, yeah, that's the genesis of freaking in the modern sense of it being something close to recognizable.
Yes, what most people consider freaking, that would be the genesis of it.
It's basically, you know, some guy going out to a pay phone, dialing an 800 number, and then taking out this little box out of his pocket, and then routing phone calls across the globe.
And that's what it all is.
This really started about 1960 or so, when people actually just said, yeah, I would say probably 1962.
1964 is when the bell system actually, what it was is the way they used to dial your phone number is you would dial your long distance call,
at which point the equipment would interpret that, and then it would do special types of tones that would route your number across the various forms of switching equipment that was existing in the network.
And this was fine and dandy, and people found out that, you know, you could record these tones and splice them together and actually make them route to different places.
But they never actually figured out what these tones were.
Sure, so the bell system accidentally one day published all of these master tones in a bell system technical journal article.
I don't think it was so accidental.
It was just more, you know, unknowing, not knowing that this could be kind of dangerous.
True, I guess you could say that.
Yeah.
Things don't accidentally get published in the bell system technical journal.
True, true.
And so when people actually figured out, well, hey, these are these master tones.
Basically, I can make a little box that will play all these tones, and I can convince all the equipment that I am trying to route my call different ways,
which was, of course, kind of illegal and not actually good.
But it just expanded into this giant exploration of the phone system, which really is what freaking is.
Of course, one of the side effects and benefits of this was you got free phone calls.
Basically, I could make it look like I was dialing a 800 number, and in reality, I'm routing over to southern Indonesia,
which was kind of expensive back then.
But in reality, I'm not paying for anything.
According to my local billing equipment, I am dialing an 800 number.
So what this little box used to be called was the blue box, and that is the big thing.
This is the creme de la creme.
Everyone hears about the blue box, and they just go, ooh.
Because it was just this little thing you could have in your palm of your hand,
and basically you can control all of these switching equipment,
which essentially were giant computers back when computers weren't even around.
and just control all of the switching equipment.
And it was just this wonderful thing.
Ah!
Now, are you making fun of me?
That was the best sound effect I've ever heard.
I like the, ah!
So that's what freaking is.
And freaking has progressed from there.
I mean, back in the 1980s, they stopped using all these systems that were susceptible to blue boxing.
Here's an example of multi-frequency tones, by the way.
And that's basically what you would hear when you would dial across a long-distance network,
because these switching things would talk back to each other with these tones,
and that's how you control them.
So around the 1980s, these things started to get retired,
and they moved over to digital systems that were actually completely computer-controlled,
and weren't susceptible to blue boxing, and you freaking just kind of...
Well, that's not so much, that's more a misnomer,
because the 1ESS, the 1AESS, are both computer-controlled analog switches,
and they're totally susceptible to blue boxing.
The real key is not so much the switches themselves, but the signaling used between them.
And what happened was, this was all in-band signaling.
The number was sent down the tones down the trunk that you were going to be talking on.
And instead, what the new system that replaced it, called Signaling System 7,
does, it sends everything totally out of band.
So in reality, you can't hear everything.
It's just more of a packet flying across the network, which you don't hear or see.
Yeah, which you don't know anything about.
And in fact, it does make call setup times quicker,
because, you know, the old network, if you dialed a New York number from Los Angeles,
you would tend to have to wait maybe 10, 15 seconds for your call to go through,
whereas now it starts ringing practically immediately.
So anyway, so as these systems died out, and the trunking died,
and these systems that used this in-band signaling didn't work,
I don't know, I guess you could say in the early 90s, freaking kind of hit a low point.
As the old system started to go, and the new system, really, you couldn't do much fun things with it,
or people, nothing that you could do on the old system.
There were certain things you could do, and people still played around with it,
but not as it was back in the olden days.
And nowadays, all the freaks are using VoIP, because VoIP is cool,
and VoIP is basically, you get to be your own phone company, as we specified in our asterisk presentation.
And of course, the really cool thing about VoIP is the fact that, you know,
what makes it cool is not just that you're able to route calls over the Internet to the PSTN,
but you have a lot more control over what actually gets sent out to your carrier,
rather than you just signaling, I want this number.
You get to signal, set up a call, so this number, from this number, over this network, and so on and so on.
Yeah, have my caller ID set to this, and all kinds of fun stuff.
And actually, more than a couple of the, I guess you could say the original freaking clan,
are very interested in VoIP, and just are amazed at the things you can do today.
We know a couple of people.
Mark Brunet.
One of which actually is being Captain Crunch.
But yeah, Mark Brunet is into VoIP, but I wasn't aware of that.
Oh yeah, yeah, Mark Brunet plays with VoIP.
Bill New York plays with VoIP.
Evan Dorbell plays with VoIP a little bit, though.
Not so much.
I was unaware of this.
See, all these people are playing with it.
Everyone's doing it.
So, basically, you see all of these boxes out there right now, and you hear all these text
files from 1980 about Blotto boxing, and beige boxing, and red boxing, blue boxing.
There are really...
We cover what a blue box is.
But basically, what are the three boxes that are workable in today's system, Strom?
Well, the three real boxes...
You can go rant about your...
Yes.
The three real boxes.
I'm going to drop into my rant about the three real boxes.
The only three real boxes are the black box, the red box, and the blue box.
The black box was a resistor trick that you could use on the old network, because when
you hear the phone ringing on the old network, it's actually connected up to the subscriber's
phone line that you're dialing.
So, if you put a resistor in series, you can drop the voltage on the line enough to trip
the ring and talk on the circuit, but not drop it enough to pass answer supervision all
the way back.
And so, the call never answers, and the call never gets spilled.
We've already gone over what a blue box is.
It's a method of sending tones down the line and controlling the old network, which doesn't
work much anymore.
And then, there's red boxing, which is generating coin tones and pretending to be depositing coins
into a phone, a payphone, rather than actually depositing them.
The rest are either works of fiction or simple electronic tricks you can do at home or things
of that nature.
There's, for example, or they're even just totally nonsensical.
Like, the beige box, which I know I'm going to get a lot of flack for claiming this isn't
a real box, but all it is, it's a telephone with alligator clips on the end of it.
It's a homemade lineman's butt set.
And, I mean, if you're going to consider going to Radio Shack, getting two alligator clips and
a soldering iron to be a complicated electronics project on the level of making a blue box or
a red box, you know, it, it, no.
The black box is simple, but it took advantage of, of actually understanding how the network
worked.
Whereas with a, a beige box, it's just a matter of, you know, oh, here's contact points,
clip, dial tone.
So, really, if you're going to do it right, go to Graybar or eBay and get yourself a real
butt set, not a beige box.
But I'm digressing.
There's also...
Well, the beige box really came around back in previously to 1984 when you couldn't get
these online.
You can't go to eBay, you can't go to Graybar.
Yeah, no, you could, you could always go to Graybar.
Well, you couldn't actually buy it, could you?
Oh, yes, of course you could.
I was unaware of that.
I always thought it was the Bell System property and you could basically either steal it out of
a truck or make a beige box.
Well, yeah, Western Electric had, uh, had their own, uh, had their own butt sets, but
Automatic Electric and, uh, Automatic Electric, Stromberg, Carlson, um, and ITT, I'm pretty
sure, made them as well.
And this was the stuff that you could buy at Graybar.
So you've always been able...
I stand corrected.
You've always been able, as far as I know, to buy the stuff at Graybar.
There's also, um, what other crazy boxes are there?
There's the Blotto box.
Let's get into this.
This, if you look this up, this is a totally outrageous claim that you can plug your phone
line into the AC power and some versions have you plugging it, you know, putting it next
to a, uh, plugging it to a generator or something and blowing out, depending on which version
of the file you read, your switch, your entire, uh, local area or your entire area code.
Look, this is total bunk because there are relays.
At the point where your copper loop hits the central office, there are relays and circuit
breakers that are there to detect things like a cross with power lines or a strike by lightning
or other things of that nature and cut your phone line off from doing any damage to the
switch.
So if you do this, all that you're going to do is you're going to blow out your own phone
line, possibly damage all the phones on your line, and, uh, be pretty much stuck until
they've, uh, sheepishly call repair service and say, hey, my, my phone doesn't work.
What happened to it?
Uh, I don't know.
Pray they don't ask too many questions.
Exactly.
And I, I saw something online where it was, they, they, they called it a bottle box, but
basically what it was to reverse, you basically go outside someone's house and you hook it
up to their phone line and you fried their phone service and basically any type of phone
or computer or modem that was on their network and that's something that theoretically could
work, but yeah, although, yeah, that's, that's not freaking you.
That's being a stupid asshole teenager.
Yes, exactly.
That's tons of stupid asshole teenagers go, hey, wait a second.
So yeah, so those are the boxes and let's state for the record that the only two boxes that
really work right now are the beige box, which we already went into.
And the red box, and I know more than a few people are going to say, hey, there's a third
box that works, but we're not going to cover that because it only works in two places in
the United States and we're not going to talk about that.
The red boxings.
I wish I could more, learn more about that though, because I mean, there's so much stuff
you could probably do, like these other crazy countries, third world countries.
So.
Yeah, there's lots of stuff.
If, if, a good reference, we'll just sort of get this right here right now, is Default
Radio, which was a radio show, I don't know, when did it run?
It ran from like, 2003, September 2003 to about 2004, late or so.
I'm not sure when it exactly ran.
It's DefaultRadio.com.
It's a really good show and they, and they do some crazy stuff on there that still works
today and that, that's a great example of modern day freaking.
But even that stuff wasn't like, that in depth.
I know there's got to be more.
Oh, there's always more.
There's always more stuff about what you could do.
You could do stuff with like, Free World Dial-Up or something in England, because you can dial
the 0800 numbers, but then I think that got shut down.
I don't know.
I've just heard so much different stuff.
No, I mean, it's basically what it is, is you've got to use your judgment.
But there's always stuff out there.
There's always stuff to learn.
That's what it is.
That's what freaking is all about, much like there's always stuff to learn with computers.
Hackers find them.
Well, I will state for the record that red boxing still works.
What you have to do, actually, I've got a, I've got a series of recordings that I need
to piece together and put up, but I've got a series of recordings of how red boxing works.
Although in the recordings, I'll state for the record that I'm actually depositing real
coins, but you can imagine I'm pressing buttons on the red box.
Yes.
What it basically is, is the way the red box still works, is that there's something
called ACTS, which stands for Automatic Coin Toll System.
Automated Coin Toll System, or Automated Coin Toll Signaling, although technically, actually,
ACTS is no longer the correct term for it, because ACTS was something that ran off TSPS.
And TSPS...
Oh, really?
What is it called?
It doesn't run around.
These days, it's just Nortel Top's Traffic Operator Position Service, or system.
Yeah, Traffic Operator Position System.
So, what this is, pretty much, on local toll calls, when you place a call through, it'll
do a coin refund, first of all, if you deposit the minimum amount as if it were a local call,
and then it'll switch you through to the tandem, to the TOPS tandem.
And the Automated TOPS tandem will prompt you to deposit however many cents for the first
three minutes.
So, as you...
Actually, you know what?
I should do this.
I should bring my...
I should come in on my pay phone, and I can just demonstrate this with real coins.
Just a second.
All right.
So, what it is, is basically, the system is now...
When it says, you know, please deposit X amount of coins, it waits for the phone to signal back
to it that it's got coins.
And the way it does this is little dual-tone multi-frequency pulses, as Strom will demonstrate
right now.
Here's five cents.
Here's ten cents.
And here's twenty-five cents.
Yes.
And what this is, is that the system waits for that, and it understands those tones as
being five, ten, and twenty-five cents.
And when it reads these tones back, it assumes that you deposit coins.
Now, what redboxing is, is you don't deposit coins, you just play these sound files back to
it.
Sound clips, tapes, however you want to do it.
And it thinks you've deposited coins, but you haven't.
Hmm?
You should use your mouth.
Yeah, you can use your mouth.
You can be, like, lucky.
Has he actually ever done that to an ACTS system?
It's on Doug TV.
You've never seen it.
Oh, no, no.
He just did that to the test set.
He never actually...
Yeah, he never actually did it...
No, I'm pretty sure he's done it, like, on a conference or something, and he's screwing
around.
Well, you never know.
You could actually convince that.
And you can actually say, hey, you know, I was just speaking to it.
I didn't actually know I was doing something illegal.
But anyway, that's what redboxing is.
Now, what you used to be able to do is you used to be able to do that nationwide through
AT&T system.
However, in the late 90s, AT&T discontinued that service.
And so everyone claimed, oh, no, redboxing is dead.
It'll never work anymore.
Blah, blah, blah, blah.
But what they completely forget is that now it just works.
It wasn't the late 90s.
It was 2002.
2002?
Well, it was that late.
That was before I was on the scene.
Mm-hmm.
So I wasn't paying attention at that point.
Mm-hmm.
So what it is now that everyone forgot that, hey, AT&T is not doing it anymore.
I can't call nationwide.
But, you know, a lot of local providers, much like Verizon, still use it for local calls.
Mm-hmm.
Which are local calls outside of your local calling area but inside your local access transport
area, which is basically a kind of a line of demarcation that was set up after the Bell
system divesture.
And if you really want to do some research on that, look at Wikipedia.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Look at Wikipedia.
It'll explain it all, how many there are, what they're called, and all kinds of stuff.
And so basically redboxing still works.
It just does not work for nationwide calls anymore.
And it's just heavily dependent on the system.
And a lot of people are actually moving away from ACTS or whatever they call it because it
costs a lot more money to run.
And Verizon is all moving to all cocots anyway, which is very sad.
But since we're on the topic of payphones, let's go talk about payphones.
There are two types of payphones.
There are regular payphones, which are standard.
There's actually technically three types of payphones.
Okay.
So there's cocots, which are very much where the smarts are in the phone.
And they're more or less hooked up to a standard phone line.
And they do all the coin signaling inside its electronic brain, which is located in the
phone.
Well, actually, there's really no signaling.
It's all internally computed.
Yeah.
I mean, signaling is the wrong word.
Yes.
Correct.
And then there's the standard sort of local exchange carrier payphones, which are basically
run by your local exchange carrier.
For example, mine in Massachusetts would be run by Verizon.
Here in Southern California, it's either SBC or Verizon, depending on which part of Los
Angeles you happen to be in at the time.
Natus, what would it be for you?
I know what it would be, but let's just say it anyway.
Verizon.
If you're in the Midwest, it'll be Quest.
And if you're in the Mountain region or like the Northwest region, which I think is like
the Minneapolis, the Minnesota area and around there, or the Pacific Northwest, it'll be Quest.
If you're in California or the Midwest, it'll be SBC.
And if you're in...
If you're down in the Southeast, it'll be Bell South.
Yep, Bell South.
Bell South ripped out all their payphones, as far as I know.
Yes, which is very sad, and we really won't touch on that.
So, we already covered Cocots, and now the second time, that would be your...
I don't know what the actual official term is.
It's kind of like CO-controlled coin signaling.
Yeah, CO-controlled coin signaling.
I like the term either dumb phone or single-slot phone.
Yeah, single-slot.
That's what it is.
And those are basically the phones run by your local company, and they're set up to run.
And all the smarts are actually sitting on the telephone switch back at the central office.
And it's...
When you deposit a coin, it does a little test.
It basically sends a 120, 110, 120.
Well, then, okay.
What happens is, when you make a local call, when you want to make a local call, you deposit the coins at the dial tone.
And when you deposit the minimum deposit, they fall through the totalizer and trip a switch.
They trip a relay.
Well, what's a totalizer?
The totalizer...
Okay.
The totalizer is the device inside the phone that counts up the coins, basically.
It counts up the minimum deposit and generates those tones for...
Generates the tones for when you're...
When you're in the ACTS mode.
Yeah, when you're in the ACTS mode.
But, so, when you're making a local call, you deposit the minimum deposit, and then you dial the number.
Once you finish dialing the number, the local central office performs a ground test on the phone
and checks to see whether or not that switch has been tripped.
And if it's been tripped, then there will be a ground on the line when it does that test.
If it hasn't tripped, there will be no ground on the line.
So, and what happens is it's the tip lead that gets shorted to ground.
So, if the tip lead is shorted to ground upon completion of dialing, then the local call goes through.
If the tip lead is not shorted to ground upon completion of dialing, then the local call does not go through.
And you get the error recording saying, you need to deposit the minimum deposit.
Please hang up and try again.
And that's how local calls work.
Now, what's this third type of phone you were talking about?
Ah, there is a third type of phone, which is the hybrid phone.
Ah, true.
Yes, okay.
Which acts like a dumb phone for local calls, but acts like a co-call for toll calls.
Did I actually come up with the term hybrid, or did someone else actually come up with that?
I forget who came up with the term hybrid.
I never actually remember it actually being in use before I started calling that on yet another payphone list.
Which is my website, of course, as always, and you should check that out.
Yapple.org.
Yeah.
I'm going to call it Orgy.
Orgy.
So, anyway, that's the third type of phone, and basically it's this combination there, too, like I said.
And it's pretty simple to understand, and essentially, I always take, it always takes all of the bad parts of a, being a dumb phone,
and all the bad parts of being a cocot, and just combines them all into one nice little package for you.
With a charming yellow handset.
Yes.
Yeah.
They're disgusting.
I can't stand them.
But, anyway.
Nice phone with one stick on it.
Now, why are payphones cool?
Payphones are cool because it's basically your own little wonderful way, completely anonymous, to get onto the phone system.
You can do everything you want on there.
Of course, you always have to pay the little toll to get in.
But once you do that, it's all yours, and you can fiddle with it to your heart's content, and more than enough, you just, no one will notice and complain about you.
You can just sit there and do it.
Because everyone uses payphones, for the most part.
Of course, now that cell phones are becoming more prevalent, of course, they all just sort of sit there and collect dust, which always makes me sad.
But the payphones are cool because just, they work, and you can play with them, and you don't have to worry about tying up your own phone line, or you don't have to worry about, oh, my God, someone's going to trace me back and find out about it.
Plus, you can call them.
Yep.
Well, for the most part.
You can't call them up in the Northeast.
In Los Angeles, you can call quite a few of them.
And that's another fun thing about it.
Part of the reason why I started the end of the payphone list is you can sit there and call them and talk to random people.
And ask them all kinds of strange questions, and they'll never know who's calling because they don't have caller ID.
What are you wearing?
Probably they're fully closed, I would hope.
Well, you never know.
Maybe not in the seedier parts of Los Angeles, yeah.
What color underwear are you wearing?
So, moving right along.
Do I look good in this phone?
That was good.
So, we should talk about local exchange carriers because I'm not sure that people know about local exchange carriers.
Follow you, Strom.
All right.
So, when we say that the payphone is operated by the local exchange carrier, we mean the incumbent local exchange carrier for the area, which is the ILEC.
So, what the ILEC is, if you look – if you go back, you know, 20 years, there was one phone company that's going to be the area.
Come on, Strom.
Let's go set up the Wayback Machine to 1984.
So, let me just get up my 1984 disco mix here and – oh, forget it.
So, anyway, if you go back to about 1984 or so, there was one phone company that serves your area.
Just one.
None of this competitive phone company nonsense.
Just one phone company.
And that phone company is the ILEC, the incumbent local exchange carrier for your area.
In many cases, this will be – in most of the continental U.S., this will be either Verizon, SBC, Quest, Bell South, or Sprint.
Of course, Sprint.
There's also – so, I'll get into this in a second.
There are different types of ILECs.
There are regional Bell operating companies, and there are independent companies.
So, the RBOX, the regional Bell companies, are Verizon, SBC, Quest, and Bell South.
The independent companies are Sprint, CenturyTel, and what are the other major independent companies?
I'm not sure.
There's also a handful of – not major independents, but a lot of places where you start moving out into the boonies.
There's small mom-and-pops.
Oh, yeah.
TDS Telecom is one leased around here.
They've bought up a lot of small mom-and-pops in New Hampshire.
Yeah, they did that here, too, in New England.
They did that in a lot of places in New England, I think.
There's an independent company in Northern California somewhere called the Volcano Telephone Company.
Yeah, their CEO in Mount St. Helens just sort of got destroyed a while back.
I said California off Washington State.
Oh, close enough.
They could have long-distance providers or something.
And Verizon is actually an interesting one because Verizon is a combination of Bell Atlantic, which was a Bell company, and GTE, which was the largest independent company.
So some parts of Verizon are GTE and some parts are Bell Atlantic.
And they're still tariffed differently.
The rates are different.
The switching equipment tends to be different.
So it's going to be a while before you see no discernible difference from which Verizon area you're in.
I wish they had GTD-5s out here in former Bell Atlantic territory.
Yeah, GTD-5s are fun to play with.
Yeah, you're closer to GTD-5s than we are.
I mean, you just have to zip right over to cross the border, I think.
Who, me?
Yeah.
I mean, in New York City, you can be pretty close, too.
You just have to go down to Pennsylvania.
Do they have GTD-5s there?
I believe so, don't they?
Yeah, there's GTD in Pennsylvania.
In fact, the GTE payphone that I have is from Pennsylvania.
Hershey, Pennsylvania, if I remember correctly.
Yeah, the number is 717-533.
And so that's a Hershey prefix.
What's funny is I called the number on the Dymo label on the payphone.
And the person answered and said, oh, is this a payphone?
Yeah, it is.
Where is this payphone?
Oh, it's in the Hershey chocolate plant.
Does it have a nice brown handset?
Unfortunately, no, it doesn't.
It came with a black one, and I replaced it with an automatic electric handset.
Dude, he's ricing out his phone.
More like restoring it.
So Verizon, the GTD-5 is just a different type of switching system, which is basically the computer that controls all your content.
It controls all your telephones.
It's the thing that gives you dial tone, basically.
Exactly.
Thank you.
The thing that gives you dial tone and puts your calls through.
So there are...
Those are the major ILECs.
Now, what other LECs are there?
There's a CLEC.
Now, what's a CLEC from?
A CLEC is a competitive local exchange carrier.
These are the, like, the PacWest Telecom and the cable company and the AT&T local and what else is there?
I'm just naming off CLEC because I know we're local here.
But actually, a lot of companies will...
RCN.
Yeah, RCN.
A lot of companies will, in fact, our box are running CLEC service elsewhere.
Like, for example, in Las Vegas, which is firmly Sprint territory and has always been independent phone company territory,
there's now an SBC switch, and you can get SBC local service in Vegas.
I believe I can get SBC service in Massachusetts.
Wow.
Yeah.
I know I can get SBC DSL, and I'm pretty sure they have CLEC services out here.
It's all special.
I don't actually get to be on an SBC switch like I would be in Las Vegas.
But still, I would find it highly amusing if I actually went to SBC.
Because, you know, it's all going there anyway.
They're eating up everybody.
What was Blake's map, 2015 telecom maps?
The whole country's SBC?
And so there's also a type of phone company known as an inter-exchange carrier.
These are your long-distance companies.
AT&T, MCI, we're really dating the show here because those aren't going to exist in a year.
Yeah, true.
AT&T is getting bought up by SBC, and MCI is getting bought up by Verizon.
Sprint's an IXC.
Yeah, Sprint's also an IXC.
Sprint's an interesting story, though.
So the story of Sprint, in a nutshell, is Sprint is an amalgam of United Telephone and Central Telephone companies,
the local exchange carriers.
And then they bought from GTE a long-distance company which had been started actually by Southern Pacific Railroad called Sprint.
Sprint actually stands for Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Telecommunications.
And so United Telephone bought Central Telephone and then bought Sprint and changed the company name to Sprint.
Now, with Sprint buying Nextel, what's actually kind of funny is Sprint is now going to divest itself of its local telephone operation.
So the Sprint local stuff is going to either spin off independently or get eaten up by SBC or something.
They're turning into a cell phone company, basically.
Yeah, they're turning into purely long-distance and mobile phones.
That's kind of sad.
I'll go buy Sprint local.
If the CEO is Sprint and listening, I place my dollar for $20, and I probably have some change in my pocket.
So maybe like $20, $50 or so.
I'll throw an additional $25 and a pink Princess touchtone phone.
I want a pink Princess touchtone phone.
Oh, it's a beautiful phone.
Yeah, I can imagine.
But so – and the other inter-exchange carriers, before we get too distracted, are Global Crossing and – who else is there?
There's – Quest, of course.
MCI.
Of course, Quest.
Quest, yes.
Yeah, I already talked about MCI.
Yeah.
Quest is – started off as an inter-exchange carrier, actually, and they bought up US West for their local phone operation.
So Quest has also an inter-exchange carrier side and a local exchange carrier side.
Well, Verizon does too, though, right?
Verizon actually, at this point, doesn't have their own inter-exchange network.
They just resell other people's service and call it Verizon Long Distance.
That's why they're buying MCI.
I believe they're using Global Crossing.
Are they?
I think so.
I know they're not using AT&T.
I know SBC Long Distance, at least in California, is AT&T.
Hmm.
Which is kind of ironic, because SBC is now buying AT&T.
Yeah, actually, AT&T is an IXC now.
Always has been an IXC.
Yeah, I don't think we mentioned them, did we?
I mentioned them way at the beginning.
Oh, I don't know.
We just sort of went on.
What's the other one?
Level 3 is one, is that?
Oh, yeah, Level 3.
Oh, yeah, Level 3, I think there's more data than voice, though, although.
Yeah, Level 3, let's call that.
Well, no, let – yeah, well, they do do voice, and actually I can go in front of Harrison Ave
switching station and see a license plate that says level – not license plate, a manhole
cover that says Level 3.com, and I was like, wow, we are not in Kansas anymore.
So, anyway, what are some of the fun things one can do on the network?
You can hand-scan, and basically what hand-scanning is, it's kind of boring, we'll go for you.
I don't think I was – I think there was something else I wanted to explain about the
C-like versus I-like versus Arbok versus I-X-E thing.
Oh, okay.
You know, I can't remember anymore.
I'm sorry.
Okay, well, you lose.
What did you say, Natus?
Brain fart?
Yeah.
Damn.
So, one of the tried-and-true freaking methods is something called hand-scanning.
And what hand-scanning is, it's kind of boring.
Basically, you sit there, and you pick out some phone numbers you want to dial, and you
dial them, and you see what's on the other end.
And don't tell the listeners that it's boring.
Yeah, that's boring.
It is boring.
I can't stand doing it.
I do not do it.
I occasionally dial phone numbers in random and hope to get intercepts and see what they
sound like.
But what an intercept is, for those of you who don't know, is the little error message
you get, like, you know, your phone number you have called is not in service at this time.
Let me pull up an example of an intercept message here.
Okay.
If I remember what the number is.
508-995-9972.
Oh, of course.
310-454-9999.
We're sorry.
All circuits are busy now.
Please try your call again later.
And that's one example.
Basically, there's all kinds of different error messages you can get.
Some of the more interesting error messages that I found, well, I haven't found them.
I actually picked them up from a text file from Decoder, are the AT&T error messages.
And you can get all kinds of fun stuff, like, oh, due to the hurricane in the area you were
calling, your call cannot be completed as dialed.
And there's just all kinds of fun and interesting things that people think of and people have
to think of just, you know.
There's all kinds of stuff you can find in hand scanning, though.
It's not just intercepts and everything.
Yeah, just intercepts.
What else do you find out?
Some of you guys think it's boring, because that's, like, one of the coolest things to me
was always hand scanning.
I usually just hand scan all the time.
I mean, Decoder would, like, talk about what we found.
Was that the Mexico one?
Yeah, the codes to Mexico changed from New York City.
Oh.
So, okay, well, why do you think hand scanning is so interesting?
I'm not knocking it.
I am saying if it floats your boat, go right ahead.
But I just can't.
I can't stand it.
I'm very ADD.
It's not, well, yeah, it does kind of suck, like, actually typing in the numbers
and over and over and over, but it's just, like, I don't know.
It's just one of, like, the most purest, well, I can't say purest things.
I don't know.
I just always found cool stuff scanning, and Decoder would always have a million things
that he would find, and he'd be like, oh, damn, I need to do some scans,
so I'll find cool stuff, too.
Well, honestly, there are tons of cool stuff you can find on there.
Yeah.
And hand scanning is the only way you're going to find it.
Personally, I just, I can't, it drives me nuts.
It's, I mean, I get, I get, it's cool for about, like, the first 20 or 30 numbers,
but after that, I just go, ugh.
Yeah, in the same way, I get really, really bored after 20 or 30 numbers.
I get pumped up, and I want to finish it, and I want to move on.
Speaking of which, I actually have some numbers.
For those of you who are listening to the episode, go to the freaking forum on binrev.com,
and I'm going to post some numbers tonight that lead to some interesting intercepts,
and I actually need to record them, because I think the switch is actually going out of service.
It's an Ericsson AXE 10.
Ooh.
That's been in service, it's been in service since, like, 1986, 87.
Eh, digital.
Boring.
Oh, digital and boring.
I mean, it's not analog anymore, but still, it's pretty cool.
I think the tone plant's actually older than that.
A digital switch with a separate tone plant?
Not tone plant, oh, what am I, the intercept thing.
Oh, the announcement machine.
Announcement circuit, thank you.
So, one of the ways you can actually automate hand scanning is war dialing,
and what war dialing is, it's kind of a cousin of hand scanning,
is basically you set up your modem to dial and dial and dial and try to find modem carriers.
Natus, do you want to talk about war dialing?
Okay.
You've been sitting there silent.
All right.
Yeah.
So, war dialing has, it's, all right, war dialing and hand scanning have two different purposes, basically.
Like, you said, war dialing is just, it dials everything, either at random or sequentially,
and it looks for computers, basically.
I mean, you can set it to look for tones or anything like that,
but I think it's kind of pointless to do that.
And basically, the only thing I ever war dial for is modems, and that's pretty much all anybody I ever talked to that war dial still looks for.
Well, what other stuff can you find when you're war dialing?
I mean, it says, I don't know much about tone lock, specifically, but you can set it to look for, like, loops and weird things like that.
Hmm.
Uh, tone lock is a war dialing program for, like, DOS or something, if I'm not mistaken?
Yeah.
It's for DOS, and it works, it still works in Windows and everything.
It's ancient, ancient software, but still good stuff.
Yeah, it is.
I forget, was the rapper named after the software, or was it the other way around?
Tone lock?
Yeah.
Uh, I don't know.
Isn't there a rapper, like, tone, tone look or something like that?
Yes, yes, yes.
Yeah, it must have been after the program was named after him.
I'm pretty sure he was before.
I don't know, that'd be pretty gangster if a rapper was named after a war dial program.
That's, I prefer that explanation.
Dude, I, if seriously, if someone did that, I'd buy it, like, you know, DJ Blue Box.
I'd be like, yeah, man, I don't care if your stuff sucks.
I'm just buying it because you have a cool name.
MC A-Nack and DJ Ringback hanging out in phone cans.
Not there, you came up with that.
Yeah, that's pretty neat.
Okay, so yeah, I don't know, back to war dialing.
I don't know, just, it's basically to find other modems.
And the cool thing I always got excited about when I was starting to get into all this was that I'd be like, oh, I might find the switch.
I might find the CO switch, a dial-up to it, you know.
I might find internal phone company test equipment.
And so that's why I was scanning, war dialing.
And for those of you who want to see war dialing in action or a Hollywood version of it, you should watch War Games, which is a movie with Matthew Broderick.
And if you even consider yourself a geek, you need to watch this film.
I should note a very, very young Matthew Broderick.
I know one person that considers himself a geek that hasn't seen it, and when he admitted this to our 2600 group, we basically all went and were going to actually sit him down and make him watch it.
Did you all gasp in unison?
Yes, exactly.
It was kind of funny.
We all just sat there and went, oh my god, you've never seen it?
Well, I hope you won't find any government crap like that when you're a war dialing.
Yeah.
Nowadays.
Yeah, the same rule with war dialing goes with every other thing.
Just keep your nose clean.
Just because you find something that's interesting doesn't mean you should go and poke and prod at it.
Again, BinRev Radio does not support illegal, you know, stuff and all that kind of crap.
Legal disclaimer, BinRev Radio does not support illegal, um, stuff and all that, uh, stuff, yeah.
No.
Yeah.
One thing a lot of people don't know about now is that you can use VoIP to war dial.
Really?
Did you know that?
I was aware of it.
I'm not, I haven't really done, done anything, but I've been aware of it.
I mean, like, I heard, like, you know, you couldn't really do that because the speeds suck.
Yeah, that's the thing.
But if you set your modem at, uh, 1200 baud, then it works.
And there's actually a text file.
It's not on oldschoolfreak.com yet, but I've been talking to the author of Vox, and I'm going to try and get him to revise it a little bit.
Because I don't want to just steal files off Freaks and Geeks, basically.
But it's on Freaks and Geeks.
And it's on the text file section.
And I tried to go to it earlier, but it doesn't work anymore.
So you have to put the URL into Google and get the cache.
But I'm looking at it right now.
And it was written last year.
It was written in 2004.
And it just tells you how to configure your modem for VoIP.
Basically, you lower the baud rate, and you set the DTMF tones to, uh, so there's more of a pause between each one.
So it doesn't misdial.
So, and it works good, though, because all, like, even faster modems now still allow you to connect at slower speeds.
Oh, yeah.
Everything's backwards compatible with modems.
So that I knew.
So, I mean, doesn't this cost a lot of money now?
No.
I mean, it's cheap for VoIP, but you still have to, like, say, like, two cents a minute or something, right?
Oh, well, if you have goiax.com, that's a new site.
Who found that, anyways?
That was me.
That was you?
Well, Mark Brené told me about it, and I brought it to BinRev, so.
Okay, yeah.
So Strom found Go IX, and right now they're offering free, basically free unlimited calling in the U.S.
Yeah, it's, in fact, totally anonymous.
You don't even have to give them a real e-mail address.
You just punch in any random thing, and they give you a number.
Oh, yeah, it's scary like that.
I just set mine up last night.
Oh, yeah.
The caller ID comes up, what is it, 202-256-0000?
202-256-0000, I think, yeah.
Yeah.
So it's pretty damn anonymous.
And, I mean, you can get these VoIP providers.
You can get, like, Vonage or something and hook this up, but it's kind of sketchy because it says in their terms of service that they don't allow war dialing and stuff like that.
Mm-hmm.
So I know somebody who's gotten in trouble.
Oops.
We're sorry.
Oh, well.
We're sorry.
But usually if you're war dialing from a POP line and you have unlimited long distance or something like that, then you're all good.
Or if you have, if you war dial in your local exchange, because there's, you know, they have a certain amount that you can pay tops for your local calling.
It's like a, I don't know, what's it called, Strom?
Sorry?
Flat rate service?
I don't know.
They have, like, a cap.
Yeah, that's what it is.
It's a cap.
They cap your rate.
Around here they do that, anyways, Verizon.
What is it?
Explain it again to me.
So you can only pay so much for your local calling.
Oh, Quest has this.
It's basically what it is, is you can...
Well, Verizon has it.
Verizon has it?
I didn't know Verizon has it.
Yeah, we haven't.
The only one that I knew was Quest was, well, what it is, is you can use, you pay, like, you know, per diem or whatever you want to say.
You pay for your phone calls up to about, you reach $20.
And anything beyond $20 is free, is virtually free.
You just pay them the $20.
But, for example, if you go below $20 for some reason, you only pay them how much you spent.
Yeah.
I know they have a term for it.
Verizon has a certain term for it.
I don't know.
Yeah.
Local calling cap or limit or something.
That sounds about right.
No such thing seems to exist in Southern California.
Oh, that's right.
I know Verizon did it, but I know Quest did.
Yeah, because I know I have it here on my Verizon landline.
And I just war dial a lot of local exchanges.
So, yeah, GoIX, though, is the end.
I think a lot of people should start checking it out while it's free.
Well, I'm going to start checking it out.
I actually have a modem that is sitting around doing nothing, and I'm going to have to plug it in, give it a try.
In fact, Natus has been talking to us on Goeeks the whole time.
Oh, really?
Oh, he has?
He has, yes.
Oh, wow.
That sounds pretty good.
For free.
Yeah.
That's pretty elite.
I didn't even know that.
Didn't check your caller ID window?
I don't have caller ID.
Oh.
Oh, all right.
Thank God.
I'm not the only one.
What kind of freaks are you?
Yeah.
I'm a freak to lose with parents who don't believe in caller ID.
But come join the modern age, you know, real phones.
Yeah.
And actually, I don't have caller ID set up on my HEA either, mainly because I never actually programmed it back in after I reflashed it.
But anyway.
I've been really wanting to use Goeeks and do some scans.
I'd really like to do some, like, New York City scans, some Manhattan scans, or some Los Angeles ones.
Because, I mean, people haven't been war dialing and putting out results lately.
Yeah.
Well, one of my friends had a wonderful idea.
And I think Natus might know this story, but I'm not sure how many other people do.
He had access to a T1 for a weekend.
And he was like, oh, well, geez, I have a T1.
I had – he had his asterisk box.
Well, geez, I can just sort of, you know, war dial away here and just hook some modems up to it.
So basically, in a matter of, you know, about an hour or so, he, like, war dialed an insane amount of numbers.
And he got a phone call from his provider saying, what are you doing?
You're just essentially dialing all these numbers, and we have – you're only listening for, like, you know, 10 seconds in most cases or something.
And he said, oh, I'm doing tests with my system.
Oh, okay.
And they just sort of let him go with that.
And he said, oh, I guess they're watching me.
I shouldn't do that.
They didn't really care, though.
I don't think – he was basically saying that he didn't want to chance it because it wasn't his or he was using it for business purposes.
I forget which one.
There was a reason why he stopped, and I knew it was – I said, oh, okay, that's a decent reason.
Yeah, it's pretty crazy, though, 24 channels at once.
Yeah.
God, I can do some crazy stuff with that.
I mean, you could do that with VoIP, though.
Yeah, if you've got enough bandwidth to throw at it.
Well, not 24, but, I mean, you could do a lot.
Well, no, if you've got enough bandwidth to throw at it, hell, if you're sitting there on a DS3, you could do, you know, 240.
Okay, here's a question.
I mean, I talked to Natus about this earlier today.
Does GoEaks support multiple phone calls at once?
Let's find out.
Oh, I might get dropped.
Well, I'll just pick up my other phone here.
Oh, Pond, I guess you're smarter than they think.
Let me – let me just see if maybe it's that line.
Let me try my VoIP phone here.
I'm going to have to put you guys on hold for a second.
Oh, forget about it, then.
Okay, okay, okay.
What, you don't want to hear my lovely hold music?
No, not for the radio show.
So, well, like I said, same with the intro to hacking.
We just sort of barely scratched the surface, and we just sort of tried to cram as much information as we could in however long we took, an hour and a half or so.
Basically, it's been about an hour and a half or so, hasn't it?
Yeah, it certainly has.
Yeah.
I think we're going to have to edit some stuff out, but we'll take care of that.
So, anyway, that's what it is.
We try to cram as much stuff as we could in the time that we're allotted.
So, but if you want to learn more, like I said, defaultradio.com.
It's a real fun show to listen to.
It's quite humorous.
I enjoyed the format.
I think I was on one episode once upon a time.
You were on one episode.
I was on like the second to last episode they ever did.
I was on a bunch of them.
Yeah, you were always there.
I was on one of particular interest to a certain government agency, too.
Which I wasn't.
All right.
I found that out.
So, defaultradio.com.
It's been around forums.
They have a freaking forum.
Natus, do you have any site you want to see?
Oldfreak.com.
Spell that for us.
Old, O-L-D-S-K-O-O-L-P-H-R-E-A-K.com.
And don't forget about Freaks and Geeks, too.
Yeah, Freaks and Geeks.
I was going to plug that if you weren't.
Okay.
Natus, Freaks, too.
P-H-R-E-A-K-S.
Yeah.
It's good stuff.
Yeah.
I don't know.
There's a couple other sites out there.
Let's not forget.
Phonetrips.com.
Oh, jeez.
I can't believe I forgot that.
Bernie saved me.
And then go use the Internet Wayback Machine and go look at what are the other ones.
Telco Insiders was good.
There's Phone Losers.
Wait, Phone Losers doesn't exist anymore?
No, it does.
Telco Insiders doesn't, though.
Yeah, I'm never a big fan of Phone Losers.
Yeah, I never was, but it was kind of a shock to me if they actually had ceased to exist.
Yeah, they'll always be around.
I'm not trying to make a thing, but they're basically the cockroaches.
I was just about to say they're the cockroaches.
I mean, I'm not using that in a negative light.
It's just that it's more of their tenacity than anything else.
Oh, yeah.
All right.
Yeah, phonetrips.com where you can listen to all the old stuff.
You know, it doesn't apply anymore, but it's really cool to listen to.
Oh, it's so much fantastic to listen to.
I love listening to that.
I love my iPod.
Same here.
I love driving around with my windows open, blasting phone trips.
Yeah, I know you love that.
It drives both my sister and my fiancé nuts.
Completely nuts.
How to learn about phones and ruin your marriage.
phonetrips.com.
Well, they both – I mean, they don't care about the content.
They just tune it out, but they can't stand the noises.
It's like the various clucks and clunks through the system.
It just drives them batty.
It's hilarious.
So –
And also –
Any other websites?
Yapple.org.
Yapple.org, yes.
Where did it?
Plug that one.
Yeah, and stromcarlson.com.
I've got some recordings of my own and explanations of stuff and phones.
Blackratchet.org also has stuff on there.
Yes.
I guess we can't forget Verizon Fears, too.
Oh, yeah, verizonfears.com.
That has some interesting stuff on it.
Oh, Bells Mind.
Oh, jeez.
Oh, man.
How can we forget all these websites?
We should have written all these down.
Yeah.
BellsMind.net is really good.
Now, I won't tell about the other one out there because really that one sucks.
Yeah.
Well, let's not forget the greatest resource for free numbering information,
the North American Numbering Plan Administration,
NANPA.com, N-A-N-P-A.com.
That's –
But what's N?
Nancy, Alpha, Nancy –
November, Alpha, November, Papa, Alpha.com.
Yes.
Nancy.
Well, no, I think Nancy was the old school one.
Was it?
Okay.
All right.
Hey, Natus, do you have any announcements?
Any book signing tours?
No.
Strom?
I have a big announcement.
Binrev Radio call-in voicemail is back.
Oh, we announced that last week.
Did we?
Oh, okay.
Well, I did.
You weren't here.
You were sleeping.
I've been so massively busy this week.
It's crazy.
I haven't had time to listen to the previous episode yet.
But, yeah.
So, I guess I'll just announce the number anyway, in case people weren't listening last week.
Yep, go ahead.
Drop this number down.
Get out a pen.
Ready?
Okay.
213-415-1047.
I repeat.
213-415-1047.
All right.
Email, as always, since we're doing that, we should have sort of gone to that.
Radio at binrev.com.
Yeah, my announcement is 2,600 meetings this Friday.
Be there or be square via the Boston or the LA one or whatever your local one is.
Or, hell, set one up yourself, as always.
I'll be in the Los Angeles one, so you better be there if you're in Los Angeles.
I'll be in Boston, so you better be there.
Where will you be, Natas?
It won't be to any of them.
Sorry, Warren.
I was thinking about going down to New York for a weekend, but I'm not sure.
Well, Natas may be appearing at the New York 2600 meeting.
I think Gray Area is supposed to be there, so there's another phone freak you can talk to.
Shouts.
Who has shouts?
I do.
Who do you have shouts for?
You go first.
Because you're on the little shout-outs list first.
I'm on the shout-outs list first.
So, shout-out to you, Natas.
Thanks for coming on.
Shout-out to all the old-school freaks out there, man.
Yes.
Keeping it real.
Yeah.
Shout-out to Mark Bernay, Evan Dorbell, Bill New York, Joy Bubbles.
Joy Bubbles, yes.
Al Bernay.
Chris Bernay.
Oh, of course.
Can't forget Chris Bernay.
Yeah.
The president.
Yep.
Mr. President.
And we mean Chris Bernay, Mr. President, not George Bush, Mr. President.
So, before all you weirdo political activist type start emailing us with hate mail.
Bush derangement syndrome at work.
Yeah.
Natas, who do you have shouts for?
You probably have much more interesting shouts than we do.
Oh, God.
Decoder, of course, Lucky, I don't know, Doug, everybody.
Everybody from the forum.
Too many people to list.
Let's give a shout-out to Wardile with VoIP and Go IAX, Go Eeks, whatever you want to call it.
Go IAX, Go Eeks, whatever you want to call it.
Dan and Wardile still, because I think it's elite.
You can hand-scan until the cows come home.
And a shout-out to textdrop.com, T-X-T-R-O-P.com.
That's my site, and it's elite, and I haven't said that before.
So, that's my site.
Leakness, textdrop.com.
I'll have to check that one out.
I haven't been to your site.
T-X-T-D-R-O-P.com.
It has nothing to do with it, but it's free SMSs, free text messaging.
All right.
I'm on the show right now.
Well, that's what this show is about.
I got out to Lindsay Zohan for that one shot with the phone, because I was elite.
Amen to that.
Yeah, I'll put an amen to that one.
Site of the reeks, ocremix.org, which is a bunch of remixes of old-school computer games
and video game songs.
And I got to say, it's awesome.
So much stuff there.
It's amazing how much stuff they have.
Speaking of which, our closing music tonight is from this website.
And it's an Estratosphere.
It's the Super Mario Bros. 2 Super Buck Jazz OC Remix.
And it's good.
It's kind of different than what we usually play, but still.
I got to say, it's one of my two favorites right now.
Maybe I'll play the other favorite next week.
So it's about that time.
So we will see you next week.
Same hack time.
Same hack channel.
Peace.
We'll be right back.
Thank you.