Slashdot Log In
A Look Back at One of the Original Phreaks
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Dec 31, 2007 03:42 PM
from the pioneers-of-the-past dept.
from the pioneers-of-the-past dept.
tmalone writes "The New York Times is running an end of year piece about the most interesting people who have died this year. One of their picks is Joybubbles, also known as Josef Engressia, or 'Whistler.' He was born blind and discovered at the age of 7 that he could whistle 2600 hertz into a phone to make free long-distance calls. He was one of the original phone phreaks, got arrested for phone fraud, and was even employed by the phone company. The article deals more with his personal life than with his technical exploits, but is a very interesting story."
Related Stories
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Obligatory (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally, I liked the movie. Always have. It amuses the heck out of me.
Besides, you have to love Penn getting called a "Hapless techno-weenie" *grin*
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Best line in the whole movie.
Re: (Score:2)
You also had to love the dumbing down of what happened to the super tanker training vessel.
"Excuse me?"
"The little boat...flipped...over..."
get my hopes up (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
History of Hacking (Score:4, Informative)
Ah this takes me back... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
interview (Score:5, Interesting)
Slight offtopic but there's a guy that just made a graphic novel about the history of phreaking. I'm not sure if Joybubbles is in it but looks neat. http://www.edpiskor.com/wizzy.html [edpiskor.com]
NPR on Joybubbles (Score:5, Informative)
Very good listen.
Re:NPR on Joybubbles (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Sneakers? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sneakers? (Score:5, Informative)
It seems like it, taken from the trivia page of sneakers from imdb [imdb.com].
Parent
Talk about... (Score:2)
"He was one of the original phone phreaks, got arrested for phone fraud, and was even employed by the phone company. The article deals more with his personal life than with his technical exploits, but is a very interesting story.""
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Work for us at a good salary or we have you thrown in jail for most of the rest of your life.
It's not really a blind faith issue (decent pun use though). They realized that anyone good enough to figure out how to circumvent their systems could be a useful asset to their company from both a technical and security standpoint provided they could be "domesticated" so to speak.
Now they just tend to go apes**t any time som
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
In some cases, I'm sure they still had problems. However, as a couple of anecdotal data points, I've known a couple of people that were busted back in the early-mid nineties and given that choice. They both worked out quite well.
A lot of it, I think, comes down to why they were doing it - exploration and learning vs trying to defraud, etc.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
After the war we paid them to build even bigger rockets, for pretty much the same purpose, except we wisely realized we could showcase our precision guidance and heavy-lift capability with a seemingly innocuous exploration and science mission.
Phone phreakers didn't necessarily know enough about the phone system to actually create anything.
I called him in 1984 (Score:5, Interesting)
Phreaks (Score:2, Interesting)
You know you're a child of the 80s... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Phreaks (Score:5, Interesting)
Eh Tee Dee Tee
Eh Tee Eff Oh
Eh Tee Ate Six Seven Five Three Oh Nine
[Limbers up whistling muscles]...hWooooooooooooooooooooooofhhhhhhhhhoooooooooooooooooo.
Good Evening Cowboy Neil, sending updates to the porn landscape of the Internet to your system. (Please Wait...)
Eh Tee Aitch Oh
[No Carrier]
Yup, I've still got it! (Actually, I don't remember modem codes at all, so I've undoubtedly got them wrong...)
Seriously, though, it's amazing what telephone technology has done in the last quarter century. I went from a party line (we were two long, one short) to dial phones that you could actually figure out some weird hacks by semi-intelligently flapping away at the hook (or more likely getting a call from a pissed off operator), to carrying something around that's smaller than a wallet which gives you the ability to create video and pictures, play games, do arithmetic, save or generate text, talk to almost anybody on the planet without explaining yourself to some telephone company employee, save an audio message, record an audio message, and a hundred other things. And not only that, it's not screwed to the wall. Really, the achievements in telephony have been pretty remarkable. I wonder what the modern Joybubbles is up to....
Parent
listen to Joybubbles (Score:3, Interesting)
Poor Ol' Joe (Score:5, Interesting)
He was a great guy. I don't know how well he fared once the phone system went digital, but he was someone who made the best out of what life took from him, and what life gave him. That is, his sight was taken but his tone sensitivity was extreme.
Phone phreaking is a lost art -- an analog art, made of electronics and geeky passion. It was damaged by criminals out for nothing more than free calls, but ultimately destroyed by SS7.
I've had the idea to use all this wondrous DSP technology and massive amounts of CPU power and storage to recreate the phone network circa 1982 - a phreaker's version, as close to the real thing as possible, where you'd use a blue box to get around, and find loops, etc. Think of it as an audio adventure game. I don't have the DSP talent to make it happen though. But if I ever could get it done, I would dedicate it to the memory of Joe Engressia.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I've had the idea to use all this wondrous DSP technology and massive amounts of CPU power and storage to recreate the phone network circa 1982 - a phreaker's version, as close to the real thing as possible, where you'd use a blue box to get around, and find loops, etc. Think of it as an audio adventure game. I don't have the DSP talent to make it happen though.
It doesn't sound all that difficult. You wouldn't really need to know anything about DSPs, just take some code from Asterisk, or another free PBX s
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Poor Ol' Joe (Score:5, Interesting)
SS7 was an absolute necessity, the old inband signaling system was very expensive, too slow to deal with traffic growth, and too exploitable. Now, there is a whole new generation of Phreaks manipulating the SS7 system with relative impunity and ease. You have been reading about the very public exploits of the destructive and immature ones. They insert false info into remote PSAPs (e911 systems) and social engineer an armed SWAT response to a distant victim's house. For the little bit you hear about in the press, there is a large amount going on quietly unseen even to the
Someday, when the rest of us around Joe's age have passed to greener pastures, the current
the AC
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, to the fellow who suggest Asterisk - you're wrong on so many counts. First of all, you need to know that DTMF is not MF. Second of all, it was the BUGS in the ole' phone system which made it interesting, and these aren't going to be duplicated in Asterix. We'd have to re-implement them, and that is a lot of DSP work. It's not just about building a phone
Re: (Score:2)
I speak modem (Score:5, Interesting)
I had to actually do something like this with phone modems for testing purposes. We had a bank of modems and to check which modem went to which phone number (people sometimes switched them without telling us) we would have to call the number on a voice phone across the way and then run over to the modem bank to see which lights were on.
Often the modem lights wouldn't stay on long enough from a mere phone call. Rather than run fast and risky in a crowded, wiry data center, I discovered that if I whistled certain frequencies mirroring the connect sound, the modem would think I was another modem and spend a longer time trying to connect. Thus, by learning to speak modemese, I could walk instead of run.
End of an Era (Score:2)
You can do some kinds of interesting things with an ISDN line, because you have access to the D-channel which is the actual, real, live out-of-band signalling channel; but they're still limited, because the exchange is acting as a man-in-the-middle and knows wh
Interesting.... (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
The correct answer is: To Have and Have Not. (My favorite of the two, actually.)
Re: (Score:1)
Re:The Mentor (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's his site [blankenship.com] according to his wikipedia article [wikipedia.org]
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
There were two KPs, KP1 and KP2. KP1 was used for making domestic
do believe they were there... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It was never that really hot information... There were commercially available wristwatches that would dial the phone for you by holding it up to the phone, etc.
As a prank, when I was in grade school, circa 1990, a friend and I made a BASIC program on our school IBM's that would give a fake login screen that would "allow" you via simple commands to "dial FBI" completely with realistic "modem" dialtone and carrier tones. It would be hilarious to
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)