A Look Back at One of the Original Phreaks

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."

History of Hacking

[shawn443]

I'm sure most geeks here have seen this video. But for those who haven't, History of Hacking [google.com].

NPR on Joybubbles

[dsginter]

NPR did a bit on Joybubbles [npr.org] (Joe's handle) some months ago.

Very good listen.

Re:Sneakers?

[Albert Sandberg]

"Whistler is seen eating a box of "Cap'n Crunch". In the 1970s, "Cap'n Crunch" came with a small whistle in the box. A "phone phreaker" called "Captain Crunch" (John Draper) discovered that this whistle could be used to get free phone calls (one of many components in the practice of "phone phreaking", which digital phone switching-systems has made almost totally obsolete). Whistler is patterned after Joe Engressia, a blind telephone expert born with perfect pitch who was one of the original phone phreakers."

It seems like it, taken from the trivia page of sneakers from imdb [imdb.com].

Re:NPR on Joybubbles

[Kizzle]

Actually Joybubbles is not his handle it's his legal name. He had it changed to that.

Re:The whole nine yards (Almost)

[MasterOfMagic]

KP and ST were needed for sentinel values due to the in-band signaling nature of the old MF long distance system. KP1 is not key punch, but key pulse. You send it after a supervision wink before you enter routing codes or destination numbers. Very important if you wanted to get into the art of tandem stacking or if you wanted to do anything with a bluebox at all. After putting in the routing codes or destination number, you would send ST.

There were two KPs, KP1 and KP2. KP1 was used for making domestic calls. KP2 was for international calls.

Re:Poor Ol' Joe

[Vellmont]

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 software to detect DTMF. Build some infra-structure around it, and make your game.