150.txt

1000 HOWTOs for various needs [WINDOWS]

have the power to do it but I don't... Well one time, just one time, I have to
admit that I did.  There was this girl, Linda, and I wanted to find out... you
know.  I tried to call her up for a date. I had a date with her the last
weekend and I thought she liked me.  I called her up, man, and her line was
busy, and I kept calling and it was still busy.  Well, I had just learned about
this system of jumping into lines and I said to myself, 'Hmmm.  Why not just
see if it works. It'll surprise her if all of a sudden I should pop up on her
line. It'll impress her, if anything.'  So I went ahead and did it.  I M-Fed
into the line.  My M-F-er is powerful enough when patched directly into the
mouthpiece to trigger a verification trunk without using an operator the way
the other phone phreaks have to.

"I slipped into the line and there she was talking to another boyfriend.
Making sweet talk to him.  I didn't make a sound because I was so disgusted.
So I waited there for her to hang up, listening to her making sweet talk to the
other guy.  You know.  So as soon as she hung up I instantly M-F-ed her up and
all I said was, 'Linda, we're through.'  And I hung up.  And it blew her head
off.  She couldn't figure out what the hell happened.

"But that was the only time.  I did it thinking I would surprise her, impress
her.  Those were all my intentions were, and well, it really kind of hurt me
pretty badly, and... and ever since then I don't go into verification trunks."

Moments later my first conversation with the Captain comes to a close.

"Listen," he says, his spirits somewhat cheered, "listen.  What you are going
to hear when I hang up is the sound of tandems unstacking. Layer after layer of
tandems unstacking until there's nothing left of the stack, until it melts away
into nothing.  Cheep, cheep, cheep, cheep," he concludes, his voice descending
to a whisper with each cheep.

He hangs up.  The phone suddenly goes into four spasms: kachink cheep. Kachink
cheep kachink cheep kachink cheep, and the complex connection has wiped itself
out like the Cheshire cat's smile.

The MF Boogie Blues

The next number I choose from the select list of phone-phreak alumni, prepared
for me by the blue-box inventor, is a Memphis number.  It is the number of Joe
Engressia, the first and still perhaps the most accomplished blind phone
phreak.

Three years ago Engressia was a nine-day wonder in newspapers and magazines all
over America because he had been discovered whistling free long-distance
connections for fellow students at the University of South Florida.  Engressia
was born with perfect pitch: he could whistle phone tones better than the
phone-company's equipment.

Engressia might have gone on whistling in the dark for a few friends for the
rest of his life if the phone company hadn't decided to expose him.  He was
warned, disciplined by the college, and the whole case became public.  In the
months following media reports of his talent, Engressia began receiving strange
calls.   There were calls from a group of kids in Los Angeles who could do some
very strange things with the quirky General Telephone and Electronics circuitry
in L.A. suburbs.  There were calls from a group of mostly blind kids in ----,
California, who had been doing some interesting experiments with Cap'n Crunch
whistles and test loops.  There was a group in Seattle, a group in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, a few from New York, a few scattered across the country.  Some
of them had already equipped themselves with cassette and electronic M-F
devices.  For some of these groups, it was the first time they knew of the
others.

The exposure of Engressia was the catalyst that linked the separate
phone-phreak centers together.  They all called Engressia.  They talked to him
about what he was doing and what they were doing.  And then he told them -- the
scattered regional centers and lonely independent phone phreakers -- about each
other, gave them each other's numbers to call, and within a year the scattered
phone-phreak centers had grown into a nationwide underground.

Joe Engressia is only twenty-two years old now, but along the phone-phreak
network he is "the old man," accorded by phone phreaks something of the
reverence the phone company bestows on Alexander Graham Bell.  He seldom needs
to make calls anymore.  The phone phreaks all call him and let him know what
new tricks, new codes, new techniques they have learned.  Every night he sits
like a sightless spider in his little apartment receiving messages from every
tendril of his web.  It is almost a point of pride with Joe that they call
him.

But when I reached him in his Memphis apartment that night, Joe Engressia was
lonely, jumpy and upset.

"God, I'm glad somebody called.  I don't know why tonight of all nights I don't
get any calls.  This guy around here got drunk again tonight and propositioned
me again.  I keep telling him we'll never see eye to eye on this subject, if
you know what I mean.  I try to make light of it, you know, but he doesn't get
it.  I can head him out there getting drunker and I don't know what he'll do
next.  It's just that I'm really all alone here, just moved to Memphis, it's
the first time I'm living on my own, and I'd hate for it to all collapse now.
But I won't go to bed with him.  I'm just not very interested in sex and even
if I can't see him I know he's ugly.

"Did you hear that?  That's him banging a bottle against the wall outside.
He's nice.  Well forget about it.  You're doing a story on phone phreaks?
Listen to this.  It's the MF Boogie Blues.

Sure enough, a jumpy version of Muskrat Ramble boogies its way over the line,
each note one of those long-distance phone tones.  The music stops.  A huge
roaring voice blasts the phone off my ear: "AND THE QUESTION IS..." roars the
voice, "CAN A BLIND PERSON HOOK UP AN AMPLIFIER ON HIS OWN?"

The roar ceases.  A high-pitched operator-type voice replaces it. "This is
Southern Braille Tel. & Tel.  Have tone, will phone."

This is succeeded by a quick series of M-F tones, a swift "kachink" and a deep
reassuring voice: "If you need home care, call the visiting-nurses association.
First National time in Honolulu is 4:32 p.m."

Joe back in his Joe voice again: "Are we seeing eye to eye? 'Si, si,' said the
blind Mexican.  Ahem.  Yes.  Would you like to know the weather in Tokyo?"

This swift manic sequence of phone-phreak vaudeville stunts and blind-boy jokes
manages to keep Joe's mind off his tormentor only as long as it lasts.

"The reason I'm in Memphis, the reason I have to depend on that homosexual guy,
is that this is the first time I've been able to live on my own and make phone
trips on my own.  I've been banned from all central offices around home in
Florida, they knew me too well, and at the University some of my fellow
scholars were always harassing me because I was on the dorm pay phone all the
time and making fun of me because of my fat ass, which of course I do have,
it's my physical fatness program, but I don't like to hear it every day, and if
I can't phone trip and I can't phone phreak, I can't imagine what I'd do, I've
been devoting three quarters of my life to it.

"I moved to Memphis because I wanted to be on my own as well as because it has
a Number 5 crossbar switching system and some interesting little independent
phone-company districts nearby and so far they don't seem to know who I am so I
can go on phone tripping, and for me phone tripping is just as important as
phone phreaking."

Phone tripping, Joe explains, begins with calling up a central-office switch
room.  He tells the switchman in a polite earnest voice that he's a blind
college student interested in telephones, and could he perhaps have a guided
tour of the switching station?  Each step of the tour Joe likes to touch and
feel relays, caress switching circuits, switchboards, crossbar arrangements.

So when Joe Engressia phone phreaks he feels his way through the circuitry of
the country garden of forking paths, he feels switches shift, relays shunt,
crossbars swivel, tandems engage and disengage even as he hears -- with perfect
pitch -- his M-F pulses make the entire Bell system dance to his tune.

Just one month ago Joe took all his savings out of his bank and left home, over
the emotional protests of his mother.  "I ran away from home almost," he likes
to say.  Joe found a small apartment house on Union Avenue and began making
phone trips.  He'd take a bus a hundred miles south in Mississippi to see some
old-fashioned Bell equipment still in use in several states, which had been
puzzling.  He'd take a bus three hundred miles to Charlotte, North Carolina, to
look at some brand-new experimental equipment.  He hired a taxi to drive him
twelve miles to a suburb to tour the office of a small phone company with some
interesting idiosyncrasies in its routing system.  He was having the time of
his life, he said, the most freedom and pleasure he had known.

In that month he had done very little long-distance phone phreaking from his
own phone.  He had begun to apply for a job with the phone company, he told me,
and he wanted to stay away from anything illegal.

"Any kind of job will do, anything as menial as the most lowly operator.
That's probably all they'd give me because I'm blind.  Even though I probably
know more than most switchmen.  But that's okay.  I want to work for Ma Bell.
I don't hate Ma Bell the way Gilbertson and some phone phreaks do.  I don't
want to screw Ma Bell.  With me it's the pleasure of pure knowledge.  There's
something beautiful about the system when you know it intimately the way I do.
But I don't know how much they know about me here.  I have a very intuitive
feel for the condition of the line I'm on, and I think they're monitoring me
off and on lately, but I haven't been doing much illegal.  I have to make a few
calls to switchmen once in a while which aren't strictly legal, and once I took
an acid trip and was having these auditory hallucinations as if I were trapped
and these planes were dive-bombing me, and all of sudden I had to phone phreak
out of there.  For some reason I had to call Kansas City, but that's all."

A Warning Is Delivered

At this point -- one o'clock in my time zone -- a loud knock on my motel-room
door interrupts our conversation.  Outside the door I find a uniformed security
guard who informs me that there has been an "emergency phone call" for me while
I have been on the line and that the front desk has sent him up to let me
know.

Two seconds after I say good-bye to Joe and hang up, the phone rings.

"Who were you talking to?" the agitated voice demands.  The voice belongs to
Captain Crunch.  "I called because I decided to warn you of something.  I
decided to warn you to be careful.  I don't want this information you get to
get to the radical underground.  I don't want it to get into the wrong hands.
What would you say if I told you it's possible for three phone phreaks to
saturate the phone system of the nation.  Saturate it.  Busy it out.  All of
it.  I know how to do this.  I'm not gonna tell.  A friend of mine has already
saturated the trunks between Seattle and New York.  He did it with a
computerized M-F-er hitched into a special Manitoba exchange.  But there are
other, easier ways to do it."

Just three people?  I ask.  How is that possible?

"Have you ever heard of the long-lines guard frequency?  Do you know about
stacking tandems with 17 and 2600?  Well, I'd advise you to find out about it.
I'm not gonna tell you.  But whatever you do, don't let this get into the hands
of the radical underground."

(Later Gilbertson, the inventor, confessed that while he had always been
skeptical about the Captain's claim of the sabotage potential of trunk-tying
phone phreaks, he had recently heard certain demonstrations which convinced him
the Captain was not speaking idly. "I think it might take more than three
people, depending on how many machines like Captain Crunch's were available.
But even though the Captain sounds a little weird, he generally turns out to
know what he's talking about.")

"You know," Captain Crunch continues in his admonitory tone, "you know the
younger phone phreaks call Moscow all the time.  Suppose everybody were to call
Moscow.  I'm no right-winger.  But I value my life.  I don't want the Commies
coming over and dropping a bomb on my head. That's why I say you've got to be
careful about who gets this information."

The Captain suddenly shifts into a diatribe against those phone phreaks who
don't like the phone company.

"They don't understand, but Ma Bell knows everything they do.  Ma Bell knows.
Listen, is this line hot?  I just heard someone tap in.  I'm not paranoid, but
I can detect things like that.  Well, even if it is, they know that I know that
they know that I have a bulk eraser.  I'm very clean."  The Captain pauses,
evidently torn between wanting to prove to the phone-company monitors that he
does nothing illegal, and the desire to impress Ma Bell with his prowess.  "Ma