150.txt

1000 HOWTOs for various needs [WINDOWS]

Bell knows how good I am.  And I am quite good.  I can detect reversals, tandem
switching, everything that goes on on a line.  I have relative pitch now.  Do
you know what that means?  My ears are a $20,000 piece of equipment.  With my
ears I can detect things they can't hear with their equipment.  I've had
employment problems.  I've lost jobs.  But I want to show Ma Bell how good I
am.  I don't want to screw her, I want to work for her.  I want to do good for
her.  I want to help her get rid of her flaws and become perfect.  That's my
number-one goal in life now."  The Captain concludes his warnings and tells me
he has to be going.  "I've got a little action lined up for tonight," he
explains and hangs up.

Before I hang up for the night, I call Joe Engressia back.  He reports that his
tormentor has finally gone to sleep -- "He's not blind drunk, that's the way I
get, ahem, yes; but you might say he's in a drunken stupor."  I make a date to
visit Joe in Memphis in two days.

A Phone Phreak Call Takes Care of Business

The next morning I attend a gathering of four phone phreaks in  ----- (a
California suburb).  The gathering takes place in a comfortable split-level
home in an upper-middle-class subdivision.  Heaped on the kitchen table are the
portable cassette recorders, M-F cassettes, phone patches, and line ties of the
four phone phreaks present.  On the kitchen counter next to the telephone is a
shoe-box-size blue box with thirteen large toggle switches for the tones.  The
parents of the host phone phreak, Ralph, who is blind, stay in the living room
with their sighted children.  They are not sure exactly what Ralph and his
friends do with the phone or if it's strictly legal, but he is blind and they
are pleased he has a hobby which keeps him busy.

The group has been working at reestablishing the historic "2111" conference,
reopening some toll-free loops, and trying to discover the dimensions of what
seem to be new initiatives against phone phreaks by phone-company security
agents.

It is not long before I get a chance to see, to hear, Randy at work. Randy is
known among the phone phreaks as perhaps the finest con man in the game.  Randy
is blind.  He is pale, soft and pear-shaped, he wears baggy pants and a wrinkly
nylon white sport shirt, pushes his head forward from hunched shoulders
somewhat like a turtle inching out of its shell.  His eyes wander, crossing and
recrossing, and his forehead is somewhat pimply.  He is only sixteen years
old.

But when Randy starts speaking into a telephone mouthpiece his voice becomes so
stunningly authoritative it is necessary to look again to convince yourself it
comes from a chubby adolescent Randy.  Imagine the voice of a crack oil-rig
foreman, a tough, sharp, weather-beaten Marlboro man of forty.  Imagine the
voice of a brilliant performance-fund gunslinger explaining how he beats the
Dow Jones by thirty percent.  Then imagine a voice that could make those two
sound like Stepin Fetchit.  That is sixteen-year-old Randy's voice.

He is speaking to a switchman in Detroit.  The phone company in Detroit had
closed up two toll-free loop pairs for no apparent reason, although heavy use
by phone phreaks all over the country may have been detected.  Randy is telling
the switchman how to open up the loop and make it free again:

"How are you, buddy.  Yeah. I'm on the board in here in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and
we've been trying to run some tests on your loop-arounds and we find'em busied
out on both sides.... Yeah, we've been getting a 'BY' on them, what d'ya say,
can you drop cards on 'em?  Do you have 08 on your number group?  Oh that's
okay, we've had this trouble before, we may have to go after the circuit.  Here
lemme give 'em to you: your frame is 05, vertical group 03, horizontal 5,
vertical file 3.  Yeah, we'll hang on here.... Okay, found it?  Good.  Right,
yeah, we'd like to clear that busy out.  Right.  All you have to do is look for
your key on the mounting plate, it's in your miscellaneous trunk frame.  Okay?
Right.  Now pull your key from NOR over the LCT.  Yeah. I don't know why that
happened, but we've been having trouble with that one.  Okay.  Thanks a lot
fella.  Be seein' ya."

Randy hangs up, reports that the switchman was a little inexperienced with the
loop-around circuits on the miscellaneous trunk frame, but that the loop has
been returned to its free-call status.

Delighted, phone phreak Ed returns the pair of numbers to the active-status
column in his directory.  Ed is a superb and painstaking researcher.  With
almost Talmudic thoroughness he will trace tendrils of hints through soft-wired
mazes of intervening phone-company circuitry back through complex linkages of
switching relays to find the location and identity of just one toll-free loop.
He spends hours and hours, every day, doing this sort of thing.  He has somehow
compiled a directory of eight hundred "Band-six in-WATS numbers" located in
over forty states.  Band-six in-WATS numbers are the big 800 numbers -- the
ones that can be dialed into free from anywhere in the country.

Ed the researcher, a nineteen-year-old engineering student, is also a superb
technician.  He put together his own working blue box from scratch at age
seventeen.  (He is sighted.)  This evening after distributing the latest issue
of his in-WATS directory (which has been typed into Braille for the blind phone
phreaks), he announces he has made a major new breakthrough:

"I finally tested it and it works, perfectly. I've got this switching matrix
which converts any touch-tone phone into an M-F-er."

The tones you hear in touch-tone phones are not the M-F tones that operate the
long-distance switching system.  Phone phreaks believe A.T.&T. had deliberately
equipped touch tones with a  different set of frequencies to avoid putting the
six master M-F tones in the hands of every touch-tone owner.  Ed's complex
switching matrix puts the six master tones, in effect put a blue box, in the
hands of every touch-tone owner.

Ed shows me pages of schematics, specifications and parts lists. "It's not easy
to build, but everything here is in the Heathkit catalog."

Ed asks Ralph what progress he has made in his attempts to reestablish a
long-term open conference line for phone phreaks.  The last big conference --
the historic "2111" conference -- had been arranged through an unused Telex
test-board trunk somewhere in the innards of a 4A switching machine in
Vancouver, Canada.  For months phone phreaks could M-F their way into
Vancouver, beep out 604 (the Vancouver area code) and then beep out 2111 (the
internal phone-company code for Telex testing), and find themselves at any
time, day or night, on an open wire talking with an array of phone phreaks from
coast to coast, operators from Bermuda, Tokyo and London who are phone-phreak
sympathizers, and miscellaneous guests and technical experts.  The conference
was a massive exchange of information.  Phone phreaks picked each other's
brains clean, then developed new ways to pick the phone company's brains clean.
Ralph gave M F Boogies concerts with his home-entertainment-type electric
organ, Captain Crunch demonstrated his round-the-world prowess with his
notorious computerized unit and dropped leering hints of the "action" he was
getting with his girl friends.  (The Captain lives out or pretends to live out
several kinds of fantasies to the gossipy delight of the blind phone phreaks
who urge him on to further triumphs on behalf of all of them.)  The somewhat
rowdy Northwest phone-phreak crowd let their bitter internal feud spill over
into the peaceable conference line, escalating shortly into guerrilla warfare;
Carl the East Coast international tone relations expert demonstrated newly
opened direct M-F routes to central offices on the island of Bahrein in the
Persian Gulf, introduced a new phone-phreak friend of his in Pretoria, and
explained the technical operation of the new Oakland-to Vietnam linkages.
(Many phone phreaks pick up spending money by M-F-ing calls from relatives to
Vietnam G.I.'s, charging $5 for a whole hour of trans-Pacific conversation.)

Day and night the conference line was never dead.  Blind phone phreaks all over
the country, lonely and isolated in homes filled with active sighted brothers
and sisters, or trapped with slow and unimaginative blind kids in straitjacket
schools for the blind, knew that no matter how late it got they could dial up
the conference and find instant electronic communion with two or three other
blind kids awake over on the other side of America.  Talking together on a
phone hookup, the blind phone phreaks say, is not much different from being
there together. Physically, there was nothing more than a two-inch-square wafer
of titanium inside a vast machine on Vancouver Island.  For the blind kids
>there< meant an exhilarating feeling of being in touch, through a kind of
skill and magic which was peculiarly their own.

Last April 1, however, the long Vancouver Conference was shut off. The phone
phreaks knew it was coming.  Vancouver was in the process of converting from a
step-by-step system to a 4A machine and the 2111 Telex circuit was to be wiped
out in the process.  The phone phreaks learned the actual day on which the
conference would be erased about a week ahead of time over the phone company's
internal-news-and-shop-talk recording.

For the next frantic seven days every phone phreak in America was on and off
the 2111 conference twenty-four hours a day.  Phone phreaks who were just
learning the game or didn't have M-F capability were boosted up to the
conference by more experienced phreaks so they could get a glimpse of what it
was like before it disappeared.  Top phone phreaks searched distant area codes
for new conference possibilities without success.  Finally in the early morning
of April 1, the end came.

"I could feel it coming a couple hours before midnight," Ralph remembers.  "You
could feel something going on in the lines.  Some static began showing up, then
some whistling wheezing sound.  Then there were breaks.  Some people got cut
off and called right back in, but after a while some people were finding they
were cut off and couldn't get back in at all.  It was terrible.  I lost it
about one a.m., but managed to slip in again and stay on until the thing
died... I think it was about four in the morning.  There were four of us still
hanging on when the conference disappeared into nowhere for good.  We all tried
to M-F up to it again of course, but we got silent termination.  There was
nothing there."

The Legendary Mark Bernay Turns Out To Be "The Midnight Skulker"

Mark Bernay.  I had come across that name before.  It was on Gilbertson's
select list of phone phreaks.  The California phone phreaks had spoken of a
mysterious Mark Bernay as perhaps the first and oldest phone phreak on the West
Coast.  And in fact almost every phone phreak in the West can trace his origins
either directly to Mark Bernay or to a disciple of Mark Bernay.

It seems that five years ago this Mark Bernay (a pseudonym he chose for
himself) began traveling up and down the West Coast pasting tiny stickers in
phone books all along his way.  The stickers read something like "Want to hear
an interesting tape recording? Call these numbers."  The numbers that followed
were toll-free loop-around pairs. When one of the curious called one of the
numbers he would hear a tape recording pre-hooked into the loop by Bernay which
explained the use of loop-around pairs, gave the numbers of several more, and
ended by telling the caller, "At six o'clock tonight this recording will stop
and you and your friends can try it out.  Have fun."

"I was disappointed by the response at first," Bernay told me, when I finally
reached him at one of his many numbers and he had dispensed with the usual "I
never do anything illegal" formalities which experienced phone phreaks open
most conversations.

"I went all over the coast with these stickers not only on pay phones, but I'd
throw them in front of high schools in the middle of the night, I'd leave them
unobtrusively in candy stores, scatter them on main streets of small towns.  At
first hardly anyone bothered to try it out.  I would listen in for hours and
hours after six o'clock and no one came on.  I couldn't figure out why people
wouldn't be interested.  Finally these two girls in Oregon tried it out and
told all their friends and suddenly it began to spread."

Before his Johny Appleseed trip Bernay had already gathered a sizable group of
early pre-blue-box phone phreaks together on loop-arounds in Los Angeles.
Bernay does not claim credit for the original discovery of the loop-around
numbers.  He attributes the discovery to an eighteen-year-old reform school kid
in Long Beach whose name he forgets and who, he says, "just disappeared one
day."  When Bernay himself discovered loop-arounds independently, from clues in
his readings in old issues of the Automatic Electric Technical Journal, he
found dozens of the reform-school kid's friends already using them. However, it
was one of Bernay's disciples in Seattle that introduced phone phreaking to
blind kids.  The Seattle kid who learned about loops through Bernay's recording
told a blind friend, the blind kid taught the secret to his friends at a winter
camp for blind kids in Los Angeles.  When the camp session was over these kids
took the secret back to towns all over the West.  This is how the original
blind kids became phone phreaks.  For them, for most phone phreaks in general,
it was the discovery of the possibilities of loop-arounds which led them on to
far more serious and sophisticated phone-phreak methods, and which gave them a
medium for sharing their discoveries.

A year later a blind kid who moved back east brought the technique