Joe Engressia, the granddaddy of phone phreaking (and in many ways one of the first modern hackers) died today. If you haven't already the seminal 1971 Esquire article "Secrets of the Little Blue Box" that told his story, you really should.
via Boing Boing
8 comments:
Awesome read. Here is a link of a pic of the Steve's (Jobs and Wozniak) with a blue box. How cool is that?
Dock has Woz's new book.
He lived (and died) in Minneapolis.
I'm so bummed. I never knew he lived here! I've long wanted to turn his life story into a screenplay.
I don't see tim's link.
I got mixed feelings about those guys. For starters, yea, I did something similar when I was using unsecured wireless. (although I did attempt to find the guy, I'd have no problem paying...and I could be connecting for free right now today, but I am paying for a legal connection by choice)
Someone builds an infrastructure, I think it is only fair that those who use it pay for it. Say you build a bridge for 100 guys to get to work, one more guy doesn't wear the bridge out, it's already built, his crossing costs you nothing, so the 101s guy gets to use it for free and the other 100 split the cost of building the bridge? I don't see that as fair.
Mainly I feel sorry for the blind kids left home alone with some sitter whose parents obviously are having issues with. I can see how if you are a blind kid sitting in an 'average' home, the phone being a very attractive plaything because of soudtones etc. I just wonder what would have happened if the parents had invested a bit of time and effort in exposing the kid to other areas where he could explore with sound, such as a musical instrument.
Still there was also a sense of 'community' that a lot of these people were able to build, when their normal everyday life left them as islands in a sea of sighted people, phreaking let them open doors and go places they otherwise couldn't and connect with eachother.
Of course, that is basically what chatrooms and message boards are doing now. If you have no friends coming over to visit, if no one in your area shares your concerns, special outlook, or interest, you can jump on the web and dive headlong into the very specific subcommunity you are looking for.
I can understand these guys desire to work with the phone company, help them improve the situation. The problem is, such people like this often cause team dynamics problems. Maybe each one can do the work of 10 techs, but the phone company needs 100000 techs even if they are only partially competent. When one guy lives and breaths X, he usually seems to expect that everyone else should too, which cause conflict with the guys who jsut want to do their job and go home, because if those guys were really interested in applying themselves 110% to something, they probably would have gone to lawschool or doublemajored in chemistry and buisness, or what have you, not PhoneTech. However well meaning, I can see these phreakers if they did get their dream jobs as menial techs at a phone company would cause more harm to internal worker dynamics than they could compensate for.
I think business is finally learning how to handle these guys though, in whatever field, not just phones. Let them freelance and subcontract and all that good stuff. Have some superobsessed guy come in and work with you for 2 weeks, then he is gone before you truely desire to strangle him.
I know at best buy stores while they like the associates to straighten up etc as they work and help customers and all that, they specifically avoid people who are genuinely obsessive/compulsive about it after learning the hard way.
Of course, the long-distance phone infrastructure had long been paid for by the mid seventies. There weren't significant new infrastructure costs until sprint laid all that wonderful fiber-optic cable in the late 80's.
doesn't matter if it has been 'paid for' to me.
My grandparents paid off their house years ago, I am not going to let you run around the basement naked, well at least not unless you pay the basement naked fee of $10 just like everyone else.
Gus- you totally scooped Futuretense. The NPR site (http://www.publicradio.org/columns/futuretense/) isn't updated yet, but it was about Joybubbles and phone phreaking today, Aug 21.
I rule.
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