The History of Phone Phreaking Blog

Business Cards, Blue Boxes, and Project MF

Question: If you go to a conference what's the one thing you need above all else?

Answer: Business cards.

Problem: Business cards suck.  You give them out, other people accept them graciously, and then, nine times out of ten, they toss them  Usually this happens with some head scratching on their part after looking at your card a week later and saying, "Who was that?"

The PCB layout

Opportunity: My pal Kenton forwarded me a link to some highly memorable business cards. I got to wondering: what kind of a card could I make for a hacker conference that would be memorable?

Inspiration: A printed-circuit board!  But since I was giving a talk on the history of phone phreaking, there was really only one choice: a blue box PCB.

(Digression: For the uninitiated, a blue box is an electronic tone-generating widget that phone phreaks used to control the long-distance telephone network.  Blue boxes were the scourge of AT&T in the 1960s and 1970s but the network has been immune to them since the mid-1980s.)

The resulting business card

Serendipity: I have been corresponding with Don Froula, a phormer phone phreak.  Turns out that, just for ducks, he recently designed a single-chip blue box made up of modern components.  Over the course of several days we  turned his design into a layout for a printed circuit board and then ordered 350 of them through Advanced Circuits.  They were shipped directly to my hotel room at the conference and arrived the day before my presentation -- talk about just-in-time inventory management!

Result: A cute little business card that you can assemble and use as a blue box!  I gave out 200 of them after my talk.  They went like hot cakes.

Conundrum: But where on Earth can you use a blue box if the telephone network no longer uses those musical little tones?

Assembled and ready for use

Realization: Not where, but when!  You need a time machine.  And that's when Project MF comes in.  Mark Abene and Don Froula developed a set of patches for the open-source Asterisk PBX system that makes it pretend to be an old-school telephone switch from the 1970s.  And with that you now have a perfectly legal place to test out your blue box and experience the joys of the telephone network from days gone by.

Link: http://www.projectmf.org.

On the Dangers of Narrative

Every so often the universe whomps you on the head to teach you a lesson.*

I was recently reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book The Black Swan, a discursive rant about the random nature of the world we live in, our failure to comprehend this, and what it means for us.

One of the points NNT makes is that humans have a deep-seated need to utter the word "because."  That is, we want to find causation, even to the point of making it up when it's not there.  Given a set of data we humans will come up with elaborate theories to explain "why" something happened, e.g., that thing B happened "because of" thing A.  Sometimes we're right.  Often we're not.  Frequently things are more complicated than they seem.

NNT suggests that much of the danger of narratives comes from stories being so powerful and alluring -- once you have a good narrative that you think fits the data, well, stick a fork in you, you're done.  You will incorporate this story into your subconscious and believe it -- and repeat it -- without a second thought.

Jason Scott also warned of the dangers of narrative in his "One Last Time: The Hack/Phreak History Primer" talk at the HOPE Conference last weekend. He said many of the same things NNT does but said them from a historian's perspective rather than that of a cranky polymathic physicist turned options trader.

As Jason spoke I nodded to myself in the audience and thought, "Yep, I totally get this.  I completely see the dangers.  I hate it when other people do it.  It's a darn good thing I'm so self aware and that I don't engage in this sort of behavior."

(Have I set myself up enough yet?)

The next day I gave my talk on the history of phone phreaking.  One of the slides in my presentation dealt with YIPL/TAP, a phone phreak newsletter that predated 2600 by, oh, 13 years.  YIPL started in 1971 and its initials stood for the "Youth International Party Line", a play on the organization's roots in the Yippie movement as well as its interest in telephones.  A few years later it changed its name to TAP, the "Technological American Party."  A few years after that it changed its name to the less political "Technical Assistance Program."

As I was discussing the slide I said, "In 1976 TAP changed its name to the Technical Assistance Program because it had become less political."  Note the "because."

During the Q&A period, Cheshire Catalyst, the last TAP editor, stepped up to the microphone and said, "Actually, we changed our name to 'Technical Assistance Program' because we were unable to get a bank account if we had the word 'Party' in our name."

Oh.

Later, in the bar across ther street from the hotel he said, "Don't feel bad!  You were right, we did become less political!"

But that wasn't why they changed their name.  So much for me being so self-aware.  :-)

* Yikes!  Do you see the narrative that crept in to my opening sentence without me even being aware of it?  NNT would spank me! "Phil, the universe may well have whomped you on the head, and while you might have learned a lesson from it, it is unlikely that the universe whomped you on the head in order to teach you a lesson!"

The Last HOPE

This weekend I attended The Last HOPE conference in New York City. I had an astonishingly good time. (It's the first hacker conference I've been to since the 1989 USENIX in San Diego.) I was impressed and uplifted by the youth and energy!

Jason Scott at The Last HOPE (photo: mirka23)

Alas, I didn't get to see as many talks as I would have liked, mostly because I was holed up in my hotel room working away on my talks. :-) But two that I did catch that I thought were quite good were Jason Scott's funny and insightful rant on hacker history, and Stephen Cass's (of Discover Magazine) talk on how to deal with the mainstream media.

My two talks were "A Brief History of Phone Phreaking, 1960-1980" and "The Freedom of Information Act: A Hacker Perspective". Both seemed to be well attended and well received; the phreaking talk in particular was standing-room only! Many people said nice things to me after each of them, which was flattering. My belief is that the Last HOPE people will be offering DVDs of these talks for sale Real Soon Now, and I will be posting slides from the FOIA talk shortly as well.  [12/1/2008 update: they are finally available!]

An unexpected treat was looking up after my FOIA talk and seeing my old friend David whom I met at Berkeley in 1987 or so and really haven't seen since then. We ended up going out to dinner later that weekend and had a great time catching up.

Thanks to Jason and Chesire Catalyst for introducing me to various people I needed to meet, and especially to Jason for shamelessly pimping my talk and then giving me a rousing impromptu introduction at my phone phreaking talk.