The History of Phone Phreaking Blog

Ex Libris Joybubbles (Part I)

Sam Etler just posted the following on the Singing Wires and CentralOffice Yahoo groups:

I recently came into possession of a number of documents from the library of Joybubbles (aka Joe Engressia) via Phil Lapsley. There's some interesting documents that I'll hopefully be able to digitize eventually. Here's the first: Telephone Theory and Practice, Automatic Switching and Auxiliary Equipment by Kempster B. Miller, 1933. It was photocopied by someone at AT&T and sent to a reader, since Joybubbles was blind. Because of this a lot of the photos are of poor quality, but the text is readable. It's a nearly 500-page book so someone went to a serious amount of effort to get it to him.

The PDF is large, about 42 megs. It can be found here:

http://etler.com/docs/Books/Telephone%20Theory%20and%20Practice,%201933.pdf

sam

These were documents that Steven and I rescued when we were cleaning out Joybubbles' apartment after he passed away in 2007.  Thanks, Sam, for digitizing this particular volume and for the many other things you do to preserve telephone history.  Joybubbles would have appreciated it.  As he was fond of saying, "knowledge shared is knowledge expanded."

Two Hacks (One Old, One New) For the New Year

Two interesting hacks -- neither really telephone related -- that seemed worth sharing for the new year.

One's from 1903, and comes to us via New Scientist:

LATE one June afternoon in 1903 a hush fell across an expectant audience in the Royal Institution's celebrated lecture theatre in London. Before the crowd, the physicist John Ambrose Fleming was adjusting arcane apparatus as he prepared to demonstrate an emerging technological wonder: a long-range wireless communication system developed by his boss, the Italian radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi. The aim was to showcase publicly for the first time that Morse code messages could be sent wirelessly over long distances. Around 300 miles away, Marconi was preparing to send a signal to London from a clifftop station in Poldhu, Cornwall, UK.

Yet before the demonstration could begin, the apparatus in the lecture theatre began to tap out a message. At first, it spelled out just one word repeated over and over. Then it changed into a facetious poem accusing Marconi of "diddling the public".

To read more about what New Scientist suggests is the first public pwning of a communication system, see Dot-Dash-Diss: The gentleman hacker's 1903 lulz.

The second is from 2011 and comes to us via Boing Boing:

One of the most mind-blowing presentations at this year's Chaos Communications Congress (28C3) was Ang Cui's Print Me If You Dare, in which he explained how he reverse-engineered the firmware-update process for HPs hundreds of millions of printers. Cui discovered that he could load arbitrary software into any printer by embedding it in a malicious document or by connecting to the printer online.

Read on to learn how your mild-mannered HP network printer can be completely taken over and turned into the devil itself, merely by printing a document.  Printer Malware: Print a Malicious Document, Expose Your Whole LAN.

Thanks to the several folks who suggested both stories.

Happy New Year, and welcome to 1903 ... or is that 2012? :-)