The History of Phone Phreaking Blog

3D Printing a 2600 Hz Whistle

Terence Eden has a nice blog post about 3D-printing a 2,600 Hz whistle, just for fun.  No, it's not actualy a Cap'n Crunch whistle, but it does hit the right note.

3D Printing the 2600 Whistle

Vexsome

In researching Exploding The Phone I spammed various federal agencies with hundreds of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.  The FBI bore the brunt of my requests since I figured they were the agency that had the most info on phone phreaks.  According to my tracking spreadsheet I sent them about 400 requests over the course of four or five years.

Recently Jason Smathers of Muckrock filed his own FOIA request to the FBI, asking them for a copy of their "vexsome filer list" (vexsome: adj., tending to cause annoyance, frustration, or worry [1]). 

They sent him a copy.  I'm on it:

You can see the details on his request and the FBI's response over on Muckrock's web site.

I note that there is something vexsomly and recursively delightful about filing a vexsome request for a list of vexsome requesters.  :-)

[1] Although I'm thinking it should probably technically be "vexatious", not "vexsome."

Document of the Week: Telephone Hackers Active

Back in 1963 the MIT student newspaper, The Tech, published a gem of a piece titled "Telephone Hackers Active":

"Many telephone services have been curtailed because of so-called hackers, according to Professor Carleton Tucker, administrator of the Institute telephone system. [...]  The students have accomplished such things as tying up all the tie-lines between Harvard and MIT, or making long-distance calls by charging them to a local radar installation.  One method involved connecting the PDP-1 computer to the phone system to search the lines until a dial tone, indicating an outside line, was found."

In addition to being an interesting bit of phone phreak history, this is the first published use of the word "hacker" (used in its modern sense) that I'm aware of.  As a side note, Prof. Tucker was famous for overseeing MIT's phone system.  He was also instrumental in getting Amos E. Joel, Jr. a job with Bell Labs -- Joel later went on to become the head of switching at the labs.

P.S.. Management apologizes for the hiatus in Document of the Week postings... certain small matters, such as moving back to the U.S., intruded.  We hope to be back on a more regular, if not weekly, posting schedule forthwith.