atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums General General Telephone & Systems Information This makes me mad!

Wozniak of Apple fame was one of those phone phreak hacks. In collage he got hold of an AT&T practices and made a tone box to simulate many tones to trick the network in passing free calls. :rofl:

Does anyone remember the PC movement that pushed to have manholes renamed to ... I think it was .. "person covers" or something to that effect?

Sam is spot on.

Matt,
To insure total political correctness the name was to be peroffspring hole covers.

I remember when dozens of dubious articles like these could be found on bulletin board systems.

One sticks in my mind especially. It went to great lengths describing a gadget intended to get you out of an "FBI lock-in trace" on your line. It was nothing more a regular 120V receptacle with a single-pole switch in series connected across the line so you could plug a table lamp or other appliance into it.

According to the "expert," your phone applies voltage to the line to "keep it open," so the FBI connects its own source of voltage to your line so that even when you hang up your phone the connection remains up. So you have to build this gadget which magically "drains" the FBI's voltage from the line to release the call before they can trace it back to you! :rofl:

"All further inquiries about our Mk. II telephone hold adapter may now be directed to prisoner #245218, Federal Penitentiary, Terre Haute, Ind."

'Hey, I'm out now, and the device you refer to is patented and supported a nice stay in the iron-bar hotel, and supports me today, in a manner to which I've become accustomed!' A quote from 'no longer prisoner #245218'. John C.

Phreak away....

I remember when I was working for a radio station about 12-13 years ago, there was this obnoxious wannabe "hacker", who was continually badgering me for help building various colored boxes. He couldn't seem to understand that those were from an earlier generation, and that they did not work with modern equipment and out-of-band signalling.

He was constantly abusing station computers, using systems that he was not supposed to touch (and were clearly marked as such), such as the PC that was spooling the AP wire service.

We ended up giving him the bums rush after I caught him printing hundreds of pages of phreaker articles on the station printer, which was for official use only. When confronted, he couldn't figure out how to kill his incriminating print job, so he reached over and turned off the Sun workstation (which also served as the mail/web/shell/printserver).

I kicked him out, and nuked his unix account on the spot. He had the gall to come back, and ask for copies of his files, and I took great pleasure in telling him that they were gone, and could not be recovered. I didn't tell him about the backup tapes.

His name was added to the short list of people never to be allowed to set foot in the station again.

He later had the gall to list our station as a reference on a job application, and the chief engineer and I took pleasure in writing a response letter detailing exactly why he had been declared persona-non-grata and expelled from the station.

Isn't the politically correct description "maintenance hole" instead of manhole?