“I was disappointed by the response at first,” Bernay told me, when I finally reached him at one of his many numbers and he had dispensed with the usual “I never do anything illegal” formalities with which experienced phone phreaks open most conversations. When one of the curious called one of the numbers he would hear a tape recording pre-hooked into the loop by Bernay which explained the use of looparound pairs, gave the numbers of several more, and ended by telling the caller, “At six o’clock tonight this recording will stop and you and your friends can try it out. The stickers read something like “Want to hear an interesting tape recording? Call these numbers.” The numbers that followed were toll-free loop-around pairs. It seems that five years ago this Mark Bernay (a pseudonym he chose for himself ) began traveling up and down the West Coast pasting tiny stickers in phone books all along his way. And in fact almost every phone phreak in the West can trace his origins either directly to Mark Bernay or to a disciple of Mark Bernay. The California phone phreaks had spoken of a mysterious Mark Bernay as perhaps the first and oldest phone phreak on the West Coast. It was on Gilbertson’s select list of phone phreaks. >The Legendary Mark Bernay Turns Out to Be “The Midnight Skulker” "The legendary Mark Bernay" featured in the Esquire article: There's no way I'm going to spill the beans on HN, because I enjoy collecting my gas discounts through the collective help of this anonymous community. There's a watered-down version of it happening right now with store checkout systems where you enter a phone number to collect "points." I ran into it a couple of years ago, and I'm surprised how many stores it works in. If you think paying $2/week for is bad, before the internet, you might pay $60-$100 an hour in today's dollars to read a newspaper online. This was very useful once data started getting siloed into pay services. It was about passwords.īefore the internet, and on the internet before the web, it was common for hackers and casual sysops to create an account on a system with the username "cypherpunk" and the password "cypherpunk" to let anyone in to explore. "Hackers" has changed definitions at least six times that I can think of.Īnd anything to do with the telephone network was "phreakers."Īnd "cypherpunks" wasn't always about encryption. See also The Classic Breakfast Cereal Timeline.Yep. The blue box wasn’t the last gadget the phone phreaks community made, and this was the first form of “hacking” which later became internet hacking. There were also a group of blind phreakers, who, it is claimed, had perfect pitch and could produce this tone themselves by whistling into the phone. Cap’n Crunch Bosun Whistle © 1971markus via WikimediaĪlthough John Draper is the subject of the legend, he is not the first person to realize that a 2600 Hz tone could be used to get free calls. Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs are said to have made their own bluebox before they made the Apple computer and John Draper was a big technical adviser to them and others, called “phone phreaks.” He also became one of the first Apple employees. A box (the first one discovered was blue) was used to get free long-distance and international calls using 800 numbers, employing not only the 2600 Hz tone but a series of tones called “multifrequency” or MF tones. This practice gave rise to what was called blueboxing, which was the first automated tool fraud technique used to defraud phone companies. See also: What Was Cap’n Crunch’s Full Name? The technical reason for this is beyond my understanding (I’m just regurgitating my research), but it has something to do with sending the tone down a long-distance trunk, which would terminate the call, and then seize another trunk for reuse once the tone stopped. In reality, the line on the other end would remain open, allowing you to continue the call without being charged for it. At least, it would terminate the call as far as AT&T knew. If you dialed a long distance number and then blew the whistle into the mouthpiece, this tone would terminate the call. He is said to have discovered that the whistle, when you blew it, produced a nearly precise 2600 Hz tone. The whistle, at some point, gave rise to the famous legend of John Draper, a.K.a the hacker Captain Crunch. One famous free prize was a toy whistle called a bosun’s whistle. They’d have comic books and all sorts of great things. As much as the TV cartoons influenced my devotion to Cap’n Crunch - which has waned but never truly wilted - there were also free prizes in the boxes which were a bit more high-quality (to a kid’s mind) than other cereal-box prizes.
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