Cheshire Catalyst var en av Captain Crunchs venner og er godt kjent som en av pionerene på phone phreaking
Teksting (transkribering) av filmen
Cheshire Catalyst: The way phone phreaking worked, your touch-tone telephone at home would output a certain set of frequencies when you dialled a call. When you placed a long distance call and asked the operator to place the call her touch-tone dial put out a different set of frequencies that directly controlled [the] long lines network. What a blue box did was it duplicated the operator’s tones allowing the phone phreak to control the long lines network and control where he wanted the call to go. The way to place a call is by dialling a toll free number, 1-800-something or other, usually 18003253535; the Sheraton Hotel chain was rather popular at the time. Before they would pick up that phone though, you would send 2600 hertz down the line. Now, when I am in New York talking to my girlfriend in Los Angeles, and we’re just breathing at each other, there’s no real sound on the line, but AT&T still wants some revenue from that call. So they needed a way to be able to tell when the line was actually free. And they used the pure tone of 2600 hertz to say to the other machine: “this call is completed, this line is now available”. Well now I am sending 2600 hertz. On the other side the machine throws away the call, I release the 2600 hertz and I have a magic genie at the other end saying “Oh, I do not hear 2600 hertz so he must be getting ready to send me more digits [to] where the next call should go”. I send key pulse - area code - number - start, key pulse and start are separate buttons on a blue box dial. And the call goes through, phone gets picked up, supervision signal is sent back to the originating billing machine, which starts billing, buts its for a toll free number so no bill is actually generated! That’s how they used to work.
How was it discovered?
By reading the publicly available literature! But back in the sixties the equipment to do so was very expensive. Now where were they reading these Bell technical journals? At M.I.T. where they had access to [the] kind of resistors and transistors to be able to throw the thing together. As technology became cheaper, more and more people could build this equipment. So more people were allowed to explore [the?] networking the ways God, or at least AT&T had not intended. And if you don’t think AT&T isn’t God, just ask them sometime.
Stories from the early time
Well my claim to fame was hacking the world TELEX network, the world of model 32 Teletype machine, very loud chattering away in business offices. Western Union opened that service in the fifties, early sixties and AT&T said, “well, we’re on the Teletype Corporation, we have model 33 teletypes, that are the pure ASCII code and the Bell 103 modems, and we have this network with a lot of spare capacities. We just put TWIX, the Twix network, on top of our telephone network”. But they told everybody who would listen that the two networks were in no way interconnected. Well, they were interconnected everywhere! All you needed to do was to find which telephone exchange they’d hung the local TWIX exchange on, dial that exchange, the last four digits of the TWIX number, one ten baud, half duplex, handset in the acoustic coupler, you had a TWIX machine as far as the equipment was concerned. Well about that time when I am discovering all this 1976 or so, they put up MARI SAT, the maritime communication satellite. COMSAT, the people who ran the maritime network, had no clue where this Cheshire character were coming from, popping up on the telex machines of ships at sea via this satellite They didn’t know if I had my own earth station, whether I was trying to blow the satellite out of the sky...because they didn’t know how I could get there. They knew there was a backdoor in from the TWIX network, but they thought it was already locked! Because AT&T told them its not interconnected at all. When in fact there was this huge hinge along the entire back wall that I could lift along and slide under! So that’s pretty much how I got there.
Relationship counter-culture / technicians.
Don’s expect to find that the people interested in civil unrest and the people interested in technology are the same people, they usually aren’t. What America is finally getting into and what we aren’t shoving down everyone else’s throats ... So, I like world cooperation because I like the world’s communications network. I like the people around the world communication with each other, sharing ideas. Share the knowledge has always been the watchword of TAP, the Technological American Party, which was a newsletter I published for many years. It died out in 1984, just as 2600 Magazine, the hackers quarterly, started up. And so the torch has been handed off and carried as it were by 2600 Magazine. And while lately we had to get into political issues because the politics are invading the technology. Ordinarily we don’t really like to mess with politics, because that kind of adversarial relationship has nothing to do with the pure technical operation and the technical specification of what we like to play with: the hardware.
Many phone phreaks and computer hackers are into the technology of communications, and find it very difficult to communicate with other people. Because they are too into the technology to understand how to have relationships with other people. Just my observation from seeing so many phone phreaks over the years.
Oh, I interact much better than most hackers and phone phreaks but then again I am not a skilled as many of them! There just seem to be direct correlation of relationship between the two.
A computer is deterministic...
CC: Is the sequence of events, it must be in the proper sequence or the system falls down! And so you know, computer hackers generally like that kind of order the way things are determined like that! But the rest of the world doesn’t like that! And so we have a very hard time communicating with the rest of the world most of the times.
Defcon conference…
It’s a wonderful conference from all I’ve heard. I wish I could afford to go.
Defcon more technical than H2K that is more political
That’s more because of who attends. And you’re in New York, which is an activist centre. [?] you have a large population to draw from, where a few loudmouths can get together from the various boroughs, it’s just a subway ride away. But mostly because New York is the communications capital of America. All the TV networks are here, the news organizations are here. And if it’s going to make noise anywhere, it’s going to make noise in New York. One example given: OP Sail 2000, the flotilla of tall ships, which were in a race from Europe to Miami, and then were in Miami, where in Norfolk, Philadelphia. Did the nation know? No! They found out when it reached New York because that’s when the networks covered them, when they came to New York City. And so because it’s a communication capital, we get all these political activists, and they happen to come to the technology convention of ours. They get up and they bring their politics into our technical sessions. And so it seems like it’s a more political convention! Ask people running it, and they’ll go “politics? Huh? What?”
Emmanuel…
Well, Emmanuel has problems where the politics are infringing on his technology. The politics have gotten very stupid and my opinion, stupid politics started with the businessmen who were running cellular phone businesses and said “oh my goodness! People can listen in to our cell phone conversations with simple scanners they can get at Radioshack! Well, we must deal with this technological problem, we must pass a law!” And that’s all they did, you can still pick them up on a scanner. You buy a scanner that hasn’t got the actual frequencies, you can go at about … divide by two, go to that frequency and you can actually pick up a harmonic, that’s coming out of the cell phones, right out of the cell towers. Stupid law! It’s a businessman solution to a technological problem! And they blew it; they should have a technological solution. Encryption, digitising, some other means that just a simple scanner picking it up would not have released the conversation. But they blew it, they went for the cheap route, they just had a lobbyist buy a few congress critters and pass the law. It’s not the way you solve a technical problem.
The MPAA right now, the Motion Picture Association of America, is trying to solve a technical problem with a political, legal solution, the law, and I am sorry, the genie is out of the box! We know how to decrypt this stuff now. And, if you are not going to allow DVD’s to be played on Linux machines, then I am sorry I bought this DVD, I am going to play it on any hardware I can run it on! And its mine now, you know, your laws says I have fair use of this, and I have a machine which I want to run it, so I am going to run this private decryption software so I can play my software on your DVD that I paid for. And I am going to watch it. The politics are infringing on the technology. And we are forced to strike back.
He’s in a corner; Emmanuel is painted into a corner. He doesn’t want to be there, but if he’s there, he’s coming out fighting.
Do you think the MPAA lawyers will understand Emmanuel’s viewpoint?
Oh, they are paid not to understand Emmanuel’s viewpoint! This is what being a lawyer is being about! You are paid to listen to your client and to find reasons for your client while … why is his direction he is from is correct. In this case we don’t think they have firm legs to stand on. But it will take a court to determine that and then it will be taken to an appellant court. And further from up that, until somebody has the common sense to see that technology must rule.
Will that happen?
We have to let it play out and find out
Rumours about it going to the Supreme Court.
Oh yes, and I have little doubt that the appellant court, you know, is bought up as well. That it will go the Supreme Court and there are times when only the Supreme Court can come down with a common sense. The Elian Gonzales incident … there was no really need for it going to the Supreme Court except [for] that’s the procedure. And the appellate court did the right thing, everybody did the right thing and Supreme Court finally said, “no, the appellate court did the right thing, let the kid go home!” Because the father is the sole arbitrator in … I mean, it takes a while, it’s a democracy, ok, the democracy works slowly, but eventually the right answer usually comes up. Sometimes a guy is screwed, and I am terribly afraid that Emmanuel might get screwed, but when you look at the solid facts behind the case, the technology behind the case, I think Emmanuel is going to come out on top, and I think the MPAA is just running scared; they’ve started something, they don’t understand what they were starting, because they don’t understand the bits and bytes of the technology. And I think its going back to bite them!
They made something to decrypt …
Not only that, they are saying you cannot look on your own DVD, unless you play it on a player that has been licensed by them. But hey, this is my disc now! Why cant I play it on whatever machine I can get that can look at this. At this point we are looking at bits and bytes. So that it took a guy in Norway to figure it out, and put it up on the Net. Why are they jumping out to Norway? This is an American problem, you know, they are going to the international court of justice, they are going to the United Nations and the Interpol, they are going to these international legal meetings now and saying, “we must firm up these laws around the world to protect our copyrights from the nastiness of the Internet”. And, it’s going to take a few years to shake out. But the technology is out there; the genie is out the bottle. It’s too late for technological solution; because they opted for the cheap way out, the businessman solution, to just create laws to make it illegal and that’s going to wash out.
The commercialisation of the Internet …
The internet has become very commercialised, just walking around [on] the streets of New York, no only is there a dot com on every billboard, on every bus, but they are even selling the space on the umbrellas over the hot dog vendors to advertise businesses on the Internet! Because the first problem is have to get someone to your website to see the ad messages you’ve placed there.
The thing is that the Internet is more than just those commercial sites. Individuals around the world are setting up their websites with their own individual interests. They feed their sites to the search engines, and then people going to the search engines put in what their interests are and darn it doesn’t come up with a Proctor & Gamble dot com when they put in their interest in a soap opera, in comes up with a couple of guys down in Idaho, his wife is into The Bold and the Beautiful or the Guiding Light and … their fan page comes up. And this is the kind of interaction that is going on the Internet. Personal interaction … yes the corporate type, the ad agencies are still trying to figure out how to use the web properly, they haven’t realized glitz is fine, its gets in there once, but unless its information content they are not going anywhere. Which brings up about the point that if you are going to have the information content, make sure it’s readable by any web browser. Shockwave and Flash are wonderful. If you have a site trying to promote overseas, look at the bandwidth overseas, look at how long it takes a Shockwave page to load overseas. We’re talking about a telephone [connection] in South Africa it can take up to thirty minutes to load a Shockwave site. The advertisers haven’t figured it out yet, that the information content, the textual matter, is what counts. The most heinous crime on the Internet in my humble opinion is a graphic with words on it! Because they couldn’t get a good font out of hypertext so they put the font they wanted on the graphic and there’s no ALT tags saying what those words are for the non-graphic browsers. People coming in who cant see the graphics and don’t what the heck their graphics says!
It says “inline, inline, inline”…
It says “Inline … link” if its hyper linked, then you have to get through a process to find out what the heck the name of that hyper linked filename and is it valid to what I am looking for and … it’s a mess!
Until the advertisers and the so-called web masters, why I call them web critters, which haven’t figured this stuff out yet. When they finally get it together, the Internet will be a much more useful place in my humble opinion.
But, the individual interaction that are happening on the Internet makes the world a much friendlier place, in my opinion. And the advertisers are trying to follow along to.
Hacktivism …
Now its interesting, hacktivism uhm, its just not our problem with the MPAA. For example, the Million Mom march against guns, which actually sent about 100,000 people to Washington back in the year 2000, uhm, was mostly put together by e-mail. And without the resources of the Internet they wouldn’t be able to get so many people together in such a short period of time and do the planning and procedures and what have you, to get that march together. And the Internet brings together those people who have focused interests. You know, mothers against guns, mothers against drunk drivers, the soap opera fans … they all come together and finding communities where they were scattered individuals before, they are now an Internet community linked by the Internet. And it can only help promote their cause among others who have the same interest. But it also means they are not alone anymore; they can find people with the same interests. Almost any interest are out there on the Internet. Go to a search engine, punch in a couple of key words, and see what you find. They’d probably lead you to some chat rooms, talk to people, get together at conventions of like-minded people, you’ll have new friends! From all over the place!
I am a science-fiction fan; I grew up as a geek. You know, reading science-fiction alone in high-school, when I finally found science-fiction conventions it was wonderful to find like-minded people who knew the names Robert A. Henlein and Isaac Asimov and Larry Niven, and that I could discuss these things with, and they knew what I was talking about. You could throw about obscure references and get the proper obscure replies back and it’s … just wonderful when you can find you own.
Internet destroyed by commercialisation?
Not destroyed by it, possibly even enhanced by it. Because some people who can’t otherwise afford the Internet will get on through ISP’s wheres there’s a little ad on the bottom. Ok fine, but they are online! Many friends of mine laughs of users from AOL, I don’t because at least they are online! Their skills are not up to where they can go out and get a regular ISP and use the FTP client and how to use your [?] to email, all those fancier stuff that I and my hacker friends know how to use everyday. But at least they are trying, they are learning enough, they are at least getting out there and making the attempt and I can finally reach them by e-mail!
AOL hated, why?
Well, a lot of those so-called script-kiddies are coming on through their parents AOL accounts. The script-kiddies are just children who like to be naughty. In some cases its worse. In some cases were you got people who want to be destructive on the net, you have a situation where the playground bully has come indoors and learned how to type. And, you know, all he wants to do is to go out and scratch discs, and dump cores and just … wreak havoc. Those guys are real pain. And there isn’t a whole lot you can do to stop it. You can hopefully drag them into a con like this and make them realise that it’s more fun to be friendly out there. And you know, work with people. And, you can trade a lot more information that way. And hopefully have a better life [laughs] and finally get a life!
Definition of a hacker
What is a hacker? Well to me all hacking is [just] hacking away at a computer keyboard until it does what you want it to do. That’s all! Our proper title has been usurped by the press and handed off to these fourteen year old twerps that crack system security and we call those people crackers, because they crack system security. The press hasn’t picked up on that as much because the term hacker comes out of the old M.I.T. culture and so does a lot what we “true” hackers feel about sharing information on the net. That’s really how the net started with; it was a way to share information amongst scientists primarily. And it has become a public forum. Not only for the crass commercial corporations who want to sell soap and what have you. But also for individuals who wants to share information about their own particular interests, model railroading, and gardening …
Resource sharing
Well, not only shared, but you would leave the programs on paper tape lying around indoors and someone could pull the tape and run it and say “oh, I don’t like how it does that, let me change that and I’ll rerun the tape out and put the new copy back in the drawer”. And the first guy comes back “hey, somebody changed my program, but I like that! Hey, that’s really cool!” And you know, the culture would be one of sharing, sharing information, sharing knowledge, share how things worked, exploring how things worked and trying to make it better! True hacker syndrome is when you see something in a program that you have to try and fix. And when extended to real life, its when I see something where I got to go out and contact somebody and make a comment in the hopes of getting it fixed. And usually, you know, the problem with that is you usually break something else along the way … and, but you try! You try what you can to help fix a situation.
Alan Kotok, hacker ethics …
Well the so-called hacker ethic is just something that’s has been evolving .. you know its just taking bits and pieces from the M.I.T., from CALTECH and Carnegie Mellom and how things just used to happen in these various computer centres and trying to hang a tag on it calling it “computer ethics” Uhm, and basically its “don’t screw up!” And, “don’t scrub anyone else machine if have a problem if you get into it and let them know if you have a problem. And if you can fix it, you try and fix it, otherwise just let the guy know”. At M.I.T. I was told, when you first go the M.I.T., [the] freshman orientation, one of the first things to show you, is how to crash the system. Because back in high school that was the fun thing to do. Well at M.I.T. any fool can crash the system here, here’s how! And this will work and oh yeah, just say “shut down” and it’d just come right down. Now you know how to crash the system, go do something clever. And the kids go out try a few things. Now of course, something will crash the system. By accident, as the system comes back up and messages will flood into the console “oh golly”, you know, “I was fragging with disc drive and I hope it wants bit [?] and I don’t know what happened”. But more often than not, they’ll get the message “good grief, it’d come to this old hack, listen we need to patch this and here’s the patch”. And its … the concept of helping makes things better, by exercising them for one thing, and if you have a problem, try to get help getting it resolved. Hacker’s syndrome is really when a hacker sees something going wrong on a computer, he wants to get it fixed.
Bad versus good hackers
Well, little boys like to be naughty, you know, that just goes without saying, but ah for the most part, we are nice guys. You know, we like to help each other out, we go to Chinese dinners together, uhm, its just one those strange things
Why Chinese food / restaurants so popular among hackers?
It’s a complicated structure … the thing with Chinese dinners is that everybody orders something. It’s a very large plate of that thing and you share it all around. You share resources! And so it’s a part of the fun going to a Chinese dinner with lot of people, that you’d get to try a whole lot of different things that you’d ordinarily wouldn’t get on your own … very long tradition. And there’s that and there’s the … a lot of the things comes from science-fiction conventions as well, a whole bunch of science-fiction [fans] and computer hackers are a very mixed community. And so we brought a number of those conventions with us here to the hacker conference and putting things on.
The program book … this is something that they do at science-fiction [conventions] and I finally convinced Emmanuel this year [that’d] we have a program book laying out where everyone’s program items are … the table in the front and uhm, more and more we’d just follow the various conventions for putting on conventions. But Chinese food is just something that is different, that everyone can participate in and share it around.
What do you think of the H2K conference so far?
As one of the people who’ve been organizing it I think its been going extremely smoothly compared to how it could be going. Uhm, I’ve heard some complaints that it wasn’t quite was what people expected, and I’ve said “hey listen, any conference like this is what you make of it, you know. Get out of that network room and network with people, not just hacking around on the machine. Swap information, learn what you can, share what you can. That you are disappointed with the program that we have, or that some talks were too short or that some [?] go moved because Cult of the Dead Cow ran over time or whatever else, you know, I am terribly sorry those things happened but find a group to go to dinner with, you know, sit around and swap stories and see that you learn something and sure to swap email addresses to keep in touch later. If the conference never got its program off the ground, you should still have some good time from the people you meet.
Cult of the Dead Cow show?
The Cult of the Dead Cow is not your usual software presentation. It’s mostly a bunch of guys who like to have fun. I can see that their roots are probably steeped in the tradition of the Church of the Sub-Genius which is a joke church that if you are not part of the in crowd and know the in-jokes, meaning you just haven’t read the book or anything. If you are a pure southern Baptist from Alabama you will reel back in horror but [when?] you see it as the joke as the whole thing is, and can just sit back and enjoy the whole thing as it is, you can just see it as a bunch of guys out to have a good time and … but with some underlying messages. There is software, “Back Orifice”, sends a tremendous message to Microsoft and the real world software community that says, “You guys aren’t secure! You guys have a problem, you guys who always pass the laws here, you need to get some technological answers!”
The greatest hack of all time?
Well that has to be my personal hack actually. Uhm, and if you are looking for the area code story you’re right. Basically I am the fellow who got my own area code. Its pure timing dumb luck all put together. I think Robert A. Henlein would be proud of this story, because it was just grabbing the right information, putting it into the right ear, at the proper time. I live in the east central Florida, right outside the main gates of the Kennedy Space Centre, and we got word from our Florida Public Service Commission that they were going to split the 407 area code. Well, I am a phone phreak, I know how to look at the website of the North American Numbering Plan Administration. So go up there and look the List. Everyone in America knows the List – 201, New Jersey, 202, D.C., blah, blah, blah! And I find this number, and I go “good grief, that number is available for geographical release? Well, geographical release of the area code is what we are looking for to do. This is the number I want”. Its time to power down the web browser, power up the word processor, prepare my testimony for the Public Service Commission hearing. I went and I told those guys, “listen, we ARE the space coast of Florida, as our tourist bureau calls it. We ARE the countdown capital of the world and I fell that if the countdown capital should have [the] area code 321”. And they loved the idea from the get-go! Then one commissioner told that they loved to have this sugar coating to put on the bad news that people had to change their area code. But what was worse, was when the chairman of the public service commission came up to me afterwards and she told me that they had gone to the North American Numbering Plan Administration and they had asked for such a list such I had presented in my testimony and they had been told it was proprietary and they couldn’t have. And she was very grateful for my testimony that I brought them the list. The worst part after that … I mean, the way I like to look at it, the way I put the joke is well I asked for the area code and they approved it so it must be my area code right? But I share …
However, I saved the best number for myself. I dialled the number; “I am sorry the number you’ve reached at Bell South Mobility is not currently in use”. Cool! And I ran down the kiosk in the mall and said, “I want this number!” And she called downtown; “oh I am terribly sorry sir, but that number is in the middle of a hundred group that are on a corporate wait. So it’s a kind of reserved number and there is no way we can get it for you, I am terribly sorry”. Fine, ok. That was the day after the public service commission hearing. The day I learned they approved the area code, I got up on the Internet. Bellsouthmobility.com, ah Mark Fielders the president. Ok, “how to contact you company” and here’s the e-mail address of publicity flak [?]. First name underscore last name at (@) mark underscore fiedler at (@) dear mister Fiedler
It’s my area code; I asked for it, they approved it, its mine right? So I share my area code, I would like the number 5438633, so as of November 1’st 1999, my phone number will be 321-LIFTOFF! And I got it!
This, I consider, the ultimate phone phreak hack! In my humble opinion …
It follows Cheshire’s law: and Cheshire’s law is “you can’t break the rules, but once you’ve found out what they are, you can abuse the hell out of them!”
No abuse was required in this case, it was just a simple matter of following the procedures and that’s all it was. More pure dumb luck than anything else.
