Comment by CleanedStar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CleanedStar | Hacker News Reader

In the early 1980s I used to call a BBS with a private section that had "950 codes". I didn't really associate with people doing this sort of thing until the late 1980s though...

I have to laugh at the article. The people I knew were not blowing 2600 tones into multi-frequency trunks, they were not even logging into their local TIRKS or SARTS or COSMOS or 5ESS/DMS-100 switch. They had the whole system "owned". The x.25 networks to - Tymnet, Telenet etc. As well as all the key Internet machines and networks. We're going back over 20 years though...Not that I think things are more secure, the opposite actually.

One of the guys I knew later went to work for the tiger team of one of the big four accounting firms. Their success rate? 100%. He complained it was not a real test though, as he could not hack into Verizon or AT&T and get in via those back channels...

As to what happened? Others I know set 1995 as the year it ended, and I agree. Between 1994 and 1996, everyone I know started working at ISPs, security companies, dot coms and so forth. Including myself. Some of the people who hung out on the IRC channels became CEO/CTO/CIO/CSO executives in companies which got millions in VC (back then and recently), or were bought out for millions, or their companies IPO'd. I would say how well some of the people who used to hang out on IRC and go to cons have done, but I don't think people would believe me. I'm not even counting stuff like the founding of Apple, which I think Jobs said would not have happened if him and Woz didn't build blue boxes. The way things really happen are covered up, or not brought up any how. "Every fortune of unknown origin began with a crime" - Balzac

It's funny how these days, those systems and variations of those systems (COSMOS for example) are STILL used. Talk about legacy systems. Not more than 10 years ago, people were still breaking into them.

One theory I forgot to mention...of why phreaking and hacking died out as it was in the mid-1990s...

From the late 1970s until the mid-1990s, communication via a computer and modem was done for a great deal of people via BBSs. Someone, often a young man, would set their phone line and computer to act as a BBS when they weren't using the line themselves. So you had a network of independent, autonomous bulletin boards, run by young men mostly, called by young men mostly. They created their own culture.

It is not the Verizon/AT&T high speed connection, with Usenet servers being pulled, torrents being throttled with MPAA/RIAA letter being passed back and forth system we have now. I mean we're talking here on a board owned by venture capitalists. Or Slashdot, owned by a public company. Or chatting on Facebook. All of this was not so corporatized then. I mean, things like Usenet, P2P, anything autonomous and independent and similar to how things were done back then are beset upon by the powers that be. There was freedom back then, now things are back to typical USA - corporate-run, unfree, policed, boring etc.

I remember when I discovered BBSes. Must have been sometime in the mid-eighties. I found a number in magazine, probably Byte.

And I called it, using a TI Silent 700 terminal, which was an acoustic coupler 300-baud modem married to a thermal printer. It was called Silent to differentiate it from noisier (and slower) impact-printer based competitors, such as the IBM 2741, which used the Selectric typewriter bouncing type ball. The 700 could print out text at 30 characters per second on a roll of thermal paper.

When it answered, I was presented by a set of menus leading to all sorts of interesting hacking-related text files. But the most interesting text file wasn't a hacking screed. Rather, it was a directory of other BBSes, their areas of interest, and their phone numbers. Think the internet over PSTN. Touring the BBS network of the time, I went thru quite a few rolls of paper and made a significant contribution to the company's phone bill!

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