Joybubbles, an indie documentary about a phone phreak

http://www.radiolab.org/story/187724-long-distance

(The podcast of this show hasn't been posted yet.)

Back in 1992-ish, there were still a few phone systems on Earth that used tones. They were in weird rural places, third world locales, etc. People would set up hacked relays and PBX systems, and there were instructions passed around every now and then about how you could call one of these, then call another number, and get routed through one of these ancient telephone networks.

I did it, and using a program called Blue Beep managed to hear the "kerchunk" and silence that followed a successful 2600hz injection into an open phone line:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueBEEP

From there I tried to do a few things, but it didn't seem to work very well... just ended up getting a weird fast busy signal and getting disconnected.

I remember hanging on this article's every word:

http://www.lospadres.info/thorg/lbb.html

I also did the call myself around the world trick in 1993-1994, but using hacked PBXes. Not legal, but fun... but I was fifteen or so, so the fact that it was illegal made it cooler.

I've got a project out there now that runs on a geo-distributed architecture, which means I've got several cloud nodes scattered on four different continents. A while back I ssh'd to myself around the world... San Francisco -> Singapore -> Amsterdam -> New York -> back to my laptop. Did it after seeing a story about this stuff, for old time's sake. :)

I really miss the old hacker culture, which overlapped both senses of the term.

I feel like today's hacker culture is really two major kinds of people. You've got people trying to hustle startups, which is similar in some ways but isn't the same. Outside of that you've got this snarky troll-infested "hacker" culture full of mean-spirited people who... well... let me put it this way... are not as smart as they think they are. Their idea of a hack is to "raid" some social media site or deface a web site or whatever... it has nothing to do with exploration or invention. The derogatory term "neckbeard" is often used to invoke the popular stereotype. A person like Joybubbles would just get insulted and laughed at in this sphere, but when I was fourteen I was fascinated by characters like him. I looked up to their curiosity, and saw the way they used the early net to escape the confines of blindness and run around the world on wires as incredibly romantic and... well... fucking cool.