[00:00.850 --> 00:09.470]  And the previous program was Economic Update with Richard Wolff, and that is heard Wednesdays at 6.30 p.m.
[00:09.490 --> 00:11.810]  right after the WBAI evening news.
[00:12.010 --> 00:17.530]  Now stay tuned for Off the Hook, WBAI New York, WBAI.org online.
[00:17.790 --> 00:18.390]  Stay tuned.
[00:22.050 --> 00:26.250]  And you're listening to radio station WBAI New York.
[00:26.430 --> 00:29.390]  The time is 7 o'clock time once again for Off the Hook.
[00:36.110 --> 00:39.390]  It's ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
[00:40.390 --> 00:42.330]  I cut myself while shaving.
[00:43.130 --> 00:44.910]  Now I can't make a cut.
[00:45.830 --> 00:50.210]  We couldn't get much worse, but if they could, they would.
[00:50.470 --> 00:53.130]  But maybe more, but the best is, but the worst.
[00:53.970 --> 00:55.630]  I hope that's understood.
[00:55.970 --> 00:56.710]  But maybe more.
[02:22.390 --> 02:23.650]  And a very good evening to everybody.
[02:23.750 --> 02:25.190]  The program is Off the Hook.
[02:25.350 --> 02:27.970]  Emmanuel Goldstein here with you, joined tonight by Kyle.
[02:28.290 --> 02:28.970]  Yes, I'm here.
[02:28.970 --> 02:33.090]  And in Skypeland, we have Alex.
[02:35.790 --> 02:37.350]  Indeed, I am here on delay.
[02:37.570 --> 02:38.630]  Here on delay, all right.
[02:39.090 --> 02:40.250]  Rob P. Firefly.
[02:41.010 --> 02:41.910]  Good evening.
[02:42.370 --> 02:42.930]  And Gila.
[02:43.730 --> 02:44.110]  Hello.
[02:44.890 --> 02:47.510]  Well, we're back after a couple of weeks.
[02:47.750 --> 02:48.590]  Good to be back.
[02:48.770 --> 02:56.470]  And all kinds of fun things have been happening in the world of technology and hacking and things like that.
[02:56.470 --> 02:59.150]  I want to start with something kind of cool.
[03:00.170 --> 03:03.610]  Just more evidence that we have the best listeners in the world.
[03:04.670 --> 03:09.170]  A few weeks ago, actually a couple of years ago, and then a few weeks ago, we brought it up a second time.
[03:09.790 --> 03:19.310]  We had this ancient voice BBS system, which is basically something we held together in the 1990s, I think it was.
[03:19.310 --> 03:20.670]  It was the early 90s, mid-90s.
[03:21.310 --> 03:33.670]  It was a system that people would call into, and it would act like a BBS, a bulletin board system, of the really old days, when people used computers for that.
[03:33.670 --> 03:42.630]  But we decided to make it an audio system, so that people could post public messages and be able to hear them, and also be able to send private messages.
[03:42.810 --> 03:47.630]  But the system was... it got antiquated.
[03:47.830 --> 03:48.970]  It got obsolete.
[03:49.310 --> 03:55.470]  And we found ourselves with a whole bunch of audio files that we had no idea how to play.
[03:56.050 --> 03:59.210]  Kyle, I know you were battling this for a number of years, right?
[04:00.010 --> 04:01.130]  Kyle, more or less.
[04:01.330 --> 04:15.850]  It was really just going through parts and older equipment, trying to move e-waste along and get space, reclaim space around the office and storage areas.
[04:16.030 --> 04:22.070]  So it was really this machine that basically had no power supply.
[04:22.230 --> 04:28.730]  And I think, actually, this old Apple machine, we borrowed a power supply from that.
[04:28.730 --> 04:33.110]  And that's what we booted it with to copy all of the system.
[04:33.230 --> 04:36.170]  Actually, we basically cloned the entire OS.
[04:36.430 --> 04:37.350]  Did you mention the OS?
[04:37.710 --> 04:38.110]  No.
[04:38.330 --> 04:38.690]  No, no.
[04:38.690 --> 04:42.530]  I think we talked about it before, but it's Windows 3.0.
[04:42.710 --> 04:43.270]  No, no.
[04:43.390 --> 04:43.730]  3.1.
[04:43.870 --> 04:44.570]  3.1.
[04:44.670 --> 04:45.010]  3.1.
[04:45.730 --> 04:46.930]  Does anybody have 3.0?
[04:47.090 --> 04:48.430]  I haven't looked at it in a while, but yeah.
[04:48.430 --> 04:50.050]  For that matter, does anybody have Windows 2.0?
[04:50.850 --> 04:54.910]  I think we have some small high-density disks that have this.
[04:55.050 --> 04:55.310]  Really?
[04:55.430 --> 04:56.230]  I've never seen it.
[04:56.230 --> 05:00.690]  I have some from a very old IBM.
[05:01.010 --> 05:01.950]  Windows 2.0?
[05:02.810 --> 05:03.730]  Not 2.0.
[05:03.870 --> 05:04.170]  That's what I'm asking.
[05:04.170 --> 05:04.650]  3.0.
[05:04.670 --> 05:05.250]  The one I mentioned.
[05:05.370 --> 05:07.390]  3.0, but now I'm wondering about 2.0.
[05:07.430 --> 05:09.910]  And of course, in a moment, I'm going to be wondering about 1.0.
[05:09.910 --> 05:11.110]  Well, I think it was unreleased.
[05:11.310 --> 05:16.150]  It was probably unreleased, and they didn't release a public version until thereafter.
[05:16.490 --> 05:20.010]  So they made Windows, and they opted not to release it.
[05:20.170 --> 05:22.370]  No, they were developing it alongside of DOS.
[05:23.330 --> 05:24.290]  Okay, all right.
[05:24.410 --> 05:25.510]  I missed DOS, by the way.
[05:26.450 --> 05:27.130]  Yes, Alex.
[05:29.090 --> 05:41.490]  Speaking of DOS, you know, and old things like Windows 3.1 and what, I mean, we used to call that the six-disc virus when you installed Windows, right, on the high-density three-and-a-half floppies.
[05:41.490 --> 05:42.730]  Yeah, they would come in a series.
[05:43.370 --> 05:50.190]  Yeah, they would come in a series, or you downloaded them in a series, if you were a wares dude back in the day.
[05:50.810 --> 05:59.730]  But the other interesting thing was, for up until Windows 95, if you dropped down to the DOS prompt, the operating system of the computer was always DOS.
[05:59.810 --> 06:04.970]  It was still DOS 5.0, DOS 5.1, DOS 6.1, until Windows 95.
[06:04.970 --> 06:09.230]  When you installed Windows 95, that became the operating system.
[06:09.370 --> 06:14.850]  When you dropped down to the command prompt and typed V-E-R, it said Windows 95.
[06:15.170 --> 06:17.950]  Yeah, it was still used for the base system.
[06:18.870 --> 06:19.370]  Right, right.
[06:20.130 --> 06:28.070]  D-I-R slash P. That was a secret command that allowed you to see a directory, but not have it scroll off the screen.
[06:28.610 --> 06:29.330]  That's right.
[06:29.330 --> 06:32.290]  Or you could pipe it into the more command as well.
[06:32.630 --> 06:33.830]  D-I-R, pipe more.
[06:33.830 --> 06:35.150]  Well, that went beyond my abilities.
[06:35.310 --> 06:36.890]  But, okay, no, all kidding aside, though.
[06:37.370 --> 06:38.890]  These are all still useful things.
[06:39.470 --> 06:44.890]  I actually, I was using a command prompt, which is the same thing as a DOS prompt just earlier.
[06:45.730 --> 06:48.970]  Sometimes it is the easiest way to see things or to copy things.
[06:49.170 --> 06:52.010]  But, okay, so to get back to the story, because we veered way off track here.
[06:52.110 --> 06:52.550]  It's easy.
[06:52.730 --> 06:53.050]  Yeah.
[06:53.410 --> 06:58.790]  So we had this system where we had all these, what were the formats?
[06:58.910 --> 07:00.230]  It was .msg or something?
[07:00.730 --> 07:01.430]  Yeah, yeah.
[07:01.490 --> 07:04.930]  Not the salty food additive.
[07:04.970 --> 07:07.410]  It might as well have been for all the use it was giving us.
[07:07.490 --> 07:12.610]  You know, we tried to put it into all these online services and figure out what kind of format this was.
[07:12.730 --> 07:15.150]  It just seemed to be a completely lost format.
[07:15.310 --> 07:20.350]  We even talked to people who worked on the system itself, who worked for the company.
[07:20.450 --> 07:21.250]  It was known as Big Mouth.
[07:21.250 --> 07:24.410]  And they had no idea how to convert it back.
[07:24.970 --> 07:28.290]  And that, to me, that was about when you feel like giving up.
[07:28.810 --> 07:30.430]  Yeah, I don't know exactly.
[07:30.510 --> 07:39.990]  We had a correspondence and there was some mention of a small program that I believe worked in the command shell or DOS.
[07:40.850 --> 07:45.230]  So it was something I think I tried or I don't know.
[07:45.330 --> 07:46.750]  We did not have much success with that.
[07:46.850 --> 07:53.270]  And I don't have a lot of analyzing tools and I'm not really an expert.
[07:53.430 --> 07:57.730]  I'm much more of a generalist and have other areas of expertise.
[07:57.730 --> 08:00.570]  But so that led to asking.
[08:00.570 --> 08:01.710]  And we've asked before.
[08:01.850 --> 08:12.250]  We asked a couple of years ago and I responded to someone to give them a chance with a small sample of a file.
[08:12.250 --> 08:13.950]  And we mentioned it again recently.
[08:14.150 --> 08:15.630]  And we heard back from that person.
[08:17.010 --> 08:28.250]  Andy wrote to us and he actually said, my colleague Richard has figured out that this Big Mouth audio is encoded with 8-bit unsigned linear PCM with 8 kilohertz sample rate.
[08:28.470 --> 08:29.930]  I just happened to figure that out.
[08:30.050 --> 08:36.530]  And is easily converted by importing into Audacity or with SOX or FFMPEG.
[08:37.050 --> 08:38.930]  C attached decoded file.
[08:39.230 --> 08:45.470]  And he included the sample file that we gave him and it was decoded and we heard voices from the past, from the 1990s.
[08:45.690 --> 08:47.110]  So this is a treasure trove.
[08:47.190 --> 08:48.910]  We have over 3,000 messages.
[08:49.050 --> 08:51.950]  Now, a lot of them are just nonsense or just a tone maybe.
[08:52.890 --> 09:00.850]  But within there, well, I'm going to play you one of the ones we decoded before the show, just to give you a sense as to what we're, what we have in front of us.
[09:03.970 --> 09:04.770]  You know what I hear that?
[09:06.890 --> 09:07.790]  You can't hear that.
[09:09.790 --> 09:10.650]  You hear it, right, Carl?
[09:11.070 --> 09:12.170]  Okay, it's a phone ringing.
[09:14.150 --> 09:15.410]  You guys can't hear it, though.
[09:17.010 --> 09:17.890]  You can speak.
[09:17.890 --> 09:19.050]  We cannot hear it in Skyplane.
[09:19.850 --> 09:20.290]  Okay.
[09:20.290 --> 09:21.470]  Is this a new problem?
[09:24.740 --> 09:26.300]  We never hear audio you play.
[09:27.080 --> 09:28.820]  You're just telling me this now?
[09:29.080 --> 09:30.820]  You don't hear audio that...
[09:30.820 --> 09:32.240]  So you don't hear the theme.
[09:32.640 --> 09:34.380]  We haven't heard the theme in six months.
[09:34.600 --> 09:34.920]  No.
[09:35.000 --> 09:36.500]  When were you going to tell me this?
[09:36.720 --> 09:37.760]  You don't hear...
[09:37.760 --> 09:41.020]  Well, that makes it awfully hard for us to share this with you.
[09:41.820 --> 09:42.460]  Oh, here we go.
[09:42.460 --> 09:42.900]  There it is.
[09:43.060 --> 09:43.400]  There it is.
[09:43.520 --> 09:43.780]  Now we're here.
[09:44.680 --> 09:47.300]  Okay, so Kyle just fixed it by...
[09:48.060 --> 09:54.060]  It's caused problems in the past, I think, when we tried Google, some talk...
[09:54.060 --> 09:54.900]  You can't blame Google.
[09:55.120 --> 09:55.960]  Yeah, it was Google.
[09:56.060 --> 09:56.500]  It was all Google.
[09:56.620 --> 09:57.400]  How is this Google?
[09:57.520 --> 09:58.340]  We're not connected to...
[09:59.060 --> 09:59.780]  This is hilarious.
[09:59.780 --> 10:03.280]  I love blaming Google, but we can't blame Google now.
[10:03.660 --> 10:04.340]  Okay, okay, okay.
[10:04.340 --> 10:04.820]  This is us.
[10:04.820 --> 10:06.200]  No, that was a cop-out.
[10:06.320 --> 10:06.920]  That was totally...
[10:06.920 --> 10:07.360]  That was lame.
[10:07.540 --> 10:10.840]  Okay, so the board has...
[10:10.840 --> 10:14.500]  Some issues when we're sending audio back.
[10:14.740 --> 10:15.580]  I don't know.
[10:16.100 --> 10:16.420]  It's...
[10:16.420 --> 10:19.880]  Well, you fixed it for Rob and Gila, but Alex, you look confused.
[10:20.060 --> 10:22.120]  Did you not hear it, or did you hear it?
[10:24.360 --> 10:25.780]  Boy, it takes you a long time to...
[10:25.780 --> 10:26.820]  Yeah, I think you're muted, Alex.
[10:27.080 --> 10:28.100]  He's messing with us, I think.
[10:28.200 --> 10:28.880]  Alex, you're muted.
[10:29.380 --> 10:30.160]  Yeah, there we go.
[10:30.240 --> 10:33.000]  I heard a tone, but I didn't hear...
[10:33.000 --> 10:34.260]  You heard a phone ringing.
[10:34.380 --> 10:35.360]  Did you not hear a phone ringing?
[10:35.600 --> 10:36.360]  Yeah, I heard that.
[10:36.500 --> 10:36.880]  That's what I heard.
[10:36.880 --> 10:38.520]  That's what the audio was, okay?
[10:38.520 --> 10:40.140]  Hey, that's what we were trying to share with you.
[10:40.660 --> 10:42.220]  Oh my God, how do we get through a day?
[10:42.560 --> 10:44.480]  Okay, so that was one of the messages.
[10:44.480 --> 10:50.440]  I don't know why someone left a message of a phone ringing, but it's still good to hear because phones don't sound like that anymore.
[10:50.640 --> 10:52.320]  That was some kind of mechanical switch.
[10:53.300 --> 10:54.920]  Would you like to hear another message?
[10:55.940 --> 10:56.480]  Yes, please.
[10:56.700 --> 10:56.980]  All right.
[10:57.080 --> 10:58.280]  Well, now that you can actually hear...
[10:58.280 --> 11:00.380]  For six months, you haven't heard anything we've played.
[11:00.760 --> 11:01.600]  That is unbelievable.
[11:02.600 --> 11:03.320]  Let's see what we...
[11:03.320 --> 11:04.760]  Let us know if it's causing problems.
[11:04.760 --> 11:08.200]  Yeah, let us know if anything else is not working properly.
[11:08.720 --> 11:09.160]  Here is a...
[11:09.160 --> 11:10.580]  Does that mean I don't have to sing the theme song anymore?
[11:11.120 --> 11:12.080]  Probably not, no.
[11:12.580 --> 11:16.080]  Here is another audio file.
[11:16.700 --> 11:17.720]  Card number now.
[11:17.940 --> 11:20.640]  Thank you for using the MCI prepaid card system.
[11:23.100 --> 11:24.060]  Hey, bitches.
[11:24.940 --> 11:26.040]  Entered is invalid.
[11:26.300 --> 11:26.780]  Thank you.
[11:27.380 --> 11:32.300]  Yeah, that sort of is the tone that you get on many of these messages.
[11:33.340 --> 11:38.820]  A bunch of adolescents who are playing with phones and insulting each other and leaving messages.
[11:39.120 --> 11:43.260]  And I got to tell you, there's a lot of what's known as red boxing.
[11:44.320 --> 11:46.080]  Rob, you seem to be in stitches there.
[11:46.720 --> 11:48.240]  You remember red boxing, right?
[11:49.500 --> 11:50.420]  Oh, yes.
[11:50.420 --> 11:52.760]  It was one of my favorite pastimes.
[11:52.980 --> 11:55.520]  And also, I'm just really excited about this in general.
[11:55.520 --> 11:59.480]  I know that I spent a lot of time on this PBS.
[11:59.740 --> 12:01.040]  We're going to find you, Rob.
[12:01.140 --> 12:02.380]  We're going to find your voice.
[12:03.500 --> 12:08.220]  Yeah, you're going to have some new Blackman material on me, as opposed to all you already have.
[12:08.340 --> 12:10.320]  No, we'll have a special feature of Rob T.
[12:10.440 --> 12:11.520]  Firefly, the 90s.
[12:15.660 --> 12:17.140]  That wouldn't be good for anybody.
[12:17.340 --> 12:23.180]  But no, there was a lot of stuff in here that I remember being really impressed with.
[12:23.180 --> 12:28.420]  And just the way that you made it all happen back then, I also really appreciated.
[12:28.620 --> 12:32.580]  I made use of this during a period of my life when I didn't have access to a computer for a while.
[12:32.700 --> 12:34.200]  And so it was my only BBS.
[12:34.700 --> 12:35.800]  That was the idea.
[12:35.920 --> 12:37.980]  That was the intent, to reach people.
[12:38.300 --> 12:43.940]  Similar to what we do with a radio show, reaching people who don't necessarily have computers or access to the Internet.
[12:43.940 --> 12:50.320]  And having them be able to be part of the conversation, and just the joy of exploration and sharing information.
[12:50.320 --> 12:52.560]  Because that's how 2600 got started.
[12:52.700 --> 12:57.640]  It's through those old BBSs and sharing stories with a bunch of strangers online.
[12:58.600 --> 13:03.220]  That magic led to a magazine, led to meetings, led to conferences, led to this radio show.
[13:03.680 --> 13:07.200]  And anything we can do to spread that, to spread that enthusiasm.
[13:07.600 --> 13:10.940]  Of course, you know, you don't always get the desired effect.
[13:10.940 --> 13:14.860]  Sometimes you get people insulting you on the voice BBS.
[13:15.020 --> 13:21.800]  Sometimes you get people obviously doing illegal things, too, as in how they made their phone calls in the first place.
[13:21.840 --> 13:23.220]  And that's just fascinating to watch.
[13:24.720 --> 13:27.260]  However many years it is since this app.
[13:27.340 --> 13:27.900]  25 years?
[13:27.900 --> 13:28.740]  Was it 25 years?
[13:28.900 --> 13:29.500]  Is it that many?
[13:29.700 --> 13:30.160]  Wow.
[13:30.760 --> 13:33.300]  The files were stamped...
[13:33.300 --> 13:33.900]  Or not stamped.
[13:34.040 --> 13:38.880]  In the metadata, it was, I think, created in 1993.
[13:39.320 --> 13:39.800]  Okay.
[13:39.800 --> 13:41.700]  On some of the ones that I looked at.
[13:41.700 --> 13:43.460]  Is my mathematics correct?
[13:43.460 --> 13:44.620]  That's 27 years, right?
[13:45.680 --> 13:46.120]  Yeah.
[13:46.240 --> 13:46.500]  Wow.
[13:47.000 --> 13:47.420]  Unbelievable.
[13:47.600 --> 13:47.940]  Yes, Rob?
[13:49.400 --> 13:53.980]  Another thing that just struck me with that recording you just played is that was an MCI recording.
[13:54.440 --> 13:58.740]  And there's a company that you can't call up because it doesn't exist anymore.
[13:58.960 --> 14:00.900]  And so there are probably...
[14:00.900 --> 14:08.600]  I look forward to seeing how many little bits of history just like that there are above and beyond the actual content people were adding to this thing.
[14:08.600 --> 14:09.300]  Absolutely.
[14:09.600 --> 14:09.660]  Yeah.
[14:09.720 --> 14:11.340]  MCI was swallowed up by Verizon.
[14:11.340 --> 14:15.220]  So they're now deep within its stomach.
[14:16.660 --> 14:20.060]  Here's another audio file we were able to uncover.
[14:20.780 --> 14:23.520]  Yes, this is Jackal from the MPEA, New York.
[14:25.540 --> 14:27.380]  Jackal, you didn't finish your message.
[14:27.420 --> 14:28.160]  That's all you left.
[14:28.340 --> 14:29.880]  And we'd like to hear what you had to say.
[14:30.220 --> 14:33.180]  Actually, this next one might be the same voice.
[14:33.180 --> 14:34.120]  I'm not sure.
[14:34.120 --> 14:36.460]  I can't really tell the voices that well.
[14:37.720 --> 14:40.180]  But it's quite possible this might be the same.
[14:40.280 --> 14:41.480]  This is a little longer.
[14:42.520 --> 14:49.840]  This is in response to the message about the co-cops charging for a toll-free call.
[14:50.060 --> 15:00.040]  I believe that there's a federal law that says that all pay telephones have to give toll-free calls for free.
[15:00.040 --> 15:02.480]  And I think that's probably illegal.
[15:02.800 --> 15:05.580]  So if you see one of those, I would suggest you turn them in.
[15:07.740 --> 15:08.140]  Yeah.
[15:08.220 --> 15:09.560]  You know, it sounds very serious.
[15:09.700 --> 15:14.840]  But while it is very serious, he was talking about co-cops, customer-owned, coin-operated telephones.
[15:15.060 --> 15:18.260]  And some of them were forbidding access to toll-free numbers.
[15:18.260 --> 15:19.480]  And they're not supposed to do that.
[15:19.480 --> 15:26.580]  But so, yeah, if you saw a phone back then that was doing this, you should turn them in.
[15:26.780 --> 15:29.580]  Of course, you couldn't turn them in on a toll-free number if they didn't allow you to call that.
[15:29.660 --> 15:34.680]  But I imagine some companies were corrected at the behest of hackers.
[15:36.220 --> 15:37.780]  So that was a bit of history.
[15:37.860 --> 15:38.200]  Yes, Alex?
[15:38.840 --> 15:52.680]  Yeah, I mean, I remember having a lot of fun with co-cops back in the day because they were essentially just telephone lines that were connected to a pay phone that operated on the basis of mechanics.
[15:53.480 --> 16:05.120]  And that's why they would very often charge for 800 numbers because any time you had to use that phone, you had to go through the mechanical process of putting a quarter into the phone so that it allowed you to dial out.
[16:05.120 --> 16:16.700]  However, a lot of these, they had security bolts or security screws at the bottom of them.
[16:16.840 --> 16:23.100]  And then it would just be an ordinary RJ-11 jack that was plugged into the actual co-cot itself.
[16:23.380 --> 16:41.380]  So if you somehow came across the equipment that would allow you to unscrew the co-cot screws, you could plug your own phone into the telephone line that was otherwise about to be routed into the actual pay phone and then make your own free phone calls that way.
[16:41.720 --> 16:46.240]  That was one way to avoid having to pay for co-cots.
[16:46.700 --> 16:48.920]  Weren't they different subscriber lines, though, Alex?
[16:49.780 --> 16:51.400]  Weren't the pay phone subscriber lines different?
[16:51.540 --> 16:52.320]  Or, Rob, do you know?
[16:53.760 --> 16:57.400]  Yeah, co-cots were generally something that you could plug into any phone line.
[16:57.400 --> 17:05.200]  You didn't need a special subscriber line because, yeah, on the communication level, the phone was just making a regular phone call.
[17:05.440 --> 17:09.260]  But the phone itself was the smart device.
[17:09.420 --> 17:18.040]  It would count the change you put in as opposed to a regular bell-owned pay phone, which would do all the counting and everything on the phone system rather than in the phone itself.
[17:18.200 --> 17:19.400]  Yeah, it was a class of service.
[17:19.400 --> 17:22.820]  It was a class of service, the class of service being pay phone.
[17:23.180 --> 17:40.160]  That's why some hackers who got access to the main phone company computer, which in some cases was known as Cosmos, they were able to change the class of service to pay phone so that when someone tried to make a phone call from their home, they were asked for $0.10,
[17:40.440 --> 17:43.200]  I guess, back then, to deploy, which, of course, you can't do.
[17:43.340 --> 17:52.320]  And even if you called the operator, the operator would say, no, you're calling from a pay phone, that's what it shows, you have to put in a dime, and someone's sitting in their living room, it made for some good laughs.
[17:52.500 --> 17:59.360]  But like Rob said, the intelligence in the COCOT was in the actual phone, so you could plug that into any line.
[17:59.720 --> 18:02.320]  And you didn't have to worry about it being classified in a certain way.
[18:04.060 --> 18:19.440]  Yeah, part of the beauty of that was if you happened to know a COCOT in your neighborhood where the wire itself was actually a little bit exposed, you could theoretically stick two pins into the wire, one touching the ring and one touching the tip, and then clip a beige box onto those pins.
[18:20.560 --> 18:24.100]  That, I have a pretty good feeling about that being something that worked.
[18:24.700 --> 18:40.720]  Yeah, I hope that somebody listening to this show, whether live or recorded later on, hears their voice from 27 years ago when they left a message on an archaic voice BBS system that 2600 was running.
[18:41.680 --> 18:49.000]  And we've just, thanks to a WBAI listener, Andy, and his friend Richard, we have been able to decode all these.
[18:49.160 --> 18:52.780]  We've decoded over 3,000 messages now, and it's going to take some time to go through them.
[18:53.760 --> 18:54.580]  Here's another one.
[18:55.740 --> 18:56.340]  Oh, wait.
[18:56.500 --> 18:56.980]  I'm sorry.
[18:57.580 --> 18:58.320]  Hang on, hang on.
[18:58.420 --> 18:59.560]  I hit the wrong button yet again.
[18:59.880 --> 19:00.920]  Give me one second here.
[19:01.900 --> 19:05.840]  We're not going to play 3,000 messages tonight, but we just have a handful of them.
[19:05.940 --> 19:07.760]  And this is a new one.
[19:07.760 --> 19:13.820]  Hey, it's out back in the Midwest checking in on August 18th, actually, very early in the morning.
[19:15.660 --> 19:22.940]  This Squirt TV thing, I don't know what the story is there, but it sounds like somebody who's seriously getting picked on and a little bit of insight on MTV.
[19:23.540 --> 19:25.620]  Indeed, they have sold out disgustingly bad.
[19:25.820 --> 19:32.380]  In fact, I have heard, not substantiated in writing from anyone, that shortly MTV2 is going to be on the air.
[19:32.640 --> 19:34.820]  What do you do when you corrupt the original network?
[19:34.820 --> 19:40.620]  You start a part two that's supposed to be what it's tending to be, 24-hour videos.
[19:40.840 --> 19:44.740]  Please deposit 55 cents for three minutes more.
[19:45.280 --> 19:47.260]  Wouldn't you know it, 55 cents.
[19:47.440 --> 19:47.860]  Fooey.
[19:48.060 --> 19:49.540]  Catch you later out back in the Midwest.
[19:51.680 --> 19:57.000]  So, okay, a lot of people would call this from payphones, and they see that the payphone's demanding more.
[19:57.100 --> 19:57.900]  55 cents.
[19:57.980 --> 19:58.580]  That is unbelievable.
[19:58.860 --> 19:59.740]  He did the right thing.
[19:59.740 --> 20:00.300]  He hung up.
[20:00.300 --> 20:03.540]  He didn't use a red box to try and defraud the phone company.
[20:03.660 --> 20:06.300]  But that was a time capsule right there.
[20:06.320 --> 20:09.040]  He's talking about this story that aired on MTV.
[20:09.240 --> 20:11.120]  You all remember the MTV story, the scandal?
[20:11.800 --> 20:12.600]  Oh, yes.
[20:12.860 --> 20:13.100]  Yeah.
[20:13.940 --> 20:15.520]  We had high hopes.
[20:15.780 --> 20:16.980]  They came to WBAI.
[20:17.160 --> 20:19.660]  They interviewed all sorts of people.
[20:20.660 --> 20:21.860]  Came to the 2600 meeting.
[20:21.900 --> 20:22.580]  They sure did.
[20:30.300 --> 20:34.340]  They basically were going to do a good documentary on hackers.
[20:34.540 --> 20:45.580]  They had done good work in the past, but what they wound up doing was something truly awful that just made hackers into villains and was technically completely inaccurate.
[20:46.940 --> 20:51.880]  And, I mean, they might have gotten some ratings, but they forever lost any respect.
[20:51.880 --> 20:54.220]  And the whole hacker community was outraged by that.
[20:54.360 --> 20:57.020]  I do believe that was after 2000.
[20:57.020 --> 21:01.540]  So, I think what we have on this voice BBS is a number of years.
[21:01.820 --> 21:04.000]  Either way, it's a couple of decades ago.
[21:04.820 --> 21:06.060]  Yeah, it must have been there.
[21:07.080 --> 21:07.600]  Go ahead, Rob.
[21:07.660 --> 21:21.400]  Sorry, there were another couple of cool features you had on this thing that we can't really play in the form of recordings, but you had set up some of the abilities of this thing to do things like read the number you were calling from back to you.
[21:21.660 --> 21:22.100]  Yeah.
[21:22.100 --> 21:23.020]  In your voice, Emmanuel.
[21:23.240 --> 21:26.400]  Well, yeah, I had a lot of fun recording the prompts for this thing.
[21:27.020 --> 21:30.600]  I mean, especially, I don't know if we'll get to those audio recordings.
[21:30.740 --> 21:31.600]  If they're there, that'd be great.
[21:31.720 --> 21:39.080]  But, basically, you'd hear my voice when you called in saying, what was it I would say?
[21:39.140 --> 21:47.720]  I guess press one for this, press two for that, and then there'd be a pause, and I'd repeat it and say, press one for this, press two for that.
[21:48.000 --> 21:50.460]  And then if I had to say it a third time, I'd say, what's the matter with you?
[21:50.540 --> 21:53.080]  I said, and basically, I'd start yelling at them.
[21:53.080 --> 21:56.700]  And, you know, if they call with a rotary phone, of course, they couldn't hit any buttons.
[21:56.880 --> 21:59.840]  But, eventually, it just turned into a whole big, long dialogue.
[22:00.140 --> 22:05.100]  And it was the fun I always wanted to have programming one of these things.
[22:05.120 --> 22:06.080]  I was able to have.
[22:06.180 --> 22:08.860]  But, yeah, what you were referring to, the caller ID decoder.
[22:09.560 --> 22:11.160]  It wasn't actually...
[22:11.160 --> 22:12.360]  No, we had that, too.
[22:12.440 --> 22:17.560]  We had caller ID where it would read back your phone number, but also we had a Touch-Tone decoder.
[22:17.560 --> 22:24.880]  So, if you entered in a whole string of Touch-Tones, or you played back a tape that had Touch-Tones in it, i.e. someone's password, perhaps, my voice would read back numbers, and you'd be able to get it decoded that way.
[22:31.600 --> 22:40.000]  We might have also had that for MF tones, multi-frequency tones, which were used by phone phreaks back in the 60s and 70s with blue boxes.
[22:40.180 --> 22:48.960]  So, that would have come in handy, too, if you heard phone numbers in the background being echoed, and you wanted to know what those numbers were.
[22:49.660 --> 22:55.320]  So, there were all kinds of unique features on this BBS, and it's just amazing that we're able to hear some of them again.
[22:56.780 --> 22:57.220]  Yeah.
[22:57.440 --> 23:00.860]  Didn't you also have an area code identifier?
[23:01.240 --> 23:01.360]  We did.
[23:01.360 --> 23:06.420]  Where you could mention an area code, and then you would let the listener, the caller know what area that was.
[23:06.560 --> 23:11.700]  Yeah, and that quickly became outdated because so many area codes were being added at that point.
[23:12.220 --> 23:15.860]  Up until the 90s, that probably was something useful.
[23:15.860 --> 23:17.120]  After that, it just exploded.
[23:18.000 --> 23:20.260]  We also had a listing of 2600 meetings.
[23:20.420 --> 23:21.540]  You could enter...
[23:21.540 --> 23:23.780]  I think you could enter your area code, and it would tell you the nearest one.
[23:24.420 --> 23:26.020]  So, there were all kinds of neat features.
[23:26.280 --> 23:26.940]  Yes, Alex, go ahead.
[23:29.020 --> 23:41.200]  This was particularly innovative, I think, back in the mid-90s, and I remember having some administrative responsibilities with the voicemail system for a little while as well, way back in the day.
[23:41.480 --> 23:57.660]  But what was so interesting and innovative about this to me, and especially when you look back at it now, is that these were voicemail boxes that hackers could use or phone phreaks could use to communicate with each other without actually having to hack them when they belonged to another company.
[23:58.100 --> 24:05.240]  Because, you know, as we talked about a couple of weeks ago with Jason Scott, is that, you know, this was its own scene.
[24:05.240 --> 24:06.780]  It had its own culture.
[24:06.780 --> 24:16.560]  It was a subculture of the hacker phone phreak community where people would communicate through these hacked voicemail boxes and it would often take hours to find one, right?
[24:16.620 --> 24:24.480]  You would have to scan corporate voicemail systems looking for boxes that were unused and had the default passcode on.
[24:24.600 --> 24:31.720]  And maybe if you got lucky, you could get the system administrator's box and create new voicemail boxes for yourself, but they were always very short-lived.
[24:31.720 --> 24:43.540]  This was a place where people could communicate persistently with each other without having their boxes removed by a system administrator or taking over somebody else's box.
[24:43.760 --> 24:50.040]  I mean, it was a very, very cool and innovative way of communicating in the mid-90s.
[24:50.120 --> 24:53.400]  And so it's something I think that was really missed.
[24:53.400 --> 25:11.020]  And as we also noted a couple of weeks ago, those messages were so interesting and so unique and also so ephemeral because they were up for a day and then completely changed and people would be handing out calling card numbers, credit card numbers.
[25:11.020 --> 25:12.760]  Now, you see, we didn't allow that.
[25:12.920 --> 25:16.560]  If somebody posted calling card numbers or credit card numbers, that got deleted right away.
[25:16.660 --> 25:18.280]  We did have some standards.
[25:18.860 --> 25:20.960]  There were standards there.
[25:21.060 --> 25:21.380]  That's right.
[25:21.560 --> 25:26.160]  And what you're referring to, there were all kinds of recordings known as codes lines.
[25:26.300 --> 25:30.760]  You'd call a number and you'd hear a list of codes, MCI codes or sprint codes or things like that.
[25:31.380 --> 25:35.560]  We wanted to have something where people could engage in a dialogue and just kind of share information.
[25:35.620 --> 25:38.600]  I think what we've heard so far is a good amount of that.
[25:38.660 --> 25:40.040]  But it brings memories.
[25:40.480 --> 25:42.840]  This was the 90s and up until 2000.
[25:43.480 --> 25:58.380]  But my first experience with a voice bulletin board, well, not a bulletin board, a voice mail system was back in the 80s, early 80s, when I found an IBM ADS known as Audio Distribution System.
[25:58.540 --> 25:59.640]  And I still remember the numbers.
[25:59.860 --> 26:02.280]  1-800-426-2222.
[26:02.520 --> 26:06.680]  I was just scanning around with 800 numbers because that's what people did.
[26:06.860 --> 26:12.760]  They would pick an exchange and they'd just dial 800-426-1234-1235.
[26:13.040 --> 26:14.180]  You'd hear modems.
[26:14.520 --> 26:16.220]  You'd get all kinds of weird recordings.
[26:16.260 --> 26:21.260]  But one day, I found this strange system that just said, please key press your last name.
[26:21.360 --> 26:23.460]  And I was fascinated by that.
[26:23.480 --> 26:31.360]  So I just started pressing buttons and hearing names being repeated back based on the lettering on the Touch-Tone keypad.
[26:32.220 --> 26:37.860]  And then when I found the name, wow, I even remember the name, Gary Wilson.
[26:39.020 --> 26:40.260]  How do I remember this?
[26:40.480 --> 26:42.180]  I just, I can even hear her saying it.
[26:42.260 --> 26:43.340]  I probably have a recording with someone.
[26:43.520 --> 26:46.420]  Gary Wilson, please key press your password.
[26:48.000 --> 26:49.520]  And what did I do?
[26:49.720 --> 26:53.020]  I basically just started pressing things.
[26:53.820 --> 26:58.520]  And after a while, I pressed 426, which also happened to be the exchange.
[26:59.640 --> 27:04.660]  And it let me in because 426 on a Touch-Tone keypad spells IBM.
[27:05.520 --> 27:06.040]  Yeah.
[27:06.360 --> 27:08.200]  And it was run by IBM.
[27:08.200 --> 27:12.040]  IBM ran this system called the Audio Distribution System.
[27:12.400 --> 27:17.040]  It was run, I think, on a machine known as a System 2.
[27:17.400 --> 27:18.640]  I could be wrong on that.
[27:18.700 --> 27:20.220]  Maybe somebody out there has that information.
[27:20.420 --> 27:23.040]  Write to us, OTH at 2600.com.
[27:24.200 --> 27:32.900]  And in that system, you were able to basically receive messages from people that would call that number and enter your name.
[27:33.540 --> 27:37.520]  Or you could send messages to other users on that system.
[27:37.900 --> 27:42.800]  And actually, in a few weeks, I was able to find other hackers who had also found that same system.
[27:42.800 --> 27:44.260]  And we kind of took it over.
[27:44.800 --> 27:53.420]  We also discovered that every account had a guest password, which allowed people to just leave a message for the host.
[27:53.780 --> 27:57.680]  And by default, those passwords were also 426, IBM.
[27:58.240 --> 28:05.380]  In my case, the user had changed that so his main password was 426, I guess, for ease of remembering.
[28:05.720 --> 28:16.000]  But the interesting thing about that was since everybody's password was 426, you were able to change the password inside the guest system.
[28:16.100 --> 28:25.700]  But if you hacked those numbers and the first three coincided with another one of his passwords, it would tell you.
[28:25.700 --> 28:29.180]  It would say the password you were trying to select conflicts with another password.
[28:29.400 --> 28:37.000]  So then you would know that his main password began with those three digits and you could hack out the rest of them and figure it out from there.
[28:37.120 --> 28:39.540]  And maybe it spelled a word or something like that.
[28:39.640 --> 28:48.680]  So that was great fun being had in the world of voicemail and voice interactive systems back in the early 80s.
[28:48.840 --> 28:49.040]  Alex?
[28:50.500 --> 28:53.220]  That's a particularly ancient one, I think.
[28:53.220 --> 29:16.020]  I remember in the magazine back in the 90s and also in places like Phrack and Hack-Tic and all the other hacker magazines that existed back then that have sort of gone to the wayside these days, we'd often talk about Meridian Mail was a really popular voicemail system which I think was a pound sign when the message was playing to log in.
[29:16.460 --> 29:33.120]  Then there was also Audix was another very popular voicemail system that was of which phone phreakers were very fond and I think they tried to hide the log in functionality by making it star 7 during the outgoing message if I recall correctly.
[29:33.580 --> 29:39.140]  But there were so many articles in 2600 that were dedicated to voicemail boxes to voicemail hacking.
[29:39.320 --> 29:44.380]  I mean, it was such its own scene and it's been it's just been gone for decades.
[29:44.380 --> 30:09.440]  So this discovery this archive that you have from the 90s is I think a real testament to this time and to this it's taking something that was ephemeral in nature and has made it permanent and the way in which this has been done again is also part of I think the real hacker spirit here because we talked about it on the radio a listener chimes in and wants to help and Kyle and you guys just figure
[30:09.440 --> 30:19.720]  it out you know within a couple of days is what it seemed like I mean pretty extraordinary It was a temporary way to unearth and make permanent something that had been gone for almost 30 years.
[30:20.260 --> 30:25.460]  Yeah, and really it was about knowing what the format was, having that information.
[30:25.620 --> 30:40.000]  And it wasn't like files and software we find today where it was sort of got DRM or all sorts of locking and protection and this kind of thing.
[30:40.000 --> 30:46.080]  It just was basically a WAV or like a PCM WAV file of sorts.
[30:46.280 --> 30:49.580]  So very easy to interpret with modern software.
[30:49.780 --> 30:56.760]  And if we probably had the ability to analyze it, we maybe eventually would have stumbled on it.
[30:56.840 --> 31:05.520]  But again, asking questions, finding out from people I think was so beneficial because other people can just look at it.
[31:05.600 --> 31:08.560]  I'm just not really an expert on analyzing it.
[31:08.560 --> 31:10.980]  I mean, we could have played around with extensions.
[31:11.120 --> 31:13.520]  It's just it's hard to figure out.
[31:13.960 --> 31:18.040]  And I didn't get that even from the manufacturer, which is really funny.
[31:18.200 --> 31:22.440]  I mean, I don't think it was that simple because we tried importing it into editors.
[31:22.440 --> 31:25.240]  We tried every audio playback program there was.
[31:25.400 --> 31:31.460]  We looked it up through Google and even asked people who used to work for the company, and no one could figure out how to do it.
[31:31.460 --> 31:39.800]  And I think, you know, where we stand out is where we preserve things, which oftentimes are seen as a complete waste of time and useless piles of junk.
[31:40.080 --> 31:46.220]  But occasionally we save something that turns out to be valuable and can be restored.
[31:46.220 --> 31:57.860]  But we should all be careful when working with technology and computers and things like that because formats change, versions change, and you find yourself left behind with something that you can no longer read.
[31:58.220 --> 32:00.980]  You have to be very careful not to become a victim of that.
[32:00.980 --> 32:08.700]  Don't think that your old pictures or memorabilia are lost just because it doesn't work anymore.
[32:08.820 --> 32:09.500]  It doesn't play back.
[32:09.800 --> 32:11.180]  There is always a way.
[32:11.380 --> 32:12.440]  Just ask Jason Scott.
[32:13.020 --> 32:18.460]  Yeah, we were talking about it recently, and there are tools that don't really even care about what formats are.
[32:18.580 --> 32:20.020]  They're just taking the information.
[32:20.660 --> 32:24.100]  And he's talked about some really incredible technology.
[32:24.100 --> 32:26.700]  So you've got to have that original format.
[32:26.920 --> 32:28.100]  And this was something...
[32:28.100 --> 32:33.820]  I'm so glad we brought it up and asked again just to see if anyone out there was interested in a puzzle.
[32:34.340 --> 32:39.380]  Yeah, you know, as long as we have our listeners helping us, what else do we need to get fixed?
[32:40.260 --> 32:42.640]  Well, there's that door that won't close all the way.
[32:42.820 --> 32:44.720]  Do you think somebody could have a look at that?
[32:45.500 --> 32:47.560]  Rob, do you have anything that needs working on?
[32:47.760 --> 32:48.920]  No, that's a trap.
[32:49.300 --> 32:49.620]  Yeah.
[32:50.860 --> 32:51.560]  Well, I don't know.
[32:52.100 --> 32:53.100]  Okay, how about this?
[32:53.100 --> 33:02.040]  Are there any people out there that both know how to find a satellite and know how to cut down the right trees that are blocking the satellite dish?
[33:02.380 --> 33:05.360]  Yeah, you can't find somebody that does both.
[33:05.380 --> 33:09.360]  You can find a tree guy that knows how to cut trees but doesn't know anything about satellites.
[33:09.360 --> 33:13.880]  You can find a satellite guy that doesn't know anything about what tree is in the way.
[33:14.200 --> 33:14.460]  Arbery.
[33:14.860 --> 33:18.500]  Yeah, but you can't find somebody to merge the two together.
[33:18.500 --> 33:25.880]  And you have to go through a company that sells you a particular product, but if, say, you're using a different company, that is uncommon.
[33:26.480 --> 33:28.800]  Yeah, it's a challenge.
[33:29.080 --> 33:35.760]  Or how would you locate something in the way of the direction a dish was pointed?
[33:35.980 --> 33:38.880]  Yeah, we need some satellite dish experts.
[33:38.900 --> 33:48.040]  In a remote location, trying to reach someone through a satellite, how would you aim to figure out what was in the way?
[33:48.040 --> 33:49.060]  What is that job?
[33:49.060 --> 33:50.620]  That's just one thing that came up.
[33:50.860 --> 33:52.820]  It's time for another audio recording.
[33:53.040 --> 33:53.180]  Ready?
[33:55.080 --> 33:56.740]  I'm going to assume you're ready.
[33:57.880 --> 33:58.300]  Yes.
[33:58.400 --> 33:59.020]  Everyone's nodding.
[33:59.120 --> 33:59.260]  Okay.
[34:00.500 --> 34:01.900]  I'm making this call illegally.
[34:02.580 --> 34:08.960]  I'm wondering if anyone out there will tell me a prefix of some sort which will allow me to red box a local call.
[34:09.140 --> 34:09.940]  Thank you very much.
[34:10.380 --> 34:22.760]  Well, in answer to your question, 27 years later, Well, the reason you can't red box a local call is because the local system doesn't use the AX system, A-C-T-S.
[34:23.280 --> 34:24.100]  What does that stand for?
[34:24.180 --> 34:24.800]  Does anybody remember?
[34:26.080 --> 34:26.260]  No?
[34:26.980 --> 34:27.500]  Something...
[34:28.100 --> 34:28.620]  Automated.
[34:29.120 --> 34:29.640]  Automated.
[34:29.680 --> 34:30.080]  Automated.
[34:30.180 --> 34:30.400]  Automated.
[34:30.400 --> 34:30.600]  Automated.
[34:30.600 --> 34:30.860]  Something told.
[34:31.160 --> 34:31.440]  Okay.
[34:31.860 --> 34:34.260]  Automated coin something system.
[34:34.320 --> 34:34.840]  Poling.
[34:35.100 --> 34:35.840]  All right, whatever.
[34:36.080 --> 34:36.460]  Set up.
[34:36.660 --> 34:38.100]  It's not used...
[34:38.100 --> 34:38.520]  Thank you, Kyle.
[34:38.520 --> 34:41.620]  It's not used on local calls.
[34:41.760 --> 34:47.340]  It's used when you go out of your LATA, local area, transport area, local...
[34:47.340 --> 34:49.660]  I don't know what the acronyms stand for.
[34:49.900 --> 35:00.320]  But when you had to go through that computer that said, 35 cents, please, that computer is what was known as a red boxable computer.
[35:00.320 --> 35:12.540]  So if you fed it certain tones, or actually, it's really just, it's one tone five times for a quarter, two times for a dime, and one time for a nickel.
[35:13.140 --> 35:13.580]  Right.
[35:13.740 --> 35:16.560]  And it's actually, it's two tones merged together.
[35:17.700 --> 35:19.400]  And those are known as red box tones.
[35:19.920 --> 35:21.360]  That is how the system worked.
[35:21.440 --> 35:22.860]  That is how payphones worked.
[35:23.500 --> 35:31.340]  They basically would be fooled by those tones and think that a quarter or a nickel or a dime was being deposited.
[35:31.340 --> 35:40.040]  And it drove the phone companies crazy when that was discovered, because they had to basically retrofit every single payphone in the country to fix it.
[35:40.500 --> 35:45.380]  And eventually, just stopped using those kinds of payphones altogether.
[35:46.400 --> 35:51.360]  So anyway, in answer to the person's question, yeah, it won't work for local calls.
[35:51.360 --> 36:01.560]  Unless you try a trick that stopped working many years ago, where you go outside the area code and route your call so that you turn it into a long distance call.
[36:02.460 --> 36:14.220]  For instance, if I was in the 516 area code, I could dial 516 before my phone number, and it would route it in a different way, and then ask for the money, as if I was calling from out of the area.
[36:14.540 --> 36:15.780]  And then you could use the red box.
[36:17.020 --> 36:17.960]  Neat system, huh?
[36:18.160 --> 36:18.520]  Alex?
[36:19.560 --> 36:27.540]  Another trick around that, too, was actually to call the operator and ask them to connect you to whatever the local number was.
[36:27.840 --> 36:30.420]  And the operator would generally connect you to that.
[36:30.460 --> 36:35.080]  And then, for whatever reason, it was a red boxable machine on the other end.
[36:35.260 --> 36:39.460]  So having the operator make that connection for you, the operator would then drop off.
[36:39.560 --> 36:45.360]  Or sometimes, they would stay on, and they would hear the do-do-do-do-do of the red box.
[36:45.360 --> 36:46.180]  That's really good.
[36:46.420 --> 36:47.400]  That's very good, Alex.
[36:49.420 --> 36:50.620]  I can keep going.
[36:50.760 --> 36:53.880]  I have very, very fond memories of red boxing back in the day.
[36:54.120 --> 36:58.540]  But sometimes, they would come back on the line and say, I know you're using that machine.
[36:58.540 --> 36:59.700]  I know that's not a real quarter.
[36:59.740 --> 37:01.380]  Oh, we've got a couple of those coming up.
[37:01.500 --> 37:03.520]  We've got a couple of people who got busted.
[37:04.260 --> 37:04.800]  All right.
[37:05.060 --> 37:06.140]  This might be one of them.
[37:06.200 --> 37:06.480]  Hang on.
[37:06.480 --> 37:10.040]  This is Anarchy, and about the red boxing, as long as we're talking about it.
[37:10.700 --> 37:20.080]  I just wondered if you had to have that exact frequency crystal, and those exact timings, I think it was 33 milliseconds in between, and the beep was for 33 milliseconds.
[37:20.940 --> 37:26.620]  I was just wondering if it was possible to do with something like this at our computer, and I play into a dictaphone.
[37:27.880 --> 37:28.960]  Let me do that again.
[37:31.000 --> 37:32.980]  That's not a real crystal right there.
[37:33.040 --> 37:35.880]  That's just a recording, so I was just wondering if that'll work.
[37:36.020 --> 37:37.580]  So, let me know what you guys think.
[37:37.720 --> 37:37.960]  See ya.
[37:39.620 --> 37:40.020]  Wow.
[37:40.080 --> 37:41.220]  Well, thank you, Anarchy, for that.
[37:41.560 --> 37:44.860]  Yeah, that would work, actually, just playing from a tape recorder.
[37:45.420 --> 37:46.640]  That's what it sounded like.
[37:46.860 --> 37:49.300]  It sounded really awful, but it actually would work.
[37:49.380 --> 37:54.940]  There were people who used to record red box tones onto greeting cards, where you could record your voice.
[37:54.940 --> 38:04.600]  They recorded red box tones, and they'd hold it up to the receiver on the payphone and play that, and it actually worked.
[38:04.720 --> 38:06.520]  That is how bad the system was.
[38:06.720 --> 38:07.460]  Go ahead, Alex.
[38:08.320 --> 38:18.520]  Yeah, just listening to that gentleman's tones, you know, so many years later, it brings back a lot of great memories, but, however, I don't think those tones would have worked.
[38:18.540 --> 38:20.320]  I think they weren't spaced out enough.
[38:20.440 --> 38:21.460]  I think it was a bit slower.
[38:21.780 --> 38:23.520]  Rob, do you agree with me on that?
[38:23.520 --> 38:27.760]  Yeah, not only was the speed off, but there was a lot of background noise on that.
[38:27.900 --> 38:30.840]  I don't know if that was high enough quality to trip the system.
[38:31.360 --> 38:40.740]  I think part of it might be this is the 8-bit recording in the voice BBS, but also the frequency is non-standard.
[38:40.880 --> 38:46.480]  But, again, this is a little bit beyond my audio engineering skills, but I think 56 is kind of weird.
[38:46.620 --> 38:50.580]  We normally have, like, 44 and then 48 kilohertz or something.
[38:50.580 --> 38:51.000]  I don't know.
[38:51.080 --> 38:54.580]  It might be unrelated, but that could be a factor.
[38:54.680 --> 39:00.460]  I'm sure there's some red box engineers out there who are just dying to write into us and correct us on this.
[39:00.780 --> 39:03.080]  Again, OTH at 2600.com.
[39:03.960 --> 39:05.700]  Write to us here at Off The Hook.
[39:05.820 --> 39:06.140]  Go ahead, Rob.
[39:07.160 --> 39:10.940]  Yeah, my first red box was I had left the house.
[39:11.040 --> 39:11.560]  No one was home.
[39:11.640 --> 39:14.600]  I left the house, went to the pay phone, called my own answering machine.
[39:15.180 --> 39:20.120]  When my answering machine picked up, I put a bunch of quarters into the phone just to send the tones to my machine.
[39:20.340 --> 39:28.960]  Then I hung up, got all those quarters back because they weren't actually used for a call, and went home and took the tape out of my answering machine and played that tape.
[39:29.120 --> 39:33.220]  Like, I brought that exact tape around with me, and that was my red box until I eventually built one.
[39:33.220 --> 39:33.440]  Hold on.
[39:33.620 --> 39:35.180]  But you called your answering machine.
[39:35.660 --> 39:38.220]  So how did you get your quarters back if you made a call?
[39:39.340 --> 39:49.360]  Because I spent the quarter to call my house, but then if you put more quarters in the phone that you weren't asked for, it would still send the tones, but they would be held in the phone's hopper.
[39:50.080 --> 39:56.700]  And then I hung up, and it emptied the hopper back out into the coin return because it wasn't actually asking for those quarters.
[39:56.820 --> 39:57.120]  Interesting.
[39:57.240 --> 40:03.540]  But, you know, that reminds me of a scam that New York Telephone and all of the local phone companies were engaged in.
[40:03.540 --> 40:18.400]  Now, I mentioned the Axe system, which is really hard to say, which is basically for long-distance calls or interregional calls, but local calls, you would simply put your dime or your quarter in and make your call.
[40:18.580 --> 40:23.600]  And if your time ran out, an operator would usually come on.
[40:23.680 --> 40:28.260]  Sometimes you get a recording saying, please deposit five cents for the next couple of minutes or whatever.
[40:28.560 --> 40:33.400]  The scam was, if you put in a quarter, didn't count it as a quarter, only counted it as a nickel.
[40:33.740 --> 40:39.680]  Their system didn't have the capability of differentiating one coin from another, so they just kept all that extra change.
[40:39.880 --> 40:41.620]  Now, the Axe system wouldn't do that.
[40:41.620 --> 40:45.120]  It would be able to count the amount.
[40:45.300 --> 40:50.820]  In fact, you wouldn't say you have 20 cents credit towards overtime because it was able to calculate that.
[40:50.920 --> 40:54.000]  But the local system would not do that, just kept all the change.
[40:54.000 --> 40:55.480]  So, yeah.
[40:55.800 --> 41:00.620]  Phone companies, they have a lot of our coins in their pockets.
[41:01.960 --> 41:02.520]  All right.
[41:02.600 --> 41:05.320]  So, I think I found the one where somebody gets busted.
[41:05.480 --> 41:06.860]  Let's try this one now.
[41:06.860 --> 41:08.340]  Uh, yeah, okay.
[41:08.620 --> 41:09.740]  Um, this is Orbital Illusion.
[41:10.000 --> 41:10.400]  Uh, yeah.
[41:10.820 --> 41:12.200]  Um, I'm from Fort Wayne, Indiana.
[41:12.460 --> 41:14.540]  And I need some crystals for my red box.
[41:15.240 --> 41:21.700]  Um, the, uh, new Radio Shack auto dialer, I believe, has, uh, super good tips in.
[41:21.800 --> 41:25.760]  If anyone has any tips on how to get these out safely without destroying the box itself, tell me about it.
[41:26.140 --> 41:28.080]  I've also been experimenting with, uh, recording.
[41:30.160 --> 41:30.800]  You're working.
[41:31.140 --> 41:31.500]  Okay.
[41:31.860 --> 41:34.360]  AT&T, the charge is 70 cents for the next three minutes.
[41:34.760 --> 41:35.120]  All right.
[41:43.010 --> 41:44.550]  I need to put real coins in.
[41:46.910 --> 41:48.250]  Yeah, that operator knew.
[41:48.450 --> 41:50.230]  That operator knew what was going on.
[41:50.330 --> 41:52.690]  They, they got better at it over the years.
[41:54.210 --> 42:00.110]  They, they, they would have all kinds of good comebacks, but, uh, usually it resulted in the call being terminated.
[42:01.570 --> 42:02.290]  Go ahead, Alex.
[42:02.310 --> 42:05.870]  Uh, he's got a, he's got a, he's got a, he's got a, he's got a, he's got a, he had to space it out longer.
[42:06.110 --> 42:12.770]  I think, I think, again, the timing was, was often between the tones and also be very hard to get three quarters into a pay phone that quickly.
[42:12.990 --> 42:14.470]  Nobody could move that fast.
[42:14.550 --> 42:15.230]  That's, that's true.
[42:15.390 --> 42:16.610]  But everybody was so impatient.
[42:16.850 --> 42:20.330]  There was also like pay phone, uh, or a dial tone in the background.
[42:20.510 --> 42:23.950]  I think it's like you picked up another line while it was recording.
[42:24.210 --> 42:32.090]  There are many notes that we could give on what was wrong with, with that attempt to defray the phone company, but, um, didn't stop them from coming.
[42:32.710 --> 42:33.150]  Go ahead, Rob.
[42:33.150 --> 42:40.310]  There was also the fact that this was a live operator who got on the line to ask this kid for money and heard him talking about, uh, red boxes and crystals.
[42:40.590 --> 42:42.710]  So, uh, this, this operator knew what was coming.
[42:42.950 --> 42:44.410]  Yeah, that, that, that didn't help.
[42:44.530 --> 42:45.250]  That didn't help at all.
[42:45.250 --> 42:48.730]  Um, we have one more recording that I'd like to play.
[42:48.830 --> 42:50.210]  It's, it's similar in theme.
[42:50.350 --> 42:57.010]  I think it goes on a little bit, um, a little bit longer as far as, uh, when, when, uh, the person is actually busted.
[42:57.550 --> 43:18.450]  Um, so, uh, again, we are listening to recordings from the 2600 voice BBS that have just been, um, um, I guess, rescued, uh, decoded, uh, from an obscure extinct format with the, um, thanks to, uh, uh, WBAI listeners, uh, who, uh, answered our pleas and were able to,
[43:18.590 --> 43:22.070]  um, uh, help us figure out how to decode 3000 messages.
[43:22.710 --> 43:31.990]  Andy and his friend, Richard, uh, figured as, again, um, the big mouth audio was, was encoded with eight bit unsigned linear PCM with eight kilohertz sample rate.
[43:31.990 --> 43:51.670]  And, um, once we knew that we were able to import it into, um, um, um, I think it was Jones, uh, uh, was, was, was the, uh, genius behind this, uh, the FFMPEG, uh, command that, uh, was able to batch 3000 files and get them to, uh, uh, uh, turn into delightful WAV files,
[43:51.910 --> 43:55.070]  which we all can hear, listen, and appreciate.
[43:55.650 --> 44:01.290]  So we have one more, uh, to, um, uh, to play from, I believe the mid nineties.
[44:01.290 --> 44:02.050]  Let's listen.
[44:02.610 --> 44:03.010]  Uh, yeah.
[44:03.110 --> 44:03.310]  Okay.
[44:03.710 --> 44:10.710]  Um, my name is Orbital Illusion and, uh, and, um, I've been red boxing for a while and now I'm starting to have problems with telco and that sort of thing.
[44:10.870 --> 44:15.330]  If you guys know any, um, tricks in the trade or anything like that, uh, give your fellow phreak a ring.
[44:15.990 --> 44:17.090]  I'll leave a message on this bulletin board.
[44:17.390 --> 44:18.030]  Hey, thanks a lot.
[44:18.410 --> 44:18.630]  Peace.
[44:24.120 --> 44:25.640]  AT&T, the charge is...
[44:41.120 --> 44:43.360]  My operator, I need 65 cents for the next three minutes.
[44:43.700 --> 44:43.940]  Okay.
[44:53.880 --> 44:55.240]  I can't use that dumb machine.
[44:56.620 --> 44:57.480]  You got to have real coins.
[44:57.680 --> 44:59.520]  You can't use that black box or whatever it is.
[45:01.580 --> 45:02.780]  I ain't gonna let you use that.
[45:03.060 --> 45:03.480]  You hear me?
[45:05.100 --> 45:05.500]  Goodbye.
[45:11.780 --> 45:13.000]  And so it goes.
[45:13.380 --> 45:14.620]  That was the end of that attempt.
[45:15.280 --> 45:15.680]  Yeah.
[45:15.840 --> 45:27.820]  I, I, I don't want people to think that all people talked about back then was, was red boxing, but there is an awful lot of it on, on, on this, uh, uh, BBS because just the method of getting to it, uh, was, um, was a challenge.
[45:27.820 --> 45:29.660]  Phone calls were expensive back then.
[45:29.820 --> 45:35.440]  We didn't live in the world of Skype where we could all talk to each other, let alone see each other, no matter where we were on the planet.
[45:35.560 --> 45:38.080]  What phone phreaks are trying to do is simply communicate.
[45:38.620 --> 45:42.680]  And if they did this quote unquote legitimately, it would have cost hundreds of dollars.
[45:42.860 --> 45:46.200]  And, you know, for some kid in junior high school, that just wasn't doable.
[45:46.200 --> 45:49.540]  So they, they figured out the technology and made it work.
[45:51.060 --> 45:52.020]  Yes, go ahead, Alex.
[45:53.060 --> 46:05.920]  Where did these people come up with dial tones, as Kyle mentioned before, together with the red box tones, which just makes the whole thing seem rather unbelievable to, to an operator, especially, I don't understand where they came up with that crazy idea.
[46:06.280 --> 46:10.440]  Um, but you know, I'm sure that they perfected it and, and you're absolutely right.
[46:10.520 --> 46:22.680]  I mean, red boxing was essential to communication and not just communicating with people that were far away from you, that was long distance, even people, a couple of towns away, it was expensive to make phone calls, you know, to, to speak with them.
[46:23.100 --> 46:30.440]  Um, and if you were interested in, in doing any kind of hacking, right, where, which in the, this was before the internet.
[46:30.440 --> 46:40.300]  So you needed to dial on your modem and you had to figure out ways to navigate the phone system without being charged an arm and a leg, just to connect to a carrier, to connect to another computer.
[46:40.560 --> 46:44.940]  So very often you would route your modem, you know, with your, your telex.
[46:45.740 --> 47:02.320]  It was, you know, telling it to dial into like a 950 code, perhaps use an MCI calling card, then dial out to a computer bulletin board that might've even been 10 or 20 miles away because the phone companies back then charged you on the basis of, uh, if you recall,
[47:02.400 --> 47:03.400]  were message units.
[47:03.560 --> 47:09.680]  If you didn't have local unlimited call calling, you had message unit rates and it was a permanent rate and it was really expensive.
[47:09.680 --> 47:22.820]  And if you were, let's say pirating windows 3.1 or windows 95 that required all night downloads in order to do that, you know, you would wind up paying hundreds of dollars for a pirated copy of windows or something like that.
[47:22.960 --> 47:29.520]  So, you know, phone phreaking and hacking really went hand in hand and you had to know one in order to be able to do the other.
[47:30.100 --> 47:30.540]  Rob?
[47:31.420 --> 47:31.860]  Yeah.
[47:32.080 --> 47:44.780]  And, uh, younger people today have never, uh, had the experience of living in a world where communicating with people who were further than, you know, comparatively close to you, uh, was really expensive and difficult to do.
[47:45.060 --> 47:54.020]  And back in, back in this, uh, in this period in the nineties, the eighties, uh, if you were a member of the hacker community, you had to work to find that community.
[47:54.020 --> 48:02.640]  And most likely you had to do things which maybe weren't, uh, weren't on the honest level, uh, so far as paying for your calls, because if you did, you would have gone broke.
[48:02.820 --> 48:03.860]  The calls were expensive.
[48:04.080 --> 48:15.680]  And if you felt like you were the only hacker or the only phone phreak in your town and had nobody to talk with about it, you were, you were willing to go the extra mile and do what you had to do to get in touch with other people like yourself.
[48:16.140 --> 48:18.680]  Same thing with, um, um, operating systems.
[48:18.680 --> 48:26.260]  If you wanted to learn Unix, for instance, you couldn't just buy a copy or even, uh, download a copy like you can today, uh, you'd have to break into something.
[48:26.420 --> 48:31.340]  You'd either have to, uh, uh, break into, uh, an academic system or a corporate system of some sort.
[48:31.520 --> 48:34.200]  And the phone company, uh, ran a lot of those systems.
[48:34.400 --> 48:41.260]  That is how people learned by accessing things they weren't allowed to, um, uh, to access.
[48:41.540 --> 48:57.120]  I remember actually hearing on, on these, uh, airwaves, uh, on the, the personal computer show, there were, um, I think I even got into an argument with somebody, uh, about the, um, um, access to word processors that cost a huge amount of money.
[48:57.400 --> 49:05.320]  And the question I had was, well, um, what should a college student do if they can't afford to pay a thousand dollars to use a word processor?
[49:05.520 --> 49:08.200]  And the answer was, don't use a computer.
[49:08.900 --> 49:10.840]  And I just found that to be offensive.
[49:11.260 --> 49:21.280]  So I think that's something that, um, many in the hacker world, uh, take umbrage at that they should just be shut out because it's priced out of their range.
[49:21.600 --> 49:24.440]  If it's priced out of their range, there's something wrong with it.
[49:24.560 --> 49:33.620]  There's something wrong with that whole mentality that, that closes off, uh, an entire, um, a group of people, uh, just because of their economic status.
[49:33.940 --> 49:38.560]  And, and, and they're told they can't even learn how to use something, how to make it better.
[49:39.180 --> 49:49.580]  Uh, so I think there's been a lot of inspiration over the years based on, on what these kids were doing, you know, without them knowing that they were inspiring future generations, they were just having fun.
[49:49.700 --> 49:51.200]  They were figuring out ways to communicate.
[49:51.460 --> 49:56.420]  And, uh, you know, it was a bit of bravado there, but, um, we shouldn't underestimate it.
[49:56.520 --> 49:58.720]  We shouldn't underestimate what it really was all about.
[49:58.880 --> 50:00.260]  And, uh, it was great fun.
[50:00.360 --> 50:03.240]  I'm just so happy that we're able to restore it.
[50:03.320 --> 50:05.860]  And, and I don't know what we're going to do with all these pieces.
[50:05.980 --> 50:07.360]  We obviously can't play them all on the radio.
[50:07.800 --> 50:14.540]  Um, and some of them are private, obviously, because people had, uh, uh, mailboxes on these systems as well, including me.
[50:14.700 --> 50:18.360]  In fact, there's probably a lot of messages I need to, uh, return and never listen to.
[50:18.660 --> 50:24.060]  Uh, but there's all kinds of things on there that might be of, of huge interest, um, to people in the future.
[50:24.060 --> 50:26.860]  So we have, we have our work cut out for us, Alex, I believe you had something.
[50:27.700 --> 50:37.480]  Yeah, this, this issue of accessibility, I think is really interesting to me because it is also the kind of, uh, problem that inspires innovation.
[50:37.620 --> 50:50.440]  And I mean, I remember back in the nineties too, if you wanted to hack Unix systems, you had to know how to program and see, you had to, and that was why I taught myself how to program and see when I was in high school was because I wanted to hack Unix systems back in the day.
[50:50.540 --> 50:51.800]  And that's, you know, that was a hobby.
[50:52.020 --> 50:59.040]  And so, you know, that type of, um, I think necessity inspires a lot of learning as well.
[50:59.140 --> 51:11.420]  And I'm wondering, I know we only have a couple of minutes left here, but where do we see this going in the future with technology being so accessible now with, you know, Linux at our fingertips, all these different types of machines that we can access program,
[51:11.600 --> 51:11.800]  et cetera.
[51:12.340 --> 51:17.420]  What is the technology that's inaccessible to, that's going to inspire the next generation of hackers?
[51:17.660 --> 51:23.640]  Is this, is it going to be quantum computing systems that we're going to be, that are going to be inaccessible to us?
[51:23.700 --> 51:33.820]  I mean, this is something I don't think we need to figure out right now, but what's the next generation of technology that is out of our reach that will require us to hack?
[51:33.820 --> 51:44.820]  I think what we've learned is that no form of technology should be forbidden or out of our reach as far as being able to learn about it, because that's how you, um, that's how you identify the problems.
[51:44.880 --> 51:45.760]  That's how you improve.
[51:46.040 --> 51:51.760]  That's how you come up with, with brand new ideas and, and trying to control that artificially.
[51:52.000 --> 51:53.180]  It's always the wrong move.
[51:53.260 --> 51:56.980]  And there are always people who are smarter than you that will figure out ways around it.
[51:57.100 --> 52:01.540]  You can try to criminalize that as much as you want, but they're always going to find a way in.
[52:01.700 --> 52:12.780]  So the best thing to do is to embrace that and, and open yourselves up to having an insecure system that is exposed and fixed rather than pretend that is perfect.
[52:13.160 --> 52:25.720]  Uh, we, we've seen that so many times over, over the last few decades and I hope that we, um, we learn from that, but you know, seeing, you know, recently we, we talked about passwords that people use to this day.
[52:25.720 --> 52:35.260]  We, it really hasn't gotten much better to just using these passwords on bigger systems, but it's the same ignorance of what security is all about.
[52:36.620 --> 52:37.260]  Yeah.
[52:37.420 --> 52:50.400]  Oftentimes the systems, they, the entities that can afford the systems don't have the interest and the curiosity to change defaults and to use it in, in ways that are unique.
[52:50.400 --> 53:06.340]  And I think it's getting, uh, creative people access and, um, a chance instead of, uh, having all kinds of prerequisites, um, really opens up that level of innovation that the world needs.
[53:06.640 --> 53:07.640]  Yeah, absolutely.
[53:08.080 --> 53:16.540]  Hey, it was fun to, uh, not deal with the present day for a little bit and to go back in time and, and, and, and visit some of our previous selves.
[53:17.040 --> 53:19.820]  Um, please write to us at off the hook.
[53:20.100 --> 53:35.080]  The address is OTH at 2600.com and please donate to WBAI, whether by going to give to WBAI.org and, uh, pledging whatever you can afford or becoming a BAI buddy or by calling five one six.
[53:36.100 --> 53:36.540]  Okay.
[53:36.660 --> 53:40.560]  I'm going to try a five, two, six, six, two, zero, three, six, zero, two.
[53:40.780 --> 53:41.600]  Did I get that right?
[53:42.500 --> 53:43.540]  Does anybody know?
[53:44.300 --> 53:47.320]  Five, one, six, five, one, six, six, two, zero, three, six, zero, two.
[53:47.480 --> 53:48.560]  It's finally ingrained in my head.
[53:48.680 --> 53:50.680]  Five, one, six, six, two, zero, three, six, zero, two.
[53:50.980 --> 53:55.940]  And, uh, pledge whatever you can, uh, if you've enjoyed this conversation or others on this radio station.
[53:56.060 --> 54:00.280]  And by all means, keep listening to this radio station and have your mind expanded.
[54:00.620 --> 54:01.020]  Alex.
[54:02.660 --> 54:07.600]  Uh, preempting Rob, are, are there, uh, virtual 2600 meetings coming up at the end of the week?
[54:07.940 --> 54:08.760]  Oh, that's a good question.
[54:08.760 --> 54:18.120]  There are no in-person, there are no in-person 2600 meetings anywhere, uh, you, because of the pandemic, but, uh, find the websites and social media for your local meetings.
[54:18.400 --> 54:20.840]  Um, a lot of them are going, are doing virtual ones.
[54:20.960 --> 54:22.520]  We are doing virtual meetings here.
[54:22.620 --> 54:25.080]  It's at nyc2600.net.
[54:25.240 --> 54:28.960]  Uh, you can find the information there for the New York City 2600 meeting online.
[54:29.140 --> 54:40.400]  And we hope to, uh, be able to, um, uh, when, when things go back to normal and they will go back to normal, uh, we hope to, um, uh, reboot the whole 2600 meeting scene.
[54:40.780 --> 54:43.300]  Hopefully get a whole lot of new meetings coming in as well.
[54:44.260 --> 54:45.900]  Um, stay tuned for that.
[54:46.160 --> 54:48.420]  It'll be on the website, 2600.com.
[54:48.860 --> 54:55.300]  We will see you next week when we'll be talking about all kinds of, um, other amazing things in the hacker world.
[54:55.640 --> 55:00.180]  Until then, uh, keep exploring and, and playing with technology and let us know what you find.
[55:00.500 --> 55:01.080]  Good night.
[55:49.520 --> 55:50.600]  I'm Michael G.
[55:50.760 --> 55:54.480]  Haskins, one of the staff members here at WBAI.
[55:55.880 --> 56:01.760]  WBAI's local station board, responsible for advising local management and operations.