my web 0.2 website

“Ma Bell is a system I want to explore. It’s a beautiful system, you know, but Ma Bell screwed up. It’s terrible because Ma Bell is such a beautiful system, but she screwed up. I learned how she screwed up from a couple of blind kids who wanted me to build a device. A certain device. They said it could make free calls.”

That’s a paragraph from an article linked to from Steve Wozniak’s website, which Steve describes as “The Article that changed history“. He is one of the most important engineers of our time, and like thousands more, he was driven to learn more and more about how computer systems interact, after snooping around telephone networks. The telephone system has always been a prime target for attack for two reasons - vulnerabilities have historically been well published, and telephony was so expensive that it was worth working out the ways to subvert the system and talk for free.

But what happens when talking across the world is so cheap that its not worth stealing any more? You may think this is an irrelevant point, calls from BT users to France are still 18.5p per minute, to New Zealand are still 31p per minute. But what if these calls to France were a penny a minute? Calls to New Zealand 1.4p a minute?

Well, they are now that price if you are a Localphone user. Does this mean no more Steve Wozniaks, young men driven to explore big networks so that they can use their skills to build something even bigger and better?

The first ‘Phreaks’ - the collective name for people who like to exploit vulnerabilities in the phone system found their skills by accident. A blind eight year old called Josef Carl Engressia discovered that he could stop a phone accounting for a call he was making by whistling a particular note in a long distance call. He’d accidently discovered the 2600Hz tone which signals to long-distance telephony kit that a user had hung the phone up.

The later Phreaks like Steve Wozniak were more methodical, they took this learning and approached the exercise as engineers - phreaking was a learning experience - as Steve puts it, “The blue box year was 1972. Apple started in 1975. The biggest connection was some design tricks and techniques that I honed on the blue box.” Fooling around with the telephone drove innovation and learning for the early Apples.

The telephone system acted as a central point of interest for those interested in information security, and gave the movement focus. Whilst the 2600Hz trick no longer works, the number features in the name of the world’s most popular security journal, 2600 The Hacker Quarterly, which specialises in distributing information to IT personnel about improving their systems by demonstrating weaknesses in flawed systems. Again, without Phreakers would such openness and publicity for information security exist?
I admit that phreaks are not only motivated by the prospect of free telecoms, they are fascinated with the huge telephone network. I only ask if calls were as cheap as they are through services like Localphone, would so many engineers have found value exploring telephone systems, learning techniques to use in their later masterpieces.

I hope that tomorrow’s engineers will still explore telecoms. In fact, its easier today than before - downloading a free PBX like Asterisk means you nolonger need to be a criminal in order to explore how a telephone network interacts. VoIP networks have existed as islands within a corporation, or groups of interested people (e.g. the closed FWD system permitted free calls between friends on their network, no matter where they were in the world, but did not allow calls to route to other telephone networks, such as the one your mobile is connected to). Cheaper telecoms was our drive to build Localphone, so it can still act as a motivator for engineers to create something, its just that today you can have more fun doing this legally!

Disclaimer: the author is an engineer at Localphone.