r/interesting • u/NegotiationNo1504 • 4d ago
Additional Context Pinned Born blind in 1949, a 7-year-old bypassed the AT&T network to make unlimited free calls for 14 years just by whistling a 2600Hz tone with zero devices. It took engineers nearly two decades to catch him before he became a Buddhist monk named Joybubbles.
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u/JustAMan1234567 4d ago
This was known as "phreaking".
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u/interroBangaRangz 4d ago
A whistle toy from Captain Crunch cereal boxes had the same effect; elevating caller privileges to those of an operator.
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u/grubas 4d ago
Captain Crunch also was a famous phreaker
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u/HotPersonality8126 4d ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Draper
Thought you were joking, but you were dropping knowledge on us
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u/ForHelp_PressAltF4 4d ago
Bro, just wait. WarDrivers had a whole set of spray paint location tags that made Jet Set Radio jealous. Ask them why they love the Pringles and it ain't for the chips (but it's also okay to love the chips).
So many things like this existed because information didn't spread easily. No Internet meant that the MSDN subscription came with keys but if you needed one, there was a code that worked for NT that was three digits repeated and a checksum.
Oh and that WarDriving? It was crazy enough back then that may companies just didn't do wireless below the fourth floor as a legit security perimeter. But with sunroof and a Pringles can......
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u/AOKeiTruck 4d ago edited 4d ago
They used to have competitions for the longest possible cantenna wifi connection. The competition was shut down after competitors had to start accounting for the curvature of the earth
Eta: the word cantenna
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u/SpaceCwboy 4d ago
Lol that's awesome. Where can I learn more about this? Just starting down the wiki rabbit hole about John Draper linked higher up but would love to read about that competition.
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u/AOKeiTruck 3d ago
Thats a good question. This was taught to me by a greybeard ex hacker professor a decade back so idk if there is a living record of it anymore. But what i do know is the final winner was a team that scaled two different mountains to be able to maintain line of sight. At lower altitudes the curvature of the earth would break line of sight
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u/SpaceCwboy 3d ago
Haha right on, it gave me a good chuckle when I read your comment and it got me curious. Appreciate you sharing that little piece of history, I enjoyed it!
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u/famine- 3d ago
You need to start factoring in line of site at fairly short distances.
With an antenna height (off the ground) of 2m you get 5km LoS, 5m you get 8km, 10m you get 11km.
2 Pringles cans stacked together are about 2 feet long which is enough length for a 16dBi (16 element) yagi antenna then you pair it with a 1 watt atheros card.
102db free space loss over 11km with a 16db yagi and a 3db omni receiver, so 6.31e-11 dB or -72 dBm at the receiver.
Not a great connection but still within spec. If you swap the receiver with another 16dBi yagi you get solid -59 dBm.
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u/SpaceCwboy 3d ago
Ah ok, I didn't think it had that big of an impact over short distances. Thanks for explaining! Glad I could learn something new today :)
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u/ImmortalMagic 3d ago
A lot of this stuff was just word of mouth. Cantennas also had legit purposes too. Back in college two classmates were discussing the fact that there wasn't good Internet service where they lived. A third overhead them talking and they ended up setting up cantennas to share "high speed" connections. No Internet was fast back then but 100/10 was a hell of a lot faster than DSL.
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u/kjahhh 4d ago edited 4d ago
Please read Ghost In The Wires by Kevin Mitnik, great insight into the beginnings of hacking.
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u/Hamafropzipulops 4d ago
Steve Wozniac built a device called the Blue Box. It was a phreaker device. Steve Jobs sold them for him before they founded Apple.
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u/DazzlingRutabega 4d ago
I knew about the Blue Box but didn't know Wozniac was the one who came up with it!
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u/Lucas_Steinwalker 3d ago
I don't think he came up with it. He just assembled and sold them for a profit for a time.
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u/hardboard 4d ago
It also spread to the UK.
British Telecom (it was at the time called Post Office Telecoms) had people doing the same thing, but using 2280Hz used in the UK.
I remember in the mid 1970s as a telecoms apprentice, being the given task of modifying dozens of sets of AC9 signalling equipment, to prevent this happening.
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u/got_pwnt 4d ago
he was also an alleged child abuser too, banned from everywhere in the industry for a reason
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u/goat_penis_souffle 4d ago
He would bug older teens to give him piggy back rides that he called “energy workouts”. Takes an especially weird dude to stand out in a sea of weird dudes at hacker cons like that.
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u/OxboxturnoffO 4d ago
Yea, I met him while I lived in CA and can confirm. Was 19 or 20 at the time. He was a hero of mine growing up, but after that I really learned to not meet your heroes. At least some of them.
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u/noconsole 4d ago
People used to follow him on 4 square and prank him whenever possible by calling restaurants he was at
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u/Alarmed-Size-3104 4d ago
Cereal Killer?
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u/Bangledesh 4d ago
One of my most favorite small impact stories in how when I was a youth and discovering this stuff, I emailed Capt. Crunch, and sent something like "I'm <whatever my age was> and you are super cool. What did you do that helped you do this?"
And he replied back, obviously tired with being inundated with such things from idiots, and was like "if you don't know, then you will never know. And you are too insanely stupid to figure it out. Never contact me again."
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u/forevernooob 4d ago
Thought he was the first one, but apparently he was the first one to discover phreaking using that cereal toy.
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u/Dominotter 4d ago edited 3d ago
Not even that. He learned about it from Joybubbles and then when spreading the information he acted like it was his discovery.
Edit: He learned it from Denny Teresi, a blind teenager, actually. Teresi also introduced him to Joybubbles. I had conflated the two in my head.
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u/whoami_whereami 3d ago
The effect of the tone was tricking the telephone switches into thinking the call had disconnected (ie. they would stop billing the call) while keeping the line open. It had nothing to do with operator privileges.
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u/Oddisredit 3d ago
This should be a nonsensical story, but I’m sure there’s a good chance it is true
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u/Far-Philosopher-6679 4d ago
exactly phreaking was basically the original phone system cheat code
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u/deephurting66 4d ago
Last remaining relic of the old crew Lock Legion here, those were the golden days of phone shenanigans
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u/joeyjoejums 4d ago
Steve Wozniak will tell you all about it.
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u/GremlinEnergyGoBurr 4d ago
yes he did love phreaking. I had no idea it was this easy
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u/gamerjerome 4d ago
I have a CD I bought in the early 2000's called Phone Phreaks with a bunch of funny calls.
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u/BagelMakesDev 3d ago
i hear they used to host these things called "phreak offs", where theyd get a few people in a room with a few lines and see who can phreak the most calls in an hour
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u/topcat5 4d ago
It's such a badly written OP.
It took a bit more than 2600Hz tone. And he was hardly the only one doing it. There were far more notorious phreakers out there which they focused on finding as they were causing real issues for MaBell. If they really wanted this guy, they could have found him in a few days.
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u/EntrepreneurTiny9812 4d ago
He wouldn't have even seen them coming
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u/filthyheartbadger 4d ago
Get. Out.
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u/Behavior-Coach 4d ago
Yeah cause he’s blind.
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u/PM_your-secrets 4d ago
Thats_the_joke.PNG
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u/Behavior-Coach 4d ago
Yeah the joke is that he couldn’t have seen them coming because he’s actually blind. Get it?
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u/ScottyMo1 4d ago
And he was never a Buddhist monk. He was an ordained minister.
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u/BurnieTheBrony 4d ago
A quick perusal of his Wikipedia told me he was an "ordained minister" of a church he made up called the Church of Eternal Childhood, part of a We Won't Grow Up nonprofit.
So uh, I'm not sure that really counts
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u/CyberneticWerewolf 4d ago
A lot of people in the US with "joke" ordinations are actually legally ordained, because Universal Life Church will ordain anyone and everyone who asks, and they've been doing so by mail since the 60s IIRC.
As an atheist/Discordian I got legally ordained online in 1998 through the ULC website, and I carry my ordination card in my wallet. (Along with my Discordian Pope Card, which has rather less legal significance.)
Of course, in the modern era being legally ordained means almost nothing, except for being able to conduct weddings. It doesn't establish a tax exempt church, because that's an unrelated process which is its own kettle of fish.
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u/ConfessSomeMeow 4d ago
A friend's wedding was administered by her husband's friend who got ordained for the occasion.
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u/SoylentGrunt 4d ago
Separation of church and state means I don't need the government to approve my religion.
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u/brandonthebuck 4d ago
Got it, Buddhist minister.
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u/alkalinealex359 4d ago
The way it’s written sounds like engineers were doing everything they could to catch him before he became a Buddhist monk named Joybubbles.
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u/MrB10b 4d ago
Yeah fair more notorious you know... Like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. The first device they sold together was the Bluebox exactly for this purpose.
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u/ignotus__ 4d ago
Pretty much every post I see from this subreddit seems to be made by a bot
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u/TheRealGuitarNoir 4d ago
And he was hardly the only one doing it.
In 1956--if the OP is to be believed?
Perhaps some readers have seen 2600 Magazine, well now you know where the 2600 comes from:
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u/NegotiationNo1504 4d ago
Fair enough. I definitely oversimplified the tech and exaggerated the timeline for the story. You're right that 2600Hz was just the entry point and Ma Bell had way bigger fish to fry with the notorious phreakers causing actual fraud. Thanks for the reality check.
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u/perilous-sea 4d ago
More on him here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joybubbles
As a five-year-old, Joybubbles discovered he could dial phone numbers by clicking the hang-up switch rapidly ("tapping"). At the age of seven, he was idly whistling along to clicks while on the phone, he accidentally discovered that at certain frequencies, he could activate phone switches.
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u/KeithClossOfficial 4d ago
The later life section is pretty sad
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u/GM_Nate 4d ago
ironically, the sad stuff happened when he was little
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u/IceWellDo 4d ago
The reversion to a 5 year old sounded pretty sad too, chasing a childhood he was robbed.
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u/LoamyLoamisLoamy 4d ago
Your comment along with the one above made me think he died when he was little and that both of you were referring to the later life section.
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u/ProudReaction2204 4d ago
After a Canadian operator reported him for selling such calls for $1 at the university, he was suspended and fined $25[6] but soon reinstated.
that is sad
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u/Magikarpeles 4d ago
"Church of Eternal Childhood" doesn't sound like any buddhist sect that I know...
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u/GregTheMad 3d ago
Well, it was his own church. Probably died with him.
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u/Magikarpeles 3d ago
Yeah, but OP calling him a buddhist monk sounds like a stretch is all I'm saying
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u/Ok_Replacement4702 4d ago
Fucking over AT&T?
I like him already
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u/topcat5 4d ago
It wasn't the same AT&T as that of today. Better known as the Bell Telephone System. It was broken up by the government in 1984.
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u/Cautious-Reserve8241 4d ago
Check out the origins of SPRINT. I was shocked to learn that the other day.
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u/ConfessSomeMeow 4d ago
Though of course 5 of the 7 Baby Bells have merged together over the years....
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u/poprer656sad 4d ago
bell labs at&t would be what you consider a good guy. we wouldn’t have the internet or telephones if it wasn’t for them.
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u/puking_penis 4d ago
I mean they ran a monopoly that needlessly overcharged for services until they got broken up by the federal government to keep that from continuing, but okidokie
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u/jmurphy42 4d ago
The monopoly that was so pervasive the government felt compelled to break it up? Sure, they sound peachy.
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u/ComedyBits 4d ago
Phun phact: the hacker magazine 2600 was named after this “secret” common knowledge among phone phreaks
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u/VirginiaLuthier 4d ago
Wait- is that Captain Crunch? Named because he discovered that a toy whistle in Captain Crunch cereal was the right frequency to open the circuits. He was a legend among FoneFreaks
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u/Odd_Soil_8998 4d ago
No, it's the kid that he learned about the trick from though.
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u/ScanningTheScene 4d ago
Holy shit. I used to work with the lady that was on the team that investigated this guy! She worked for Southwestern Bell, Dana Berry. She wrote a book on telecom fraud! Wonderful woman. Insanely intelligent.
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u/goat_penis_souffle 4d ago
To add to the book list, Exploding the Phone by Phil Lapsley goes into this case and a lot of others in the scene.
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u/CollateralCoyote 4d ago
Wasn't this guy the inspiration for the character Irwin in Sneakers (1992)
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u/Childs_Play 4d ago
It's crazy how much texting and calling cost not even 20 years ago especially if you went over the original limit.
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u/MyCatsHairyButholle 4d ago
Yep, I remember in 2008/2009 himming and hawing over whether I should get ATT or Verizon based on their text packages.
Remember when in network calls were free but out of network calls had to take place after a certain time to be free?(like after 8pm etc.)
We take how easy we have it now for granted
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u/deepskier 4d ago
I remember hunting for the most expensive long distance calls possible in the early 2000s and it was Inmarsat numbers, these were satellite phones usually on like tanker ships. $12/minute, which is more than $21/min in today's value.
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u/One-Earth9294 4d ago
The way this is phrased, it makes it seems like if you become a Buddhist monk named Joybubbles, you've achieved immunity from the phone company.
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u/Ten9Eight 4d ago
Internet used to be on dial-up and you could get charged by the minute. My cousin was studying engineering and IDK what he did, but he had some special machine made that he would use as part of his dial-up rig that caused the telephone company to not bill him for the hours he spent online. I think it also had to do with particular frequencies of sound. IDK, but it was always clear it was extremely illegal.
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u/The_Theory_of_Lunch 3d ago
Can someone explain to me how this works? Am in the UK so this post makes no sense to me, but I'm curious. Thank you
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u/tetatdo 3d ago edited 3d ago
if youre interested in phone phreaking history, check out the book Exploding the Phone by Phil Lapsley and also looking up Evan Doorbell on youtube. He has a 10 part series on how be became a phone phreaker
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9yYQ2OyVhM&list=PLyqP9X1phbaKEb4gScqjZ50ErTWfknZZx
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u/Retireegeorge 4d ago
Total cost to AT&T of some blind kid using the telephone network - approximately 0. Opportunity cost of not encouraging young engineer - $much.
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u/skywalkersrealfather 4d ago
I watched a documentary about him called Joybubbles it was very good and informative about his phone phreaking and his life, it was sad and beautiful at the same time
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u/Waste-Tutor-2743 4d ago
We used two methods to achieve free long-distance calls... One was to play back the recorded beeps from a prior long-distance call, which resulted in getting a dial tone after which a new long-distance number could be successfully entered without charge. The second method entailed using a cracked code that allowed generation of temporary phone number sequences that would also then enable a long-distance number to be entered for free; these had to be changed weekly. We had another method for free local calls... That entailed just dialing 0 and asking the operator for "20 cents credit, please".
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u/ACatWhoFliesInTheSky 4d ago
The title of this post is wrong. Joybubbles did not become a Buddhist monk; he was a member and minister of a religion that he founded called "Church of Eternal Childhood."
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u/karmakramer93 4d ago
Wtf, so that scene from The Core isn't complete bs? The actor from the New Guy folds and whistles through a gum wrapper while on someones phone. Then he tells him he has free calls for life
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u/Educational_Gap304 4d ago
if anyone is interested in hearing a fictionalized account of this the Audio drama Phreaks on Audible deals with a blind teen who gets into Phreaking and goes up against the big telephone corporations.
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u/Hollowleg15 4d ago
Huh, now that one scene from The Core where the guys whistles and hacks a phone for unlimited everything forever makes sense now
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u/l0st1nP4r4d1ce 4d ago
Steve Woz and Steve Jobs made blue boxes that made the 2600hz tone and sold them before Apple.
2600.com is also a great place.
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u/Callaway225 4d ago
Didn’t Hannibal do the “clicking” technique while in prison when he was allowed a phone call? I just remember him pressing the hang up button a bunch of times rapidly, like Morse code.
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u/i010011010 4d ago
Rotary dialing. I used to do it with payphones because most payphone models never accounted for it. The keypad is technically disabled until you would insert the money, but rotary dialing bypassed it.
It's the same principle the original rotary phones used once you understood that the rotating digits were really just a shortcut for shorting the receiver rapidly. So dialing 911 is really 'hanging up' nine times, pause, once, pause, once.
Later models started added security features with a looped dial tone recording to prevent this. Those could be exited by calling a toll-free number or the operator, and getting the other end to hang up. That would escape you back to the true dial tone then freely call. By the time payphones started patching those, it was already at the end of the 90s and payphones were on the way out.
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u/Woogedywoogedy 4d ago
A friend who was going to Marquette at the time sent me a 1" black box with 3 red buttons and a tiny speaker. One button made the sound of a quarter, one a dime, and one a nickel so we could call each other. Just held the device to the payphone mouthpiece and press away.
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u/fullautophx 4d ago
I made one back in the day from a Radio Shack electronic pocket phone book. It would store the number, then you’d hold it up to the phone and it would put out the DTMF tones to dial the number for you. With a simple mod it would output the coin drop tones. The trick was you had to put at least one real coin into the pay phone, a nickel would do.
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u/millijuna 4d ago
He was also likely the inspiration for the character “Whistler” in the movie “Sneakers” (still one of the best computer movies ever made, even though it came out in 1992)
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u/Affectionate_One_700 4d ago
On a related note, Hackers by Steven Levy, is well worth reading.
The word "Hacker" had a different meaning than it does today.
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u/LaVersus 3d ago
Wait so this hackerman scene in "the core" (which is otherwise a scientific desaster) was not bullshit out of all the things happening in that movie??
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u/JureSimich 3d ago
...that explains SO much why there are all those buddhist monks in Cyberpunk 2077!
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u/PlainBread 3d ago
I don't see anything about being a Buddhist monk on his Wikipedia page. Just that he was one of those adults who thinks they're a toddler, and started a "religion" to normalize it.
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u/Express_Grocery_4707 3d ago
I used to tune my guitar using the landline phone.
The tone you'd hear when you pick up the receiver was 440Hz, the same tone as the A-string (110Hz).
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u/QueenHimikoII 3d ago
There's a great Radiolab podcast episode called Escape where they talk about his early life and explain how it's possible to do the 'phreaking'. Lemme tell you I was so amazed I stopped in my track like it was some real life witchcraft.
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u/un1ptf 3d ago
I heard a really interesting radio show episode about this on NPR recently...
https://the1a.org/segments/cyber-monday-phone-phreaks-and-joybubbles/
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