Slate Reprints Blue-Box Article That Inspired Jobs 121
Slate has reprinted the piece that Ron Rosenbaum wrote for Esquire in 1971, explaining to the world that there was an underground movement of people hacking the phone system. (Rosenbaum is now a columnist for Slate.) According to the article's new introduction and followup piece by Rosenbaum reflecting on its impact — and to the New York Times obituary for Steve Jobs — this article inspired Jobs and Wozniak to start building blue boxes themselves, an effort that made them several thousand dollars.
not any more (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:not any more (Score:4, Interesting)
Most definitely. Phreakers would be water boarded at Guantanamo today. Not only would the law have taken Steve and Woz's paltry thousands, they would have confiscated their homes, their cars, their parent's homes and cars, and the families of both would be on no-fly lists, etc ad nauseum. Gotta do away with those phreakers - they'll be the downfall of this great corporate nation!
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America is just so crazy isn't it?
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There's a better understanding once people know that the cost of national (inter-state) and international calls were at least $1.50/minute. So if a college student desperately wanted to call her parents from campus for a 30 minute call, that was $45. Take into account inflation over the past 40 years, and that would be like paying $250 now.
Or you could get a little blue box, put it over the handset, and enter some admin codes to get a free call.
Now you just use Skype with a PC or a mobile phone. There was a
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I never did understand, and still don't understand, why anyone needs to talk for 30 to 60 minutes. I called home from the Virgin Islands, from Spain, from Bahrain, from England. All of my phone calls were ten minutes or less. "Hi, Mom! How are things? Oh, Uncle Bill is sick? That sucks. Well, we came through the Suez, and cruised around in little circles for a couple weeks. Now we're in Bahrain. Yeah, it's hot here. Did you get the pictures I mailed? Good. Well, tell everyone I love them - I'm h
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Ask your women-folk - they'll want to chat about everything from relationships, celebrities, friends, relatives, marriages, divorces, babies, uncles, aunts, fashions, dresses, blouses, events, weddings, parties, celebrations, festivals, and more...
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I never did understand, and still don't understand, why anyone needs to talk for 30 to 60 minutes
It's called having an over-inflated sense of entitlement. People then thought they should be able to talk for as long as they liked for free, in the same way that people now think they should be able to access all the entertainment they want for free.
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Apples and pineapples, pal. Phreaking made use of hardware and equipment that had to be maintained, by people drawing wages, often times on call 24/7. One may or may not make an argument that Ma Bell and AT&T overcharged, or that they had a monopoly, or whatever. The entertainment "industries" tend to gain money with sharing. They certainly do not lose the money that they claim. In fact, the entertainment "industries" operate unethically, as well as unlawfully in a number of ways. Starting with th
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sadly phreaking like we used to do disappeared before it really homogenized into something solid. It was taken over by kids who used the name as when all they did was look over the shoulders of people entering their phone card numbers and remember them. Lame shit, even script kiddies have to at least press the enter key a few times, those guys were shit.
BTW, the remnants of the phone company response to the original boxes remains to this day. If you call a number and it rings more than a set number of times
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Only if they got caught. Mitnick got 5 years for something similar, partly in solitary because they thought he could launch nukes by whistling into payphones.
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Phreakers were back then too since what they were doing was illegal. Just not as many resources were spent, until they decided they wanted Kevin out of the picture for a while and tossed his butt in prison..
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Maybe you should read the article before reaching for the tinfoil - because Mr Draper (AKA Captain Crunch) was in fact locked up back then. (As were other phone phreakers.) The only reason Jobs and Woz were never so treated is that they managed to stay off the radar and were never caught during their brief careers as phreakers.
IIRC, the mere possession of a 'box' could net you a hefty fine. If they could prove
yup (Score:1)
news that matters
Re:yup (Score:5, Insightful)
Scoff all you want, but it would do all the youngins here good to read the whole Blue Box article from front to back. Not only does it provide a great historical context to modern hacking - and proof that the motivations haven't changed even though the technology has - but it's also an example of an extremely well written article, something the modern blogosphere is incapable of creating. Even if it takes the death of Steve Jobs, it's exactly the kind of article that should be posted on Slashdot.
iWoz, Chapter 6 (Score:5, Informative)
The lesson is... (Score:5, Interesting)
Be a criminal first. Then start a business so you can rip people off bigtime. Legally.
Don't much care for apple of the last 10+ years. Apple could have advanced computing greatly. Instead they advanced lockin, lawsuits, form over function, and trendy fad expensive disposable products.
We're not a pc! No.. you're the same hardware with one extra thing to make it a pain to interoperate with the rest of the computing world easily and cheaply. Once apple started using intel as their base it should have become obvious to everyone what they were doing and what they actually cared about. Money.
And that does not make you great. That's actually pretty common.
Damm shame... Apple forcing microsoft and other companies to compete on a level open playfield could have done so much more to advance technology.
Instead you now get your choice of iproduct in a range of primary colors!
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No doubt you will be modded down to the darkest pit of trolliness, but know that some people agree with you nonetheless.
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This is all well and good, but do you know any other way to make a computer useable by grandma?
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"Grandma" browses the web and checks her email just as well from a well set up Linux or Windows box as a Mac.
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I hope this was meant to be funny. I'll consider it as such.
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Re:The lesson is... (Score:4, Insightful)
I didn't know "grandma" was the problem the iPad was meant to solve.
Demographic studies [ymobileblog.com] would seem to indicate that the main group using iPads are between 35-44. In other words, perfectly computer literate, probably well into their careers, and wealthy enough to afford the hefty price tag and maintenance (after all, you've got to send it back to change the battery).
Also, I have used an iPad. It is just as quirky as any Windows computing device. I don't know where this delusion comes from that Apple products are more user-friendly, but from the perspective of someone who had to learn how to hook these damn things into my virtual desktop environment, I have had ample opportunity to experience the Apple user interface, and it is really nothing spectacular. It's just as badly-designed as every other user interface I've ever encountered.
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Ha! Then, you missed the biggest part of the iOS so-called "revolution". The key is that there is only one button, and this button always brings you to the same place.
You see, computers (and phones, VCRs, etc.) are stateful machines. The biggest gripe non computer literates have with computer is that they invariably get lost somewhere, and then they don't know how to get back to their previous state. I once caught my mother in law editing a word document with a 1600x magnification on. She was barely able t
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Oh i think they get it, what they worry is that by pandering to the lowest common denominator one heads towards idiocracy.
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Instead of idiocracy, I'd settle with "to each his own". Since computers as we know them are too complex for dumb* people, we should not cater anything for them? I'd rather have two sets of computers on the market: The dumbed down version and the full fledge computing platform for us.
And everyone's happy, except those that claim that the dumbed down version is a walled garden and is therefore evil. But very few care about them so all is well.
* dumb means computer-illiterate in this context.
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And then corporate backed government decide that those full fledged computing platforms are dangerous to national security in some way, and demand that anyone using them get certified via some office or other. Next thing we know, security research takes a dive and if they find a "open" laptop in your belonging during a border crossing you "vanish".
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I sort of agree with you, but iOS _is_ stateful. You say it yourself: The home button invariably gets you to the starting point.
Is that really that different from "hit escape to get to command mode" in vim? (With ":set showmode" on, at least the observant won't do the "hit escape before I do something", like newbies to vi do.)
No, I am __NOT__ in any way trying to argue that vim is as easy to use (but it definitely is easier to use than vi) as an iOS device.
Just that it's not really removed state. In fact,
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Apple could have advanced computing greatly. Instead they advanced lockin, lawsuits, form over function, and trendy fad expensive disposable products.
You don't think they did both? I do. The lock-in is the reason I'm no longer an Apple customer (I'm five years clean, thank you) but the nicely integrated systems make me wish they were open enough to be purchased ethically.
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Apple doesn't get a dime without making products people want.
Not products YOU want. Products other people want. Your beef is with them, not Apple.
"Reprint"? (Score:1)
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It's been renamed "cat" in recent years.
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No, it means legally repost, as opposed to illegally copy. (Heck, it might be in their next print edition too, where your presumed nitpick would be completely invalid.)
Esquire, then Xerox (Score:2, Insightful)
> this article inspired Jobs and Wozniak to start building blue boxes themselves, an effort that made them several thousand dollars.
this [visit] inspired Jobs and Wozniak to start building [a GUI] themselves, an effort that made them several [millions] dollars.
Now that is a pattern of real innovation.
Re:Esquire, then Xerox (Score:4, Informative)
They were invited to Xerox and bought the tech off them. Afterwards, Apple hired some of the staff. Read history (or ask Woz) and don't be a douche.
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Don't feed the trolls.
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Bought? I thought it was being given away for free. At least that is how i remember it being back then.
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From Wikipedia, with citation:
Re:Esquire, then Xerox (Score:4, Interesting)
They were invited to Xerox and bought the tech off them. Afterwards, Apple hired some of the staff. Read history (or ask Woz) and don't be a douche.
Actually the real history is that Raskin arranged the visit so that Steve Jobs would see why the technology that was in the Macintosh was important and hopefully convince Jobs to quit trying to kill the Mac.
http://www-sul.stanford.edu/mac/parc.html [stanford.edu]
Hahah (Score:4, Insightful)
It's amazing how fucked up humanity is.
Day after day, "media" spends time talking about someone who managed to run some businesses that basically produced some eye-candy that naive people can drool over. A hero.
But chance that you will hear about someone who actually saves peoples' eyes (like this, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanduk_Ruit [wikipedia.org]) are almost zero.
Edward Bernays would be proud.
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There are hundreds of thousands people who owe their eye vision to Sanduk Ruit.
He will never need any media to make people remember and love him.
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Since most people only care about money our old fashioned life saving hero became the billionaire. And those shallow people are the ones who buy shiny gadgets to upgrade their unimportance to the next level. They don't care about how these gadgets are produced in China, if price meets value, if the gadget is a throw-away one (see battery packs), if they're locked into a corporation controlled ecosystem, if the vendor stifles innovation by ridiculous patents and so on. And all other corporations follow that
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He helped create the information age, which has touched effectively everyone on the planet. Although your example no doubt does work that is very worthwhile, it touches only a tiny number of people in a profound way.
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So Jobs got started and built his empire on making a Blue-Box phreaking tool that was illegal at the time and still is now .... ....can the government seize his ill-gotten gains ...?
If the captain himself if reading this. . . (Score:3)
. . . greetings, John Draper! This article made you my hero. Hope you've had a great life since the 1970s.
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He didn't; he lives in a broken-down van in San Fransisco, eating out of garbage cans.
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB116863379291775523-lMyQjAxMDE3NjE4MzYxMzMzWj.html
Captain Crunch was a hero of my childhood; a part of me died when I first read that article. (Sorry that it's now behind a paywall; it wasn't four years ago...)
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Don't let current Apple fans find out (Score:3)
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You would be surprised how many current owner of Apple products know that ^-^
I also really doubt that his image would be tarnished, or that he has a particular bright image.
Just because you can't stand Steve Jobs, there is no need to overestimate "how much he is liked" by Mac owners.
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I for my part know no one who frowns upon jail breakers. After all jail breaking is completely legal in europe and unlike in the USA it does not void the warranty.
If you mean the Samsung case with this: and probably worse than those dirty patent infringers and 'ripoffs' of elements Apple doesn't have any legal protection for. Then I advice to try to look through the fog.
Samsung is the main supplier of Apple for nearly everything Apple is producing. When one of the two is suing the other one and the other o
Is it just me? (Score:2)
Am I the only person on here who, despite making a living in IT, has has never owned a single Apple product in my entire life, doesn't want to own one, and probably will never own one (not out of some deep political motive but just because they don't sell things I want to buy)?
I'm much more interested in some tech news, which the "Steve Jobs dying" thing was FOR ONE DAY, and could be summarised in a single brief article. I don't need it front-page of a London paper, slapped across BBC News and then people
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Me also. They do sell things I want to buy (desktop computer, laptop, mp3 player, phone, etc). Whenever I comparison shop I always feel like the Apple product is less functional and more costly than something else.
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It's just too much effort to exclude Apple stories, iddn't it?
You do know that Slashdot looks at the comment count certain topics bring when a story is being chosen to run right?
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Am I the only person here that has grown sick and tired of people who don't wish to read Apple content that post about how sick and tired they are of the Apple content that they can't stop reading?
I'm much more interested in reading comments that include humor, insight, and interesting anacdotes that are in some way related to the topic than reading another Goddamn complaint about how some egotistical elitist doesn't understand why they're not interested in the same things as others and forgot how to shut
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Anybody that cares about having control over their machine and isn't old enough to have owned an Apple ][ or older computer probably hasn't. There was a period with the old world Macs where you still had control, but they tended to have other issues.
As for Shigeru Miyamoto, just look at the projects that he's worked on during his career. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shigeru_Miyamoto [wikipedia.org] It's hard for me to imagine Nintendo carrying on through the electronic era without a visionary like that.
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What about MS Windows? Windows up until at least 3.1 licensed some Mac OS technology.
Downloaded any music using a paid service? Maybe you haven't use an Apple product to do so, but Steve Jobs and company turned the music industry upside down and forever changed the way we buy music.
First web server? Written on NeXT computer. First spreadsheet? Written for an Apple computer.
Maybe you have never owned Apple product but my g
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The Windows GUI was from Xerox Parc (Jobs paid to go there, then was convinced it was "the next big thing", which shows only an amount of insight, not ingenuity) - that's the kind of story behind all the things he brought to market. He can sell, I'll give him that. I'm not sure why that makes him a martyr compared to, say, Tim Berners-Lee (who at least *does* invent stuff).
By the time you start attributing the web servers and spreadsheets to Apple/Jobs "somehow" - given that he had very very little to do
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Nowadays.. (Score:1)
Riveting article (Score:3)
Follow-up (Score:2)
To the person complaining about relevence, if you don't care about it, ignore it! Maybe consider investing the time you spent typing negative comments in reading something you are interested in instead? Much more rewarding I promise :-) besides, Know Your History! I'd seriously be amazed at anyone I know that's a committed hacker (old defn) not to be fascinated by that article.
Anyway, my actual reason for posting - Given the age of hte article, does anyone know of a recent follow up to it? I'd love to know
Except Jobs was a leach (Score:1)
The thing you have to remember is that Wozniak loved technology, and loved to learn how things worked. It's no surprise that he would want to build a blue box and explore the telephone system.
Steve Jobs, on the other hand, was an opportunist. He didn't care about how it worked. He cared that people wanted to make illegal phone calls. So he convinced Wozniak that they should sell the things, something which Woz would have never decided to do on his own. That's a move which almost got them both arrested
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Money won't buy you happiness.
It'll just buy everything else, which is already something, don't you think?
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Money doesn't buy happiness, but it certainly makes being happy a lot easier.
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Exactly. Money indirectly does buy happiness to the poor person, because the poor person has money troubles which cause unhappiness. Take away that unhappiness and relative happiness goes up. More money than is required for getting out of money troubles doesn't buy happiness, or buys a lot less of it.
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Exactly. Money indirectly does buy happiness to the poor person, because the poor person has money troubles which cause unhappiness. Take away that unhappiness and relative happiness goes up. More money than is required for getting out of money troubles doesn't buy happiness, or buys a lot less of it.
But happiness is not simply the absence of unhappiness, unless you beg the question by defining happiness as the acquisition of wealth.
Having enough money not to starve or freeze to death is a lower stage on man's hierarchy of needs, which you have to get over before you can move up tofinding such things as love and finally self-actualisation.
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People who have tried to research this say that money does, in fact, buy happiness, but only up to an upper-middle-class income of about $65,000/year (in recent dollars).
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What if you love to hate?
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You *hate* him? Did he come and personally torture you or a family member or steal all your money and frame you for a rape?
If not, rather than expecting the world to turn on a dime to suit your irrationality, would it not be easier to either grow up or just not read such things? (Or learn to drop the hyperbole and stop wasting everyone else's time...)
Rgds
Damon
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You *hate* Hitler? Did he come and personally torture you or a family member or steal all your money and frame you for a rape?
Yes he did.
HTH, HAND.
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Hitler did none of those things either.
Hate is best directed at ideas and, if you want to personify it, the leaders who promulgate them.
Rape's awful for one person and perhaps those close to him. Jobs's less awful for any individual but his negative impact touches much of the world.
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But what is this negative impact you speak of? Having democratized graphical interfaces and the mouse? The smartphones? mp3 players?
Let me know.
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People rule their iphones and ipods and ipads?
Right.
Sure, they get to push the button they're granted and get to install the apps they're granted, but as democratic hardware goes, the iStuff is far off on the fascism side of that scale.
democratic hardware? ruling one's phone? iStuff being fascist???? Looks like the extremist just posted as AC. You know, "democratic", "free" and such adjectives best apply to sentient beings, not to inanimate objects.
Should toaster vendors provide the schematics of their toasters to make them not fascist? Or should they print Mussolini's picture on the side if they don't provide said schematics?
You're insane. Just plain insane. Real life is just out there, please get out of your mom's basement and take a pe
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Lack of schematics notwithstanding, there exists an expectation that computery-looking things such as the iPoopy ARE in fact general-purpose computing devices, because that is all comput
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Qualifying an inanimate object of being fascist is kind of crazy in my book though.
People should know really. It's not that complex. If you want a computer, buy a computer. If you want an iCrap, buy one. If you don't get why people want an iCrap, shut up and listen to them. That's if you want to know of course :-)
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>Hate is best directed at ideas and, if you want to personify it, the leaders who promulgate them.
Agreed. And one could even consider that the leaders are the way they are because of their nature and nurture, neither of which they are to blame for. I mean, take for example GWB. Talk about a bad upbringing. He was practically helpless before his fate of becoming president of the US and bombing Iraqis.
As that guy with the long hair and the blue car said: "Forgive them, for they don't know what they're doin
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Re: I hate Jobs (Score:2)
true atheists leave it be
Indeed. Actually, even the believers should leave it be.
Just for the record: Jobs is still dead, and it's been more than 3 days...
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If there is indeed something like a religious believe in Newton, then at should stop.
By now we know Newton wasn't entirely right anyway, if we believed in his "teachings" religiously, there might not be a relativity or quantum theory.
As for Jesus. Unless it's the name of some brazilian soccer star, we should stop worshipping him.
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He practiced alchemy, as well as other things. There was a Nova a few years ago about it:
http://video.pbs.org/video/2042275819 [pbs.org]
Still, I would say I "worship" Newton far more than a nonexistent invisible man in the sky.
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Jobs is dead.
-- Nietzche
Ding dong, the wicked Jobs is dead - The Munchkins