I made it to the nostalgia panel on saturday night. It was pretty amusing. Captain Crunch joined the panel along with Dan, dnm, grey and Damon. It was a bit of a popcorn affair puncuated by ascii art(pr0n), and assembly code. Captain Crunch was great. I know he was at Defcon, but I’ve been out of the cons for a while, so it was my first chance to hear him. He talked about how he got into phreaking, his first blue box and the blind kids that inspired his phone line adventures. (Today he’s got a $10 home phone line with an asterix box combined with voipstunt connection that gives him free calls legally.) A couple highlights from Captain Crunch: He wrote a little program and left it for Woz . The next day Steve was really ticked off at him. Woz used his program to set the apple phone board to call Jobs house over and over again. He scored the CIA crisis number that seemed to get Nixon on the line. He traded it and the group that he gave it to called up ‘Olympus’ and reported that they were out of toilet paper. Damon pulled out an apple scripted apple ][e emulator.
10 thoughts on “Toorcon Nostalgia Talk”
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How many people where at said event?
“trying to seduce young rave boys”
http://www.666.com/stories/john-draper.html
I was… and I met a guy with a Hackaday T-shirt, even…
Is that hater propaganda, or was John Draper really gay?
I know alot of people where jealous/hater’s because of his knowledge, and you’d only make your self look like a moron questioning anything technoligy related he said as he had year’s of expierience in most engineering field’s.
Also why couldn’t a man who made hundered’s of thousand’s a year not get dentures?
he had to go to prison for some ridiculous phone calls? am i missing something, or is the US legal system fucked up as hell (i hope i am missing something)?
harassment, maybe? I dunno. but phreaking in itself is illegal anyway as you’re depriving the phone company of revenue, usually anyway i guess.
oh, and ascii p0rn? nostalgia? are you implying that in the past there was ascii pr0n? maybe i’m too young to understand the appeal of it…
I still have the hard copy of Easy Writer Spreadsheet which he wrote in Prison.
I’m just suspicious of the way people in “the hacking seen” are hesitant to reference him. I also notice in most text file’s, and article’s he’s passivly riddiculed.
That’s pretty strange for someone with such achievment’s. He even designed a tried, and tested “uncrackable” firewall at ShopIP before he kicked the bucket(still hasn’t been cracked although the company shutdown.)
As far as his prison sentence..that sucks. It’s never pleasent to see bright people caged, and beaten up by careless criminal’s.
Ohh well (Jello Biafra quote goes here…)
We all wanna know if fbz is there, and if she is, we want pics. Tell her to join #hackaday on efnet, and that my marrige proposal still stands. :)
Man that sounds so fun. The article I mean.
John isn’t into little boys. This was a smear tactic used to get attention, similar to how many famous people get these outlandish stories placed on them.
Anyhow… I was at this event, I was even asked to speak on the pannel, but decided not to. But in anycase, during the end of the talk, there was a small contest. The few questions asked where quite easy and fun… I managed to grab a T-Shirt which says “I met your daughter on Myspace and all I got was a lousy blowjob and this shirt”, for answering a question about what scene on the TV premier of Wargames was deleted (The rotary payphone phreaking, obviously). and a book from MIT Press “The Elements of Computing Systems” which is a kick ass book! The question was about which computer did David Lightman use in the movie (IMSAI 8080). Good fun!