Unknown Book Filter
July 6, 2007 10:08 PM
What was the title of the action story/novella I read ~25 years ago???
Action story/novella from ca. 1980 about a hacker on the run, in a smallish RV. Hides out in a cabin in the wilderness, dams a stream into 3 ponds to warm the water up. Plot crisis comes when a remote computer responds "6 (?) MINUTES PER CIRCUITED EXCHANGE" and he believes it.
Action story/novella from ca. 1980 about a hacker on the run, in a smallish RV. Hides out in a cabin in the wilderness, dams a stream into 3 ponds to warm the water up. Plot crisis comes when a remote computer responds "6 (?) MINUTES PER CIRCUITED EXCHANGE" and he believes it.
Sorry for the intrusion, but what does "6 MINUTES PER CIRCUITED EXCHANGE" mean? Or would I have to read the story to understand?
posted by chudmonkey at 1:25 AM on July 7, 2007
posted by chudmonkey at 1:25 AM on July 7, 2007
delmoi's link has the text on the page . . . the quote in question was referring to how long it would take authorities to trace the call back to him (he was doing multihop calling).
posted by Heywood Mogroot at 2:35 AM on July 7, 2007
posted by Heywood Mogroot at 2:35 AM on July 7, 2007
"Per circuited exchange" means "Minutes to trace call at each telephone exchange location until we find the one he's calling into directly".
posted by dhartung at 1:44 PM on July 7, 2007
posted by dhartung at 1:44 PM on July 7, 2007
I wonder how hard it would have been to make a computer program that operated as a "fake" exchange, so that when they authorities connected it would seem like they were still at another exchange, but actually they were just connected to your computer which would send them fake information to say whatever you wanted.
posted by delmoi at 6:36 PM on July 7, 2007
posted by delmoi at 6:36 PM on July 7, 2007
For one thing, until the 1980s, most switches were still analog, delmoi. ;-) Even when the telcos adopted packet-switched networking in the form of ATM, it was still highly tied to predetermined paths -- that is, unlike TCP/IP, which is a promiscuous (I think that's the word here) switching protocol, with packets that say where they need to get to, leaving the pathway up to the network, ATM packets actually contain the information on the pathway they should be taking. So the phone company would probably have been extremely difficult to fool without a roomful of equipment.
It certainly would have been possible to emulate a PBX, though, and disguise one's entry that way (pretending to have been broken into with the call just hopping through, for instance). The trouble with that is once they figure out the endpoint is bogus, all they have to do is back up step by step until they verify where things went awry, and there they have the physical phone line leading directly to your computer.
For phreakers, then, there was much more advantage in being able to break into either a private or public exchange using known protocols (and sometimes only the barest of security through obscurity), and manipulating them directly to sneak through the network to somewhere else or pretend to be coming from someplace else.
posted by dhartung at 11:53 PM on July 7, 2007
It certainly would have been possible to emulate a PBX, though, and disguise one's entry that way (pretending to have been broken into with the call just hopping through, for instance). The trouble with that is once they figure out the endpoint is bogus, all they have to do is back up step by step until they verify where things went awry, and there they have the physical phone line leading directly to your computer.
For phreakers, then, there was much more advantage in being able to break into either a private or public exchange using known protocols (and sometimes only the barest of security through obscurity), and manipulating them directly to sneak through the network to somewhere else or pretend to be coming from someplace else.
posted by dhartung at 11:53 PM on July 7, 2007
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by delmoi at 11:18 PM on July 6, 2007