Hacker Perspective: Bill Squire
by Bill Squire (a.k.a. BillSF)
Oorlof mijn arme schapen
Die zijt in groten nood
Uw herder zal niet slapen
Al zijt gij nu verstrooid!The above is from Het Wilhelmus (the Dutch national anthem), verse 14. It's a concept and it doesn't translate well to English.
Praise my poor sheep
He is in great need
Your shepherd will not sleep
Though you are now scattered!"Hacker" is a concept about concepts. Unfortunately it doesn't translate well to any language. My life is about turning concepts into useful products. A hacker does that and much more. Let's get to it.
In the 1960s, AT&T ran an ad campaign: "The telephone is not a toy." Thank you AT&T! Vietnam, LBJ, the Cold War, and so on... everything was a lie. So the telephone must be the best toy ever invented! Is a greater understatement possible?
I always wanted the other end to hang up first so I could hear what it sounded like. That little "pliek" trailing off in the background was fascinating. I realized it must play the major role in making and maintaining the "long distance" call. Soon I could whistle it and see what it could do - before the Quaker Oats whistle and 800 numbers.
My early experimentation was only to places my parents called. They only looked at the "place" on the bill and if I had an "accident," that was simply it for the day.
There was more, so much more.
Sometimes after placing a "toll call" (a type of local call) I'd hear the number I pulse-dialed, pulse-dial a second time. There were beeps associated with this. Other times I would hear beeps that sounded like steel drums. I loved the "drums" and quickly realized this wasn't music but communications! (They were MF tones, to be precise.) I was on to something.
The "ultra-modern" phone system was using the same technique the primitive "Bush people" had used for generations. It was obvious tones were telling the other end what to do whether I heard it or not. How did they do it? "Ask and you shall receive." When everything seemed to be a lie, that biblical verse was to be the truth. The little brat was becoming an operator and learning how to social engineer. Soon, the secret was mine.
Best of all, I was to discover I wasn't alone. There was this kid in sixth grade named Dan N. He was the shortest kid in the class but very strong and nobody messed with him. Dan was later to tell me of someone who could make "free calls" with sound like I could. That man was Captain Crunch.
It was 1969. We were a few 12-year-old boys and there were a few twice our age. We knew we had something going into junior high, but we had no idea what our impact on society was to be.
With an age range between 11 and 14 years, junior high was the ultimate freak show. For some of us it was a "phreak" show and we didn't show a thing outside our tight group. This was a very uneventful time in my life.
In 1970 a very small piece in Popular Science reported on a new payphone with a picture of this most ugly beast. The most important features were a single coin slot and "silent electronic signals to replace the familiar sounds that currently signal the operator of deposited coins."
Interestingly, these horrors were to show up first where I lived. I was going to find out what those "silent signals" were. First, I had a friend call me at one of these "fortress phones" while he recorded the call. I "sacrificed" 40 cents (my lunch money) to do this. I instructed my friend to call back on the off chance I got the money back and we could record the tones again. Sure enough it returned! We were able to repeat this several times. Don't forget: Hacking is scientific. It was a simple matter to whip up a simple phase-shift oscillator and amplifier to match the frequency (quickly determined to be 2200 Hz but that isn't important). We needed a way to gate the tone.
A small strip of copper was taped with ordinary cello tape in such a way as to leave five stripes of copper about 8 mm wide exposed. This formed, with a conducting probe, a custom switch. With just a couple of minutes of practice it was very easy to exactly emulate the timings. We took turns calling a fortress phone and comparing their tone generators with ours. No discernible difference! We had broken the mighty fortress within hours of their debut. Millions of dollars AT&T spent versus one dollar's worth of parts. Nothing else mattered.
(Much later they thought they got smart and introduced 1700 Hz (sometimes 1500 Hz) but somehow they missed what hackers were able to do with CMOS. We could create phase-shift oscillators as perfect as their L/C oscillators. Later DTMF and MF chips became available and by replacing the 1 MHz crystal with an L/C oscillator, a very close approximation could be obtained.
Red and Blue, or "Rainbow" (named after a drug), boxes were popular. These chips were extremely expensive, but fortunately free for me. Much later, the TCM5087 came out for 50 cents. A very cheap, no effort Red Box! The big question: "How much honey or maple syrup does it take to make a 'fortress phone' sound like a 6.5536 MHz crystal-based Red Box?" The "quarter," designed by a very competent engineer, was to solve half the problem. A damn 6.5536 MHz rock was still used, but replacing that with an L/C circuit made a perfect box. Hackers can wind coils! Hope you kept your back issues of 2600.)
High school finally. The principal welcomed the new "class of '75" and warned the returning students to be nice to us. Silicon Valley was just beginning to form out of the long established anchors: Lockheed Aerospace, Hewlett-Packard, and Varian. Our school district found itself with more money than it could use. We were being addressed on a newly installed closed-circuit TV system. We were told there were 2600 students enrolled. Very amusing in a somewhat secret way.
This was going to be an interesting and eventful year. I was to see a computer for the first time and actually use one in real-time. The "Math Resource Center" had an ASR33 Teletype terminal installed. This connected to a central timesharing machine at 110 baud. It was UNIX! While new, UNIX was very easy to use. All students were welcome to try the new equipment. Punch cards still ruled and "computers in the classroom" were a distant dream for most schools.
The summer of 1971 had something brewing that was going to forever change the public notion of "hacker." A virtual unknown, Don Ballanger, got busted for selling Blue Boxes to what many believe was the Mafia. While not a "snitch," Don was highly criticized for getting busted for something few of us believed was illegal. He was to be in contact with (((Ron Rosenbaum))) of Esquire, a men's magazine you'd find next to Playboy. Ron wanted sensation. He managed to talk to many phreaks. While the piece he published in the October 1971 edition of Esquire contained some bullshit, it was to lead to the first police "hacker roundup."
The piece was also read on Pacifica Radio's KPFA in Berkeley just prior to its release, possibly directed to the "blind phreaks." Crunch picked up a copy at local newsstand on his way to San José City College and read the rather lengthy article without putting it down. He called Denny [Denny Teresi], the ringleader of the blind phone phreaks, and read it again. He apparently recorded the call for other blind phreaks. This was the end in one way but also a new beginning - a whole new definition of hacker.
Myself, I was caught with what was to later be known as a "Red Box," something 2600 would cover heavily almost 20 years later. Because I was a minor, news of this in the USA was very slight. But this didn't stop Canada from publishing my name, since it wasn't illegal to publish the names of minors there. I didn't learn until later, but I was to become their "Crunch" and start a popular national pastime. The Red Box was simply a utility that made using the Blue Box much easier from most of North America. Nobody knows where the term "Blue Box" actually came from. The tone generator in one of the massive "fortress phones" is red. Actually it's in a pink case, possibly to keep people out? Clearly, red is more manly.
Unfortunately, my boarding school, university, and much information you need to understand me has been edited out. I don't even have the space to tell you about seeing a real gymnasium-sized computer in 1974.
However, before we move on to the Netherlands, I'm going to outline the thought process that was to become my defining hack. I broke Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) at its weakest point: revenue collection. It was almost as simple as a Red Box and has been outlined previously in these pages.
The "BART hack" was not the first time tickets were duplicated. Rather, it was a rethink on how it should be done. Traditionally, "criminals" used a lot of huge, heavy machinery, sometimes even stolen ticket vendors that weigh nearly a ton. This was to be an ultra-simple portable device, weighing (less than half a pound, small enough to hold in the palm of your hand. Our intent was to show the world that all "security' could be defeated for less than $20. On Christmas Eve, we made several hundred $8 tickets and just gave them away to people. These were 100 percent real BART tickets!
In the early-1990s, I published an article in 2600 on how to do this. These were the very plans the authorities were trying their best to keep out of public view! You must be a "hacker" to use them, but with a complete understanding, it works.
In the case of BART, the card was proprietary, so powdered iron gave us the answer. We needed full-track 0.8 mm card-reader heads. Amazingly enough, BART dumped about 50 to a surplus shop at the Oakland airport. At 50 cents each it was a bargain and we bought them all. With the powdered iron, we determined there was another element of obscurity: The domains were rotated 7.5 degrees.
The Washington D.C. Metro used the same bogus IBM system as BART (both exist to this day). We liked to play with BART by adding fare to WM tickets! The tickets have a matrix-printed strip that shows the user the remaining value. (Most ticket scams are simply printed cards sold to "greedy people.") If one was inside the system with an "overprinted" card, there would be some explaining to do.
So this was the solution: We would make a magnetic stripe card (a used BART ticket with five cents remaining) with a value of (then) $7.95, insert in the "add-fare machine," add five cents, and voilà, a real BART issued $8 ticket!
The $7.95 we recorded on the ticket that said five cents remained was automatically wiped and no one was the wiser. This was for real and certainly not a scam. This was to be my "ticket to fame and fortune." "Crime" pays: Can it be made any clearer?
While there was absolutely no criminal intent, the BART police (glorified "rent-a-pig" types) didn't think it was very funny. This ultimately forced me to leave the USA, which I didn't think was so funny either at time, but was to be my "lucky break."
Flash to the end of the "Cold War." It was late in 1989 and I was telling my coworkers that the Berlin Wall was coming down. They all thought I was nuts. Less than a week later it happened. My plans without hesitation were to move to Europe.
East Berlin, December 31, 1989: This was sure to be the biggest party in the world and it didn't disappoint. I had been "swallowed" by Europe and separated from my American tourist friends.
Amsterdam, 1990: I did it! Skipped probation and even told my Probation Officer I was moving. I think she didn't believe me and said O.K. (One less on her caseload?) I won't go into an extradition attempt, but Holland told them where to stick it.
I smuggled a few i386s in and many more were to follow. This was the first microprocessor that could even come close to being a "computer." In with Linux-0.01. Xenix was history. The Pentium was soon to follow and while I was to play with Slackware and Red Hat, FreeBSD was looking very nice. FreeBSD was soon to be my "online" system, though I was to earn considerable money for porting a Red Hat distribution to Alpha, a 64-bit platform.
I became involved with Hack-Tic Technologies, a spin-off from Hack-Tic. We sold, in kit form, the hardware hacks. Many, like the Demon Dialer (Demon Dialer Package) and SemaFun (a pager/SMS decoder) were very successful. Hack-Tic was a short-lived publication that attempted to bring the "look and feel" of 2600 to a Dutch audience. Its downfall was mainly the fact that it was in Dutch as well as the monster it created: XS4ALL.
No Wires Needed was a company formed to complete the development of the WLAN I invented, which started alongside of the BART hack in 1985. DigiCash was the holding company for the ill-fated software patent about all electronic payments and also the most incredible collection of top people one could imagine. All these patents are expired today and everything having to do with "Internet payments" is "prior art." DigiCash developed the smart cards we use (everywhere except the USA). Sadly the banks felt threatened and DigiCash folded.
Because I was founding Dutch companies, I needed to become legal. The Vreemdelingenpolitie (Alien Police) (they normally deal with "people of color") thought it was all a big joke. I was told to "do nothing" and let the case go to court. This White boy from the USA had a 100 percent chance of winning. (Yes, these are extreme right-wing fascists.) Thank you Hanneke for your help.
To be a hacker is to devote your life to what should be obvious. We are not "criminals" and will fight tooth and nail to get them off our Internet. We are fighting a battle that includes Windows, the root of all evil, along with what has become of the fateful decision to make Internet available to low-end computer systems.
The evil simply mounts, out note it will be hackers, not politicians, that solve the problem. Sure, "puppets galore" will take credit. They owe their existence to us. We can "pull the plug" - what is a "Bush monkey" to do?
The basic evil of today's Internet is more than just Microsoft - the "middle-class OS." IM, spam, spyware, worms, Trojans, social networks online, and much more are directly a result of people and their dumbed-down "OS."
Far deeper, the root of these evils truly have been with us longer than most people have known about the Internet. In 1989 we got IRC, an improved form of the silly "CompuServe CB" (talk). It was fine until it died a strange death around 1994. Today we have "social online networks," making IRC one of the more tame computer games.
"Online friends" is something for mature audiences, such as the all UNIX Internet (old IRC). When minds are being weakened, we don't need any more of this swill.
As real hackers we solve problems, while the law and politicians only make matters worse. A technical solution to every problem on the net is in order.
Put very simply: Hasta la vista, pretenders! Stop crying and get hacking.
Bill Squire to this day works with anything technical. Don't call him a "consultant." That will insult him. He likes to travel long distances: in the winter to "warmer places" and in the summer he prefers a more technologically-oriented tour. There are always so many people to meet.
