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Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws who Hacked Ma Bell
Before smartphones, back even before the Internet and personal computer, a misfit group of technophiles, blind teenagers, hippies, and outlaws figured out how to hack the world’s largest machine: the telephone system. Starting with Alexander Graham Bell’s revolutionary “harmonic telegraph,” by the middle of the twentieth century the phone system had grown into something extraordinary, a web of cutting-edge switching machines and human operators that linked together millions of people like never before. But the network had a billion-dollar flaw, and once people discovered it, things would never be the same.
Exploding the Phone tells this story in full for the first time. It traces the birth of long-distance communication and the telephone, the rise of AT&T’s monopoly, the creation of the sophisticated machines that made it all work, and the discovery of Ma Bell’s Achilles’ heel. Phil Lapsley expertly weaves together the clandestine underground of “phone phreaks” who turned the network into their electronic playground, the mobsters who exploited its flaws to avoid the feds, the explosion of telephone hacking in the counterculture, and the war between the phreaks, the phone company, and the FBI.
The product of extensive original research, Exploding the Phone is a ground-breaking, captivating book.
Exploding the Phone tells this story in full for the first time. It traces the birth of long-distance communication and the telephone, the rise of AT&T’s monopoly, the creation of the sophisticated machines that made it all work, and the discovery of Ma Bell’s Achilles’ heel. Phil Lapsley expertly weaves together the clandestine underground of “phone phreaks” who turned the network into their electronic playground, the mobsters who exploited its flaws to avoid the feds, the explosion of telephone hacking in the counterculture, and the war between the phreaks, the phone company, and the FBI.
The product of extensive original research, Exploding the Phone is a ground-breaking, captivating book.
12 pages, Audible Audio
First published February 5, 2013
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 213 reviews
April 1, 2013
Who remembers Captain Crunch and his infamous blue box used for making free long distance phone calls? If you have ever looked at your iPhone, cable box or latest gee-whiz software and wondered just how it works inside, then you should read this book. Further, if you've ever gone a step beyond and taken that shiny new box apart and burned a chip or used a software tool to modify that machine's behavior, then you
MUST
read this book.
Exploding the Phone is the result of five years of research by author Phil Lapsley, and his hard work shows in this fascinating bestseller. He presents a comprehensive technical history of the telephone along with the growth of AT&T into a monopoly and the eventual dismantling of that cartel into the Baby Bells. Into that chronicle Lapsley weaves the stories of the often-eccentric hackers whose thirst to understand the workings of the massive telephone network led them from inquisitive playfulness to transgression.
As we know, the pre-digital telephone system was built incrementally both in terms of size and technology. As AT&T implemented the automation required to take human operators out of every telephone connection, flaws were introduced. Most notably audible tones were introduced to automatically switch mechanical relays from one long distance trunk to another. It was these warbling tones that the aptly christened "phone phreaks" utilized to make free long distance calls. These technophiles also set up free conference calls, at that time prohibitively expensive, to act as massive chat lines for the hacker community. Although for the most part the exploits were done with an almost academic curiosity and a whimsical spirit of setting the knowledge free, the corporate caretakers of AT&T were not quite so nonchalant about the incursions and the loss of revenue. The book relates stories of the company detectives showing up at teenagers' houses to arrest them in front of their startled parents.
The story of the bosun whistle from the Cap’n Crunch cereal box used to make the critical 2,600 Hz long distance switching tone is delightful. Even more interesting is that the original whistle found to trigger free long distance was the Woolworth’s Davy Crockett Cat and Canary Bird Call Flute discovered in 1955 by the appropriately nicknamed phone phreak, Davy Crockett. The progression of the hacks from the plastic toys to the electronic blue box and its variants will interest any technically-minded reader.
Lapsley explores the personalities of the characters central to the phone phreak underground. Many definitely fit the stereotype of the immensely talented techie with extremely poor social skills. It's interesting that there were a lot of blind phone phreaks - as an audio device, the telephone network with its switching tones was a natural for those focused on hearing over seeing. The uses hackers found for the discovered capabilities could be humorous, as they experimented to see just how far away they could accomplish long distance calls or would prank call the White House or FBI offices.
I highly recommend Exploding the Phone. It is meticulously researched with detailed technical explanations accessible to all including the non-technical reader. It's a compelling history of the telephone overall with a focus on the 1950 to 1980 time period when these phone phreaks were exploiting the flaws in the system. Beyond that, the book is really about much more than the hackers. It is a narrative about the nature of curiosity and the insatiable exploration of technology.
Exploding the Phone is the result of five years of research by author Phil Lapsley, and his hard work shows in this fascinating bestseller. He presents a comprehensive technical history of the telephone along with the growth of AT&T into a monopoly and the eventual dismantling of that cartel into the Baby Bells. Into that chronicle Lapsley weaves the stories of the often-eccentric hackers whose thirst to understand the workings of the massive telephone network led them from inquisitive playfulness to transgression.
As we know, the pre-digital telephone system was built incrementally both in terms of size and technology. As AT&T implemented the automation required to take human operators out of every telephone connection, flaws were introduced. Most notably audible tones were introduced to automatically switch mechanical relays from one long distance trunk to another. It was these warbling tones that the aptly christened "phone phreaks" utilized to make free long distance calls. These technophiles also set up free conference calls, at that time prohibitively expensive, to act as massive chat lines for the hacker community. Although for the most part the exploits were done with an almost academic curiosity and a whimsical spirit of setting the knowledge free, the corporate caretakers of AT&T were not quite so nonchalant about the incursions and the loss of revenue. The book relates stories of the company detectives showing up at teenagers' houses to arrest them in front of their startled parents.
The story of the bosun whistle from the Cap’n Crunch cereal box used to make the critical 2,600 Hz long distance switching tone is delightful. Even more interesting is that the original whistle found to trigger free long distance was the Woolworth’s Davy Crockett Cat and Canary Bird Call Flute discovered in 1955 by the appropriately nicknamed phone phreak, Davy Crockett. The progression of the hacks from the plastic toys to the electronic blue box and its variants will interest any technically-minded reader.
Lapsley explores the personalities of the characters central to the phone phreak underground. Many definitely fit the stereotype of the immensely talented techie with extremely poor social skills. It's interesting that there were a lot of blind phone phreaks - as an audio device, the telephone network with its switching tones was a natural for those focused on hearing over seeing. The uses hackers found for the discovered capabilities could be humorous, as they experimented to see just how far away they could accomplish long distance calls or would prank call the White House or FBI offices.
I highly recommend Exploding the Phone. It is meticulously researched with detailed technical explanations accessible to all including the non-technical reader. It's a compelling history of the telephone overall with a focus on the 1950 to 1980 time period when these phone phreaks were exploiting the flaws in the system. Beyond that, the book is really about much more than the hackers. It is a narrative about the nature of curiosity and the insatiable exploration of technology.
September 11, 2013
I stayed up much, much too late reading this book. I loved it, but I also recognize that it's the kind of book where you probably have to go into it with a foundational interest in the subject matter - in this case, the phone phreaking of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, in which teenagers and young adults made a hobby out of finding and messing around with exploits in the AT&T phone system.
It also helps if you like phone history overall, which I do. The other big aspect of this book is a look at the evolution of the phone system, in terms of policy and equipment, which is so in-depth that one of two things will happen: you will be even more impressed by the ingenuity of the phone phreaks, OR you will think I'm a lunatic for being this excited by this book. It also explains a lot about the user experience through the decades, which is awesome in giving some context to the various outdated phone things depicted in books and movies -- like what is happening behind the scenes when operators placed voice calls, and you'll recognize (well, if "you" are a phone obsessed person) all the different variations on operator actions, codes and responses.
It also helps if you like phone history overall, which I do. The other big aspect of this book is a look at the evolution of the phone system, in terms of policy and equipment, which is so in-depth that one of two things will happen: you will be even more impressed by the ingenuity of the phone phreaks, OR you will think I'm a lunatic for being this excited by this book. It also explains a lot about the user experience through the decades, which is awesome in giving some context to the various outdated phone things depicted in books and movies -- like what is happening behind the scenes when operators placed voice calls, and you'll recognize (well, if "you" are a phone obsessed person) all the different variations on operator actions, codes and responses.
May 29, 2013
Alongside the age of space exploration in the 60s, 70s and 80s exploration of another type of space was underway. The place of exploration was not a physical space, but a communication network, possibly the largest communication network at that time. These adventurers were random geeks, way before being a geek was considered cool, who had discovered properties of the phones around them and proceeded to experiment, poke, prod and hack.
At the time the US only had one telecommunications company, AT&T, who monopolised the market, dictating pricing and the level of service. The problem with AT&T is that the communication infrastructure was thrown together with little planning, and the system ran on a simple series of multiple frequency pulses. Added to that fact, the company was ignorant of any possibility of security issues and even published journals with technical details and frequency values for all their system. When a generation of intelligent yet bored teens come along, fun is to be had.
The history of this subculture is wonderfully bought to life by Lapsley. He has taken years of research, inclusing interviews and original documents from both parties, the phreaks and AT&T. The emphasis was upon the characters that played a role in this history, each bought to the page with individuality and verve. The book abounds in wonderful anecdotes that brings a little romanticism to the culture and time.
Exploding the Phone left me feeling a little jealous that I was born too late and in the wrong country. In the 21st century, are the systems that surround us in everday life too far beyond the understanding and ability for an amatuer to explore?
This wonderful homage to a unique subset of geek is essential reading for anyone who professes to be part of that culture.
At the time the US only had one telecommunications company, AT&T, who monopolised the market, dictating pricing and the level of service. The problem with AT&T is that the communication infrastructure was thrown together with little planning, and the system ran on a simple series of multiple frequency pulses. Added to that fact, the company was ignorant of any possibility of security issues and even published journals with technical details and frequency values for all their system. When a generation of intelligent yet bored teens come along, fun is to be had.
The history of this subculture is wonderfully bought to life by Lapsley. He has taken years of research, inclusing interviews and original documents from both parties, the phreaks and AT&T. The emphasis was upon the characters that played a role in this history, each bought to the page with individuality and verve. The book abounds in wonderful anecdotes that brings a little romanticism to the culture and time.
Exploding the Phone left me feeling a little jealous that I was born too late and in the wrong country. In the 21st century, are the systems that surround us in everday life too far beyond the understanding and ability for an amatuer to explore?
This wonderful homage to a unique subset of geek is essential reading for anyone who professes to be part of that culture.
September 1, 2013
This is a book about people hacking into the phone system from the mid 1950s until the 1980s, largely before hacking was even a word, to freely explore the telephone network. Many of them were simply telephone network enthusiasts - hence the term "phone phreaks". I found the story compelling, in part because it is fun to read about smart people outwitting the government and the most powerful corporation in the world, and in part because it gave me some new perspective on recent events (NSA data-mining and Ruport Murdoch's own phone hacking).
The good:
Lapsley masterfully builds up the reader's technical knowledge to the point where not halfway through the book he can get away with relying on jargon to tell the story:
"If you call 555-1212 in a distant area code and then whistle it off and use your blue box or tape recordings to reroute the call to a normal telephone number, you've just given the phone company a clue that you're up to no good. Why? Well, remember a call to 555-1212 never supes. Except that when you reroute the call to a normal telephone number and your friend answers the phone the call does supe...."
When I read this paragraph, I followed it perfectly, and then was struck at how unintelligible it should have been. Lapsley had coaxed me along with the phone phreaks' exploration of the network, and I credit him with telling the technical story very well.
The bad:
For a subculture piece, Exploding the phone is weak on characters. Each person's story tells how they personally and independently discovered a way to manipulate the phone system, and each person's story is only a slight variation on anyone else's. There is the one who went to jail, the one who was blind, and the other one. They are distinguished by their physical locations but rarely by their character. Only one of the central characters has a visible relationship with anyone who is not a phone phreak. One-dimensional characters do not make for good reading.
Journalistically, Lapsley does the good work of making over 400 Freedom of Information Act requests to the FBI and other agencies, but fails to reveal the names of informers whose actions led to the arrest of one of the characters. Lapsley says in the foreword that some interviews were given on the condition of anonymity, so I think the responsible thing would have been to rely on the documents alone.
Finally, exploding the phone is some of the worst writing, artistically, that I have ever read. Besides the innumerable cliches and conversational filler, extended expository metaphors nearly had me putting the book down for good:
"If such fates exist, John Draper believes they have not been kind to him. Actually, that's an understatement. It's more that he believes they are out to screw him over, repeatedly and without lube."
I think people who like computers would like this book. I am one of them. I wish a better book had been written.
The good:
Lapsley masterfully builds up the reader's technical knowledge to the point where not halfway through the book he can get away with relying on jargon to tell the story:
"If you call 555-1212 in a distant area code and then whistle it off and use your blue box or tape recordings to reroute the call to a normal telephone number, you've just given the phone company a clue that you're up to no good. Why? Well, remember a call to 555-1212 never supes. Except that when you reroute the call to a normal telephone number and your friend answers the phone the call does supe...."
When I read this paragraph, I followed it perfectly, and then was struck at how unintelligible it should have been. Lapsley had coaxed me along with the phone phreaks' exploration of the network, and I credit him with telling the technical story very well.
The bad:
For a subculture piece, Exploding the phone is weak on characters. Each person's story tells how they personally and independently discovered a way to manipulate the phone system, and each person's story is only a slight variation on anyone else's. There is the one who went to jail, the one who was blind, and the other one. They are distinguished by their physical locations but rarely by their character. Only one of the central characters has a visible relationship with anyone who is not a phone phreak. One-dimensional characters do not make for good reading.
Journalistically, Lapsley does the good work of making over 400 Freedom of Information Act requests to the FBI and other agencies, but fails to reveal the names of informers whose actions led to the arrest of one of the characters. Lapsley says in the foreword that some interviews were given on the condition of anonymity, so I think the responsible thing would have been to rely on the documents alone.
Finally, exploding the phone is some of the worst writing, artistically, that I have ever read. Besides the innumerable cliches and conversational filler, extended expository metaphors nearly had me putting the book down for good:
"If such fates exist, John Draper believes they have not been kind to him. Actually, that's an understatement. It's more that he believes they are out to screw him over, repeatedly and without lube."
I think people who like computers would like this book. I am one of them. I wish a better book had been written.
March 10, 2024
Perhaps the most Dad Book to have ever Dad-ed. Not only will this delight your dad (or grandpa) with nostalgia for the old telephone system, it will also satisfy him with tales of mischief and curiosity all told with a kind of "hey cool!" tone with a much higher than average ratio of puns and dad jokes thrown in for good measure.
It's still a serious work of nonfiction for the most part, so he will feel like he is reading something important and worthwhile, but it definitely wants to be a fun read.
If you are not a dad book person (I certainly am not and I still enjoyed it) but enjoy true crime-ish stuff with very low stakes this should satisfy you. It does have more than a few technical descriptions of the old telephone system, but I found these interesting. It's all surprisingly low tech, all things considered, and amazing that it lasted as long as it did.
The audio has a reader who really leans into the author's tone here, even if he mispronounces modem. (I found him a bit much, but that's me.)
It's still a serious work of nonfiction for the most part, so he will feel like he is reading something important and worthwhile, but it definitely wants to be a fun read.
If you are not a dad book person (I certainly am not and I still enjoyed it) but enjoy true crime-ish stuff with very low stakes this should satisfy you. It does have more than a few technical descriptions of the old telephone system, but I found these interesting. It's all surprisingly low tech, all things considered, and amazing that it lasted as long as it did.
The audio has a reader who really leans into the author's tone here, even if he mispronounces modem. (I found him a bit much, but that's me.)
January 4, 2022
Exploding the Phone is technically a good book, though just a warning to potential readers that about 70% of it explains how the telephone system works more than it's telling any human stories. I went in expecting a little less on the technical side and my ADHD brain basically tuned out every time the author went on a rant about how the system worked. This is a very well researched book, but I would specifically recommend it to people who are passionate about tech and a little less to your average person.
May 30, 2022
Any system you can build, if important enough, will be broken into. More often than not teenagers will be the ones breaking into the system.
The book explores phone "phreaks" who hacked into the Bell/AT&T system. Phreaks would often spend hours by their phones trying to understand the network. With that understanding they would exploit the system to make it do things it was never designed to do - free calls, conference calls and the like.
The book starts with a brief history of the Bell system. It quickly starts talking about the first phone phreaks and their exploits with human operators and analog machines. The book walks through phreaking starting in the 1940s and goes till the late 1970s. I was most fascinated by the response of the Phone company as they essentially write the playbook to deal with these hackers. The lessons of this playbook have been learnt by multiple companies since then.
The book explores topics that are of vital importance in today's environment. Questions that are hard to answer today find their roots in this period. When does mere curiosity become malicious? Does such curiosity warrant prosecution? Who is responsible for the security of a system? These questions have become increasingly important with the rise of the internet and the accompanying hacking culture.
The book explores phone "phreaks" who hacked into the Bell/AT&T system. Phreaks would often spend hours by their phones trying to understand the network. With that understanding they would exploit the system to make it do things it was never designed to do - free calls, conference calls and the like.
The book starts with a brief history of the Bell system. It quickly starts talking about the first phone phreaks and their exploits with human operators and analog machines. The book walks through phreaking starting in the 1940s and goes till the late 1970s. I was most fascinated by the response of the Phone company as they essentially write the playbook to deal with these hackers. The lessons of this playbook have been learnt by multiple companies since then.
The book explores topics that are of vital importance in today's environment. Questions that are hard to answer today find their roots in this period. When does mere curiosity become malicious? Does such curiosity warrant prosecution? Who is responsible for the security of a system? These questions have become increasingly important with the rise of the internet and the accompanying hacking culture.
April 29, 2019
It was interesting to contrast the AT&T of The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation with this one. The first showed a brilliant lab with a model of scientific development funded by a government-controlled monopoly, a quite sensible idea inexplicably subject to multiple attacks by the Department of Justice, one of which eventually succeeded. This shows another side: The Phone Company, more like the Evil Empire in Star Wars; a despised corporate monolith which price-gouged, illegally spied on users, and had its own police force; with Bell Labs as a barely mentioned appendage. The company spent a decade hounding a business that made the Hushaphone, a rubber cap for the telephone receiver intended to reduce ambient noise, and issued a painstaking manual directing staff on how best to sweep the floors.
Anyway. If one considers the cultural shift described in the book What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry from computers as soulless corporate/military-industrial machines to the techno-optimism of Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog, the seeds are here: the first part in the soulless bureaucracy that invented the semiconducting transistor, the latter in the underground misfit hacker culture. It helps that Lapsley comes from the same background as his subjects - he is an electrical engineer who authored one of the modestly-titled RFCs (Requests For Comment) which define the protocols of the Internet. He describes the origin of phone "phreaking" (the spelling actually comes from an Esquire journalist) among college undergrads, loners, and the blind. The phone network used the voice lines to send analog tones indicating how to route calls, so if one read up the company's (openly published) system specs and was able to generate a tone at 2,600Hz (with, say, a free Cap'n Crunch cereal whistle), one could access free calls to anywhere, at least until the switch to modems and digital (eventually wireless) switching systems. Lapsley summarises the history of telephony and the Bell monopoly without overdoing the technicalities.
Still, the book sags a little at the end, as all the threads are wrapped up. In a lesson in the nature of public scandal, Bell suffered almost no consequences for Greenstar, its creepy system of secretly and illegally recording millions of calls (it "just sounds illegal", said one CEO of the company). But a spate of personnel scandals and antitrust suits brought about the company's demise. The story ends with the dawn of Bulletin Board Systems, the internet-based community boards which provided the same type of hacker camaraderie. Most of the phreaks went on to become computer programmers, including Steves Jobs and Wozniak.
A good modern parallel might be file sharing on BitTorrent or the binary message boards of otherwise moribund Usenet. Originally, like phone phreaking, hackers did it for fun, but then everyone got wind of it and started using it to steal, and the lawyers came in (in this case with the DMCA). And this also led to the modern field of cybersecurity: if it's hackable, suggests Lapsley - and it is- better to let the curious play with it and find the holes. We ignore them at our peril.
Anyway. If one considers the cultural shift described in the book What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry from computers as soulless corporate/military-industrial machines to the techno-optimism of Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog, the seeds are here: the first part in the soulless bureaucracy that invented the semiconducting transistor, the latter in the underground misfit hacker culture. It helps that Lapsley comes from the same background as his subjects - he is an electrical engineer who authored one of the modestly-titled RFCs (Requests For Comment) which define the protocols of the Internet. He describes the origin of phone "phreaking" (the spelling actually comes from an Esquire journalist) among college undergrads, loners, and the blind. The phone network used the voice lines to send analog tones indicating how to route calls, so if one read up the company's (openly published) system specs and was able to generate a tone at 2,600Hz (with, say, a free Cap'n Crunch cereal whistle), one could access free calls to anywhere, at least until the switch to modems and digital (eventually wireless) switching systems. Lapsley summarises the history of telephony and the Bell monopoly without overdoing the technicalities.
Still, the book sags a little at the end, as all the threads are wrapped up. In a lesson in the nature of public scandal, Bell suffered almost no consequences for Greenstar, its creepy system of secretly and illegally recording millions of calls (it "just sounds illegal", said one CEO of the company). But a spate of personnel scandals and antitrust suits brought about the company's demise. The story ends with the dawn of Bulletin Board Systems, the internet-based community boards which provided the same type of hacker camaraderie. Most of the phreaks went on to become computer programmers, including Steves Jobs and Wozniak.
A good modern parallel might be file sharing on BitTorrent or the binary message boards of otherwise moribund Usenet. Originally, like phone phreaking, hackers did it for fun, but then everyone got wind of it and started using it to steal, and the lawyers came in (in this case with the DMCA). And this also led to the modern field of cybersecurity: if it's hackable, suggests Lapsley - and it is- better to let the curious play with it and find the holes. We ignore them at our peril.
April 22, 2013
A while back I read a book about the beginnings of computer hacker culture, Masters of Deception. It was a fun, mostly interview-based history of hackers and such, fairly thin but very appealing. A lot of the beginnings of phone phreak culture were also highlighted in the book, but didn't get a ton of play overall.
Then, a few months ago, Radiolab did a podcast/show that highlighted a person who knew how to access the phone system and make calls simply by whistling the correct tones. He, along with many others in the 1960s and 1970s, learned the ins and outs of the AT&T phone network and hacked it to pieces. Exploding the Phone is the story of that movement.
I knew a lot of the basics - blue boxes, the tones and such. What I didn't realize was about how widespread it was, or many/any of the personalities involved. The book is very heavily reliant on interviews with many of the primary phone phreaks, and it provides a really significant and worthwhile insight into the history and culture.
The book is extremely readable, with just enough technical information without overwhelming us with a lot of data and specifics that would only confuse things. If it has any real flaws, it's that the damage and the illegality of the situation too often takes a back seat to a more positive look at most of the phreaks, but this isn't really about the era as much as the people and circumstances, so it can easily be forgiven.
Definitely one of the better mainstream nonfiction books I've read lately. Of an era and a culture that doesn't get nearly enough thrift, and especially with a group that would fit in quite well with the maker movements of present day, the book is an excellent recommended read.
Then, a few months ago, Radiolab did a podcast/show that highlighted a person who knew how to access the phone system and make calls simply by whistling the correct tones. He, along with many others in the 1960s and 1970s, learned the ins and outs of the AT&T phone network and hacked it to pieces. Exploding the Phone is the story of that movement.
I knew a lot of the basics - blue boxes, the tones and such. What I didn't realize was about how widespread it was, or many/any of the personalities involved. The book is very heavily reliant on interviews with many of the primary phone phreaks, and it provides a really significant and worthwhile insight into the history and culture.
The book is extremely readable, with just enough technical information without overwhelming us with a lot of data and specifics that would only confuse things. If it has any real flaws, it's that the damage and the illegality of the situation too often takes a back seat to a more positive look at most of the phreaks, but this isn't really about the era as much as the people and circumstances, so it can easily be forgiven.
Definitely one of the better mainstream nonfiction books I've read lately. Of an era and a culture that doesn't get nearly enough thrift, and especially with a group that would fit in quite well with the maker movements of present day, the book is an excellent recommended read.
March 30, 2014
I really enjoyed this book. Having just started a new job in Kendall Square, it was really fun to be reading a book about innovation and in many ways that is what this book was about.
The title and subtitle of the book made it seem like it would be a hacker-like story, kind of like The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage. And there definitely were parts that were exciting and had the characteristics of a thriller like that. But the book was really two stories - one was about the people who figured out loopholes in the phone system to make free calls, the other was about the phone company itself and how it developed.
See, to understand the hacking, you really have to understand the entire system and Lapsley did a great job interweaving the story from Alexander Graham Bell to the breakup of the local phone companies decades later with that of the hackers. Each time the phone company changed their technology to expand or offer new services, the hackers found new loopholes, some by technology and some by social engineering.
This book is definitely one of my recent favorites - but really only suitable if you are a geek. You'll appreciate Lapsley's writing style which is somewhat informal and irreverent, as well as the early hacker pioneers who he profiles very closely.
The title and subtitle of the book made it seem like it would be a hacker-like story, kind of like The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage. And there definitely were parts that were exciting and had the characteristics of a thriller like that. But the book was really two stories - one was about the people who figured out loopholes in the phone system to make free calls, the other was about the phone company itself and how it developed.
See, to understand the hacking, you really have to understand the entire system and Lapsley did a great job interweaving the story from Alexander Graham Bell to the breakup of the local phone companies decades later with that of the hackers. Each time the phone company changed their technology to expand or offer new services, the hackers found new loopholes, some by technology and some by social engineering.
This book is definitely one of my recent favorites - but really only suitable if you are a geek. You'll appreciate Lapsley's writing style which is somewhat informal and irreverent, as well as the early hacker pioneers who he profiles very closely.
July 25, 2013
Good read about phone phreaks and hackers of the telephone company, their history from the beginning of phone lines, and why they do it. Very well researched and very well written. The technology parts are not overdone and the technology that is beyond understanding is not a detraction the way this is written. The human story is what counts and that is fascinating. The epilogue is intriguing. I would have liked knowing if the author's knowledge came exclusively from research or whether he may have had hands-on knowledge of phone phreaking. I liked how he showed the transition from old school hacking to modern computer hacking. Fully half of the book is notes and details about research that were of no interest to me, but that did not detract from the entertainment. Timothy Hurley, author of Shortstack, funny short stories.
August 14, 2019
If you've ever been curious about the history of phone phreaking -- or, hey, maybe you just passionately care about how the telephone system used to work -- this is the book for you. I knew it was a bunch of nerdy engineers building blue boxes because back in the day there were technical publications that basically explained everything you needed to know about the phone system in order to exploit it; I didn't know that the mob and the FBI had gotten involved and that a lot of it was very counterculture. I also didn't know that so many of the key participants here were blind, which I thought was interesting.
November 13, 2016
Immensely enjoyable book about phone hacking (phreaking) in the 60s and 70s - and incidentally a great history of the development of the phone system over the whole 20th century. Lots of interesting personalities. So much fun to read, for a computer nerd anyway.
May 1, 2016
If you like to learn about and understand how technology works, you'll love this book. It is long and sometimes difficult to read, but it is well worth it!
March 6, 2024
3.5 This book started very strong and I did learn a lot of interesting things from it but by the end it just felt Long and like it could’ve been organized better and I resorted to skimming the last few chapters to finish it
July 28, 2022
I was absolutely fascinated by this book. It completely appealed to my inner nerd. I remember rotary dial phones and all of the tones I’d hear when making a phone call. I have seen switchboards in old movies, but I never knew how any of this all worked. How did the telephone system begin? How did a phone number have a proper noun in it? Murray Hill 5-9975? How did that work? Why did our family friend rent her phone well into the 1980s? All my questions were answered and more! I recommend this for anyone with a curious mind.
November 17, 2015
Were you a "phone phreak"? The statutes of limitations long have expired, but the whistles packaged free in boxes of "Captain Crunch" cereal perfectly matched the Bell long-distance signaling codes in the pre SS-7 (signaling system 7) days, meaning up through the early eighties. There also were blue boxes and black boxes, with the same effect, albeit neither free nor easy to make. All of these fooled the Bell system into allowing free long distance charges.
For some reason, I was delighted with the "callback" numbers in each serving wire center: you called; hung up, and an electronic system would call you back within 15 seconds. Designed as a line check, we turned it into a party trick.
This book tells the 30 year cat and mouse story of the folks about a half-generation older than me who pioneered these efforts, and those at AT&T, some of whom I later was to meet, and the FBI, to stamp out this theft of services. 'cause power to the people, long hair and free love, that's what it was.
The major phone phreaks either were caught, turned on each other, or went straight. Ironically, long-distance in the US has become "postalized": no one pays extra; it's bundled into the rate plan. An unexpected victory for phone phreak wallets.
But no solace: virtually all phone phreaks weren't trying to scam AT&T, they were delighting in exploring one of the first, great interconnected global networks. The phreaks long-standing contribution comes in the lessons learned and built into the technical management of the Internet. For now, that remains in private hands, despite yearly efforts by the Russians, the ChiComs, the Indians, Brazil, some Arabs and others, to gain enough votes to force UN takeover of the Internet.
The toy whistles long since disappeared yet, to this day, I have a weakness for Captain Crunch cereal that Neil Stephenson's greatest book did nothing but encourage. Still, should the UN grab jurisdiction over Internet, don't be surprised to see modern versions of those whistles and boxes re-appear.
For some reason, I was delighted with the "callback" numbers in each serving wire center: you called; hung up, and an electronic system would call you back within 15 seconds. Designed as a line check, we turned it into a party trick.
This book tells the 30 year cat and mouse story of the folks about a half-generation older than me who pioneered these efforts, and those at AT&T, some of whom I later was to meet, and the FBI, to stamp out this theft of services. 'cause power to the people, long hair and free love, that's what it was.
The major phone phreaks either were caught, turned on each other, or went straight. Ironically, long-distance in the US has become "postalized": no one pays extra; it's bundled into the rate plan. An unexpected victory for phone phreak wallets.
But no solace: virtually all phone phreaks weren't trying to scam AT&T, they were delighting in exploring one of the first, great interconnected global networks. The phreaks long-standing contribution comes in the lessons learned and built into the technical management of the Internet. For now, that remains in private hands, despite yearly efforts by the Russians, the ChiComs, the Indians, Brazil, some Arabs and others, to gain enough votes to force UN takeover of the Internet.
The toy whistles long since disappeared yet, to this day, I have a weakness for Captain Crunch cereal that Neil Stephenson's greatest book did nothing but encourage. Still, should the UN grab jurisdiction over Internet, don't be surprised to see modern versions of those whistles and boxes re-appear.
quit
March 7, 2015I'm quitting because I've lost interest. The beginning history of the phone network was fascinating, but, for me, the book bogged down and became repetitive while describing the stories of the individual phreaks.
I think I'm also projecting my dislike of present day computer hackers onto the phreaks. But when does curiosity turn to mischief and mischief to crime? Some of the phreaks definitely made that journey.
Finally, the story was pushing some of my feminist buttons. I think, aside from the phreaks' mothers, there were two named females in the half of the book that I read, a girlfriend named Betsy and a sister named Toni. Am I to believe that there were no female phreaks? And that no gal pals, sisters, or girlfriends - aside from these two - contributed to the encyclopedia of phreak lore and knowledge? I know there's the stereotype that geeks are scared of girls, but an all-male phreakdom seems a bit farfetched to me.
I think I'm also projecting my dislike of present day computer hackers onto the phreaks. But when does curiosity turn to mischief and mischief to crime? Some of the phreaks definitely made that journey.
Finally, the story was pushing some of my feminist buttons. I think, aside from the phreaks' mothers, there were two named females in the half of the book that I read, a girlfriend named Betsy and a sister named Toni. Am I to believe that there were no female phreaks? And that no gal pals, sisters, or girlfriends - aside from these two - contributed to the encyclopedia of phreak lore and knowledge? I know there's the stereotype that geeks are scared of girls, but an all-male phreakdom seems a bit farfetched to me.
May 14, 2013
4.5 Stars. Even though I grew up in the era of omnipotent Ma Bell and my step-father worked for Pennsylvania Bell, I had little idea of the technical complexity of the Bell system. I also had no knowledge of the ingenious and uber-curious teens who spent thousands of hours hacking the system to see how it worked and what they could do with it. The time these "phone phreaks" devoted to exploring the Bell network and the effect this had on technological development is astonishing. As you may suspect, many of them went on to develop, and in some cases, hack computers as they were put into use. In fact Steve Jobs said that there would be no Apple if not for Steve Wozniak and him developing "gadgets" to hack the phone system.
But the most amazing fact of all is that the book is exciting and enormously interesting. Kudos to Phil Lapsley.
But the most amazing fact of all is that the book is exciting and enormously interesting. Kudos to Phil Lapsley.
March 12, 2013
Meticulously researched, well-written, and surprisingly engaging. I'm old enough to remember some of the very basic (social engineering) tricks we used to use to make fee calls, but hadn't had any exposure to the technological end of phreaking.
Honestly, my favorite parts of this book were not the stories of the hackers, but the story of the development of the phone system itself. It's rare for me to enjoy reading something about as dry a topic as the evolution of switching devices. As a not-very-technical guy, I was rather surprised to find myself so fascinated by it.
Honestly, my favorite parts of this book were not the stories of the hackers, but the story of the development of the phone system itself. It's rare for me to enjoy reading something about as dry a topic as the evolution of switching devices. As a not-very-technical guy, I was rather surprised to find myself so fascinated by it.
May 15, 2013
Very enjoyable read about the birth of hacker culture. I think it helps if you actually remember something about what phones were like before the break up of Ma Bell. He does a good job of explaining the technical parts in a simple manner and doesn't get bogged down in the technical details.
October 5, 2019
Allow me to introduce Phil Lapsey's non-fictional 2013 narrative Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell with some personal observations relevant to his research:
Back in the 1970s, in the San Fernando Valley just north of Los Angeles, you could call a free-of-charge telephone number that read you the current time. What the majority of the users of this service would never realize was that in some circumstances, due to a fluke of the telephone system, you could often hear faint voices in the background, not a part of the computerized recording reciting the time as it progressed. If you listened closely, some of the voices were intelligible, clearly raising their voices to get through to others on the line. They'd call out a telephone number, then follow up with variations on "Call the trunk line!" or "Call the busy signal!"or "Call the loop line!" That's how I was introduced to one tiny pocket of the much larger phenomenon that came to be called Phone Phreaking, and spent untold hours "hacking" the same still antiquated telephone system as more sophisticated - and often genius - kids with innate engineering talent and an inexhaustible curiosity about things mechanical or electric in their everyday worlds. Like these other kids - I was in my late teens or early twenties when I started - I explored the bizarre nature of Ma Bell's ancient switching system solely by searching out these weird test lines, loop lines, and on-again off-again busy signals because, like them, I was intensely curious yet even more intensely drawn into myself, a lifelong loner others kids always saw as different, as socially awkward as anyone you'd ever meet. Wandering the maze of numbers that allowed people like myself to connect anonymously with others like me was, it felt, perfectly natural, and great fun besides! I discovered by "random" dialing similar numbers that I could find dozens of others that acted like the time line did, and relatively fewer numbers that would allow a one on one private conversation, and fewer yet that were true party lines where dozens of kids could be heard clearly having conversations in and around other voices, calling out the numbers to other busy signals, loops, or party lines, or just providing their own surreal monologue to the mix. My favorite to this day was a guy who repeated, in measured tones that allowed him to stand out above the crowd, the phrases "I LOVE bodacious ta-tas! Do YOU love bodacious ta-tas?" Characters like this added a certain spice - or if it obscured someone yelling out a number you wanted, a certain bit of annoyance - to the mix.
In Exploding the Phone Lapsey doesn't mention the time line - and this surprises me given its role in bringing young people together on various types of private and party lines here in California. How he never encountered anyone using loop and party lines in Southern California that might bring it up is beyond me. But he does explicate the nature of some of these lines. The "trunk line" time callers might refer to was more than likely one of the myriad test lines found throughout the telephone system for engineers and techs to use in performing various maintenance tasks. The "busy signal" could be an identically functioning party line, where any number of people might join in - free of any charges - but constrained by having to talk over a constant busy signal. Naturally, a line without a busy signal was much preferred - and much more rare. The other item a busy signal might refer to was one half of a loop line, a pair of lines connected together for technical purposes but available to anyone dialing the two numbers. One number, say 555-1118, would have a busy signal. Calling that, you'd wait on the line for someone to call the other number, 555-1119. Since you were already on 1118, he or she would not hear a busy signal, and because they had made the connection as half of a private call, your busy signal would drop out and you would both be able to speak with one another just like any other phone line. Where's the fun in that, you ask? The answer is simple: Anonymity. Today on the internet you can join a chat and be anyone you like. Back then on a private line you could do the same. The other party had no idea who you were or what your appearance was, other than what you told them. You could say and do anything you liked, if your private phone buddy was willing, in complete privacy (assuming nobody else was at home with either party). You can guess how addictive that might be for the lonely kind of personalities that would seek out these phone anomalies in the first place. You could be a nerd and yet still have some kind of social interaction - possibly more so than those you were capable of having in public. And sometimes the person on the other end had more numbers to call. Hacking the phone system could take up hours of your time, make you late for work, and cut you off from friends or family trying to reach you and only getting a busy signal - the regular kind, not the chatty sort.
Lapsey's work is based on hundreds of hours of conversations with the personalities who first discovered and learned to seriously exploit the sprawling United States phone system and the ways it's electro-mechanical switches were arranged to route calls throughout the country and the world. Far from content to "just" exercise their nascent social muscles via anomalous private or party lines, these men, a handful of who were not just socially inept and isolated, but blind as well, literally could not help themselves from exploring this new world once they had discovered it. The kind of four year old that tries to stick bobby pins in electrical sockets often turned into the kind of teenager that sticks figurative pins into the weird apparatus of what we all called The Phone Company to see what would happen. (Lapsey even mentions the satiric James Coburn-starring cult film The President's Analysis, whose ultimate villain is - you guessed it - The Phone Company, run by audio-animatronic figures right out of a Disney exhibit, exhorting you to submit to their will as calmly as Disney's Lincoln reciting the Gettysburg Address). Lapsey also spoke with most of the law enforcement and telephone security officers tasked with finding and often prosecuting the phone hackers. And, of course, some of the lawyers who did the prosecuting. It's uncertain who first discovered the efficacy of billing by the minute - AT&T or lawyers. With an ancient infrastructure providing openings everywhere for mischief and crime alike, AT&T was ceratinly destined to employ a lot of lawyers.
The self-styled phone phreaks pushed the bounds of propriety and legality - frequently crossing either or both in their quest to learn the system. What worked best for them - and against Ma Bell - was the open nature of the system, and the company's own early naivete about what they had created. Caring only that the system worked well enough to build a telecommunications empire that served its customers very efficiently for the most part, Bell Labs and their manufacturing arm Western Electric were as open as the system itself, publishing technical articles in journals of the day that enterprising and curious people like the two Steves - Wozniak and Jobs, eventual creators of the Apple computer - might simply look up in the library. Coupled with the accidental discovery, made independently by several different phreaks over time, that one could duplicate the tones that governed call routing and billing inside the phone system, the technical details such publications offered allowed these phone hackers to learn the system inside and out. Once in, they bravely explored the system, often imitating technical personnel in order to convince Bell operators and tech support to do their bidding and reveal new secrets they could never have found by random exploration.
At one end of the spectrum were kids like me, just playing with numbers and lines. Somewhere closer to the other end were these often brilliant engineers at heart going so far as to build equipment that duplicated the phone company's magic signals and moving freely - at no charge - throughout the country's phone lines. And at the farthest end was a mini-spectrum of people, from the initially innocent and almost certainly mentally disturbed John Draper, known as Captain Crunch because his phone hacking began with the toy whistle from a box of that cereal - to organized criminals using the so-called "blue boxes" people like Woz and Jobs were manufacturing - and selling! - to assist in making book.
Lapsey details it all, with valuable background and insight into the phone company's creation and development throughout, right up to the days Ma Bell finally put her foot down and found ways to modernize the Phreaks out of their favorite pastimes. The heyday of phreaking was in the 60s and 70s, following a period of early discovery in the 50s, and something else was going on in parallel with the exploration of the phone company. Similar brilliant young men at this time were exploring the very new world of computers, a story so similar to Lapsey's narrative that Steven Levy's excellent 1984 volume Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution includes a significant foray into phone hacking as well, making it the perfect companion volume to Exploding the Phone. And for international espionage inside the early internet, another fascinating tale is Cliff Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage, written in 1989. All three books are, afaik, currently still in print or otherwise easy to find, and essential reading if any of this stuff rings a bell with readers of this review. All highly recommended. [Edit: I also just found out Lapsley's book has it's own web page, including outtakes from the book! Rubs hands together excitedly. More exploring to do!]
Back in the 1970s, in the San Fernando Valley just north of Los Angeles, you could call a free-of-charge telephone number that read you the current time. What the majority of the users of this service would never realize was that in some circumstances, due to a fluke of the telephone system, you could often hear faint voices in the background, not a part of the computerized recording reciting the time as it progressed. If you listened closely, some of the voices were intelligible, clearly raising their voices to get through to others on the line. They'd call out a telephone number, then follow up with variations on "Call the trunk line!" or "Call the busy signal!"or "Call the loop line!" That's how I was introduced to one tiny pocket of the much larger phenomenon that came to be called Phone Phreaking, and spent untold hours "hacking" the same still antiquated telephone system as more sophisticated - and often genius - kids with innate engineering talent and an inexhaustible curiosity about things mechanical or electric in their everyday worlds. Like these other kids - I was in my late teens or early twenties when I started - I explored the bizarre nature of Ma Bell's ancient switching system solely by searching out these weird test lines, loop lines, and on-again off-again busy signals because, like them, I was intensely curious yet even more intensely drawn into myself, a lifelong loner others kids always saw as different, as socially awkward as anyone you'd ever meet. Wandering the maze of numbers that allowed people like myself to connect anonymously with others like me was, it felt, perfectly natural, and great fun besides! I discovered by "random" dialing similar numbers that I could find dozens of others that acted like the time line did, and relatively fewer numbers that would allow a one on one private conversation, and fewer yet that were true party lines where dozens of kids could be heard clearly having conversations in and around other voices, calling out the numbers to other busy signals, loops, or party lines, or just providing their own surreal monologue to the mix. My favorite to this day was a guy who repeated, in measured tones that allowed him to stand out above the crowd, the phrases "I LOVE bodacious ta-tas! Do YOU love bodacious ta-tas?" Characters like this added a certain spice - or if it obscured someone yelling out a number you wanted, a certain bit of annoyance - to the mix.
In Exploding the Phone Lapsey doesn't mention the time line - and this surprises me given its role in bringing young people together on various types of private and party lines here in California. How he never encountered anyone using loop and party lines in Southern California that might bring it up is beyond me. But he does explicate the nature of some of these lines. The "trunk line" time callers might refer to was more than likely one of the myriad test lines found throughout the telephone system for engineers and techs to use in performing various maintenance tasks. The "busy signal" could be an identically functioning party line, where any number of people might join in - free of any charges - but constrained by having to talk over a constant busy signal. Naturally, a line without a busy signal was much preferred - and much more rare. The other item a busy signal might refer to was one half of a loop line, a pair of lines connected together for technical purposes but available to anyone dialing the two numbers. One number, say 555-1118, would have a busy signal. Calling that, you'd wait on the line for someone to call the other number, 555-1119. Since you were already on 1118, he or she would not hear a busy signal, and because they had made the connection as half of a private call, your busy signal would drop out and you would both be able to speak with one another just like any other phone line. Where's the fun in that, you ask? The answer is simple: Anonymity. Today on the internet you can join a chat and be anyone you like. Back then on a private line you could do the same. The other party had no idea who you were or what your appearance was, other than what you told them. You could say and do anything you liked, if your private phone buddy was willing, in complete privacy (assuming nobody else was at home with either party). You can guess how addictive that might be for the lonely kind of personalities that would seek out these phone anomalies in the first place. You could be a nerd and yet still have some kind of social interaction - possibly more so than those you were capable of having in public. And sometimes the person on the other end had more numbers to call. Hacking the phone system could take up hours of your time, make you late for work, and cut you off from friends or family trying to reach you and only getting a busy signal - the regular kind, not the chatty sort.
Lapsey's work is based on hundreds of hours of conversations with the personalities who first discovered and learned to seriously exploit the sprawling United States phone system and the ways it's electro-mechanical switches were arranged to route calls throughout the country and the world. Far from content to "just" exercise their nascent social muscles via anomalous private or party lines, these men, a handful of who were not just socially inept and isolated, but blind as well, literally could not help themselves from exploring this new world once they had discovered it. The kind of four year old that tries to stick bobby pins in electrical sockets often turned into the kind of teenager that sticks figurative pins into the weird apparatus of what we all called The Phone Company to see what would happen. (Lapsey even mentions the satiric James Coburn-starring cult film The President's Analysis, whose ultimate villain is - you guessed it - The Phone Company, run by audio-animatronic figures right out of a Disney exhibit, exhorting you to submit to their will as calmly as Disney's Lincoln reciting the Gettysburg Address). Lapsey also spoke with most of the law enforcement and telephone security officers tasked with finding and often prosecuting the phone hackers. And, of course, some of the lawyers who did the prosecuting. It's uncertain who first discovered the efficacy of billing by the minute - AT&T or lawyers. With an ancient infrastructure providing openings everywhere for mischief and crime alike, AT&T was ceratinly destined to employ a lot of lawyers.
The self-styled phone phreaks pushed the bounds of propriety and legality - frequently crossing either or both in their quest to learn the system. What worked best for them - and against Ma Bell - was the open nature of the system, and the company's own early naivete about what they had created. Caring only that the system worked well enough to build a telecommunications empire that served its customers very efficiently for the most part, Bell Labs and their manufacturing arm Western Electric were as open as the system itself, publishing technical articles in journals of the day that enterprising and curious people like the two Steves - Wozniak and Jobs, eventual creators of the Apple computer - might simply look up in the library. Coupled with the accidental discovery, made independently by several different phreaks over time, that one could duplicate the tones that governed call routing and billing inside the phone system, the technical details such publications offered allowed these phone hackers to learn the system inside and out. Once in, they bravely explored the system, often imitating technical personnel in order to convince Bell operators and tech support to do their bidding and reveal new secrets they could never have found by random exploration.
At one end of the spectrum were kids like me, just playing with numbers and lines. Somewhere closer to the other end were these often brilliant engineers at heart going so far as to build equipment that duplicated the phone company's magic signals and moving freely - at no charge - throughout the country's phone lines. And at the farthest end was a mini-spectrum of people, from the initially innocent and almost certainly mentally disturbed John Draper, known as Captain Crunch because his phone hacking began with the toy whistle from a box of that cereal - to organized criminals using the so-called "blue boxes" people like Woz and Jobs were manufacturing - and selling! - to assist in making book.
Lapsey details it all, with valuable background and insight into the phone company's creation and development throughout, right up to the days Ma Bell finally put her foot down and found ways to modernize the Phreaks out of their favorite pastimes. The heyday of phreaking was in the 60s and 70s, following a period of early discovery in the 50s, and something else was going on in parallel with the exploration of the phone company. Similar brilliant young men at this time were exploring the very new world of computers, a story so similar to Lapsey's narrative that Steven Levy's excellent 1984 volume Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution includes a significant foray into phone hacking as well, making it the perfect companion volume to Exploding the Phone. And for international espionage inside the early internet, another fascinating tale is Cliff Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage, written in 1989. All three books are, afaik, currently still in print or otherwise easy to find, and essential reading if any of this stuff rings a bell with readers of this review. All highly recommended. [Edit: I also just found out Lapsley's book has it's own web page, including outtakes from the book! Rubs hands together excitedly. More exploring to do!]
April 22, 2024
Do you remember the days of landlines and long distance phone calls that cost by the minute? If you said no, congratulations, your birth year probably doesn't start with 19--. However, for the rest of us, it's an ingrained part of our memories, our childhoods. "Don't you dare be calling your friends long distance, do we look made of money?" And as long as there's been landlines and long distance and payphones there's been those trying to work their way around those pesky fees - bring in the Phone Phreaks. Starting in the 1960s, a group of men started learning that certain tones worked at skirting the law and getting those free phone calls. They'd create blue boxes and black boxes and red boxes (depending on the decade and technology of the time), they'd show their tricks and sell their products. The phone company (because there was only one in the US at the time) was the only loser but they were sore losers for sure.
This was an interesting book on the world of "phone phreaking", the ins and outs, the people involved (such as Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs), the change in technology and so much more. It's well researched and the interviews are extensive. I will say that it dragged in the middle. Like...really dragged. But it did help me doze off on those nights filled with insomnia 🤣. And there were a lot of names which is never an easy thing for this dyslexic brain of mine. The beginning and end, though, kept my attention and I felt like I learned a lot. A decent read!
This was an interesting book on the world of "phone phreaking", the ins and outs, the people involved (such as Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs), the change in technology and so much more. It's well researched and the interviews are extensive. I will say that it dragged in the middle. Like...really dragged. But it did help me doze off on those nights filled with insomnia 🤣. And there were a lot of names which is never an easy thing for this dyslexic brain of mine. The beginning and end, though, kept my attention and I felt like I learned a lot. A decent read!
August 8, 2019
A very thorough and detailed history of Phone (ph)reaking. The author did a great job of keeping the technical aspects that needed to be in there while at the same time not over doing it so as to make it unintelligible to those who aren't quite as versed in the subject. The part I liked the most was he neither glamorized or "othered" the participants and told a straight story, that with the fun parallels between current MitM attacks and nascent DDoS through stacking brought a smile to my face as the more things change....
Enjoyed it and if you are a person of the technical bent or are just curious about the beginning of "l33t' culture its worth a read.
Enjoyed it and if you are a person of the technical bent or are just curious about the beginning of "l33t' culture its worth a read.
May 17, 2024
Tells a collection of really fascinating snippets, and does a good job of simplifying complex networks and systems to a level that my monkey brain could understand. Sadly it fails to really turn that into a compelling narrative. Also has little interest in examining why the FBI might have been so concerned about the legality of covertly wiretapping civilians...
November 27, 2025
Loved it. Phone system is fascinating.
September 3, 2022
An enjoyable read. We’ll documented, just enough technical detail. “Sources and Notes” section was also interesting.
September 1, 2018
A coworker asked, “Who’s ‘Ma Bell?’” the day before I returned Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell to the library. I told her—somehow eschewing the pat and self-deprecating “...and then I turned into old dust” we of middle age must utter to ward off admission of actual decrepitude—
about how the phone company used to be a governmentally approved near-monopoly. And unless you conflate surviving the relentless march of time with purposeful knowledge acquisition, there is no reason to shame a person whose youth precludes anything but a cellphone as their sole touchstone in the world of the telephonic communcation.
This hypothetical youngster is, however, not likely to search their local library—as I did—for books about blue boxing. Exploding does seem to be the only non-fiction book on the subject, which is fine because it is an excellent one. It will answer all your blue box questions, though it didn’t answer the root: Are blue boxes common knowledge or esoterica?
I am an aberration; I worked in the telecom department of Columbia Business School for a bit right around when I started using goodreads, so the fundamentals of contemporary telecommunications are seared into my brain. If you haven’t heard about Captain Crunch or Oaf Tobar or Berkeley Blue, though, how could you know there is a story to even find? What level of interest in technology do you need for this to be appealing? Ditto, culture. And history. Mayhaps a mélange of all three is the requisite? I simply don’t know.
I wasn’t alive during the heyday of phone phreaking, but I grew up with the old black rotary dialer—the world of landlines and busy signals isn’t foreign to me like it is for the aforementioned coworker born in the mid-to-late 90s. I can picture a world without connectivity—as foreign as that feels now—and how much work teenagers were willing to do to chase away their loneliness:
Which brings us to the most important part: Exploding is fun. These are smart people outwitting a monolithic system. It’s cool and the writing makes sure you know exactly how cool by never losing irreverence even when things get heavy:
about how the phone company used to be a governmentally approved near-monopoly. And unless you conflate surviving the relentless march of time with purposeful knowledge acquisition, there is no reason to shame a person whose youth precludes anything but a cellphone as their sole touchstone in the world of the telephonic communcation.
This hypothetical youngster is, however, not likely to search their local library—as I did—for books about blue boxing. Exploding does seem to be the only non-fiction book on the subject, which is fine because it is an excellent one. It will answer all your blue box questions, though it didn’t answer the root: Are blue boxes common knowledge or esoterica?
I am an aberration; I worked in the telecom department of Columbia Business School for a bit right around when I started using goodreads, so the fundamentals of contemporary telecommunications are seared into my brain. If you haven’t heard about Captain Crunch or Oaf Tobar or Berkeley Blue, though, how could you know there is a story to even find? What level of interest in technology do you need for this to be appealing? Ditto, culture. And history. Mayhaps a mélange of all three is the requisite? I simply don’t know.
I wasn’t alive during the heyday of phone phreaking, but I grew up with the old black rotary dialer—the world of landlines and busy signals isn’t foreign to me like it is for the aforementioned coworker born in the mid-to-late 90s. I can picture a world without connectivity—as foreign as that feels now—and how much work teenagers were willing to do to chase away their loneliness:
Certain telephone exchanges in some areas of the country, notably Los Angeles and San Jose in California, had busy signals that were shared among all callers. An example was San Jose’s 291 exchange in the 408 area code. If you and I both happened to call busy numbers in 408-291 we would be connected, faintly, over the busy signal—along with anyone else who happened to have called a busy number at that moment. If we shouted we could hear each other. Of course, we’d be constantly annoyed by the baaa...baaa...baaa of the busy signal. And that busy signal was loud; our voices would be in the background to the busy signal in the foreground. “It was an insane way to try to communicate,” recalls Jim Fettgather…There are so many things to learn in this book, from the fundamentals of multifrequency harmonics to the advent of transistors and how they altered so many industries. You see modernity collapse the barrier of distance through communication technologies, and then watch as clever folks smash that magical infrastructure into even more amazing bits.
Which brings us to the most important part: Exploding is fun. These are smart people outwitting a monolithic system. It’s cool and the writing makes sure you know exactly how cool by never losing irreverence even when things get heavy:
And FBI memo [indicated]: “As a source of income, the underground is manufacturing and selling ‘red boxes’ in large quantities. These boxes duplicate the tones generated by coins deposited in pay telephones. Through the use of ‘red boxes’ an individual is able to make long distance call[s] without depositing money. These boxes cost the underground $6 or $7 to manufacture and are currently retailing on the street at $100. All money obtained from the sale of red boxes is going towards purchase of technical equipment for further research.”Anyone with even the slightest interest in communications technology—or modern infrastructure; or the analogue-to-digital transition; or counter-culture; or regulatory history—should jump all over this book. And if you’ve never heard of “Ma Bell,” well, this is a wicked place to start learning.
Swell. Just swell. A shadowy underground organization made up of technical wizards—wizards who might have spies within the phone company—can monitor your calls from anywhere and who might, if they chose, sell the results to of their wiretapping to the highest bidder.
September 12, 2013
Very fun read that combined compelling stories with cultural history and some well-placed nostalgia. Lapsley does a great job of explaining the inner workings of the phone company (back in the day where it was indeed THE phone company) in a way that was not only compelling but also very understandable. The latter is hugely important, as when he starts describing how phone phreaks started discovering and exploiting the vulnerabilities in Ma Bell's technology, it's easy to grasp what they're doing. Even better, it's easy to grasp why they were excited about what they were doing.
While the phone network is the milieu, Exploding the Phone is really more about tinkerers, experimenters, hackers and the insatiably curious. While in ways phone phreaks could be considered proto-hackers - and indeed many of them went on to be part of the original personal computer revolution, which was born from guys who pretty much hacked together their original hardware and software - this is really the story of human nature and the huge drive curiosity provides. It's also the story of how, for some, that curiosity turns into something unhealthy, and it's also the story of how there will always be those who, instead of recognizing the flaws in their own systems when they're confronted with them, will focus instead on punishing the people who had the inventiveness to discover those weaknesses.
(And on a personal level, Exploding the Phone triggered some nostalgia. I grew up in what were then the outer suburbs of Minneapolis, and we were covered by an old rural phone company. I remember the sounds and systems described in the book, and my own process of seeing what I could do with a phone (which never got anywhere to the level of the phreaks). And I also spoke a few times with one of the characters and most prominent phreaks, Joe Engressia, as he had set up the delightfully bizarre "Zzzzyzzerrific Funline" that I discovered at the very, very back of the Minneapolis phone book. It was a nice trip down memory lane.)
While the phone network is the milieu, Exploding the Phone is really more about tinkerers, experimenters, hackers and the insatiably curious. While in ways phone phreaks could be considered proto-hackers - and indeed many of them went on to be part of the original personal computer revolution, which was born from guys who pretty much hacked together their original hardware and software - this is really the story of human nature and the huge drive curiosity provides. It's also the story of how, for some, that curiosity turns into something unhealthy, and it's also the story of how there will always be those who, instead of recognizing the flaws in their own systems when they're confronted with them, will focus instead on punishing the people who had the inventiveness to discover those weaknesses.
(And on a personal level, Exploding the Phone triggered some nostalgia. I grew up in what were then the outer suburbs of Minneapolis, and we were covered by an old rural phone company. I remember the sounds and systems described in the book, and my own process of seeing what I could do with a phone (which never got anywhere to the level of the phreaks). And I also spoke a few times with one of the characters and most prominent phreaks, Joe Engressia, as he had set up the delightfully bizarre "Zzzzyzzerrific Funline" that I discovered at the very, very back of the Minneapolis phone book. It was a nice trip down memory lane.)
February 24, 2016
Well, I found this to be sheer wonderfulness. Lapsley details the history of the phone phreak movement, starting with the early hackers who just wanted to understand the phone system to the later counterculture folks who wanted to rip off a powerful monopoly. At the same time, he covers the development of AT&T and details the steps the corporation took (or sometimes failed to take) to thwart those who tried to game the system.
I don't think it's a perfect book. There is a huge cast of characters, and I sometimes felt lost from chapter to chapter trying to keep up. Also, Lapsley usually does a great job describing the technology, but at times he tends towards the obtuse. But those problems aside, it's a fascinating read about the development of a pre-Internet network and those people who are captivated by networks. As many of the early phone phreaks state, they didn't do what they did to get free long-distance. (After all, most of them were young teens who had nobody to call.) But it was a blast to route a call from your home to New York to Denver to San Francisco to a house down the block, just because you could. In fact, because so many of the early phone network hackers had no serious malicious intent, it was difficult to keep any anti-phreak movement going at AT&T or the government. This book is rife with tales of AT&T begging for prosecution with no response from legal authorities (as well as stories of the government expressing concerns to be blindly assuaged by AT&T administration.)
If you're not intrigued by the idea of hacking a phone system, this book probably isn't for you. But if you have any interest in network exploits (especially in a time where networks barely existed), this is a must-read.
I don't think it's a perfect book. There is a huge cast of characters, and I sometimes felt lost from chapter to chapter trying to keep up. Also, Lapsley usually does a great job describing the technology, but at times he tends towards the obtuse. But those problems aside, it's a fascinating read about the development of a pre-Internet network and those people who are captivated by networks. As many of the early phone phreaks state, they didn't do what they did to get free long-distance. (After all, most of them were young teens who had nobody to call.) But it was a blast to route a call from your home to New York to Denver to San Francisco to a house down the block, just because you could. In fact, because so many of the early phone network hackers had no serious malicious intent, it was difficult to keep any anti-phreak movement going at AT&T or the government. This book is rife with tales of AT&T begging for prosecution with no response from legal authorities (as well as stories of the government expressing concerns to be blindly assuaged by AT&T administration.)
If you're not intrigued by the idea of hacking a phone system, this book probably isn't for you. But if you have any interest in network exploits (especially in a time where networks barely existed), this is a must-read.
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