234 DEAR HACKER

234 DEAR HACKER

respect the privacy of its users, it would not be too difficult to do everything that has been suggested. Perhaps other companies will do this in the future. Perhaps some already have. It’s a possibility that cannot be ignored and we’re glad the issue has come up, regardless of Prodigy’s actual involvement. The other fact is that Prodigy was given a fair chance to express its side of the story from the begin- ning. Nobody seized all of your equipment to investigate the matter. The media didn’t label you as potential terrorists. You were never threatened with decades of prison time for a crime nobody really understands. We find it sad that individu- als automatically mean so much less than large corporations when their integrity comes into question.

Dear 2600: Apparently someone has been applying their knowledge of Simplex

locks, especially on FedEx lockboxes, in the Boston area. Apparently FedEx is less than happy about this, and has taken measures to put an end to the robberies. If it were me, I’d do something about the locks. But it’s not, and FedEx disagrees with me. They’ve gone to the police, and gotten them to “stake out” a number of FedEx lockboxes (the ones being robbed, I guess). But they have not (yet) changed any of the combos on their lockboxes (I checked—still the same). I don’t know if UPS has done the same, or whether the thief has even bothered to take from them. I personally have seen no instances of stakeouts on UPS. Their boxes continue to use the same combination.

A Fly on the Wall It’s incredible how stubbornly some companies will cling to their ignorance.

Dear 2600:

I have noticed an annoying and disturbing trend in my local C&P Bell payphones. They have started to act like COCOTs. I first noticed

T H E M A G I C O F T H E C O R P O R AT E W O R L D

it about six months ago, when a new legion of C&P phones with gray (rather than black) handsets started appearing. I placed a local call on one of them, using a quarter, and I could hear this little click a few seconds after the call went through that sounded as if they had just un-muted the speaker (it turned out this was true). Odd, I thought. Then, after three rings, this computerized voice came on and said something like, “Your called party does not seem to be answering. Please hang up and try again later.” I was very irritated at first, be- cause I thought it had disconnected me and would not even let me leave a message, but it in fact did not disconnect me. Nevertheless, this genuine C&P Bell phone acted exactly like a COCOT. Is it possible C&P is buying up COCOTs and converting them to C&P phones? The phone looked exactly like a standard C&P payphone, except that the familiar black handset was conspicuously gray. As you can probably guess, red boxing off of these new phones is as difficult or impossible as it is off of a COCOT.

I called C&P to ask them about this, but the woman I talked to knew nothing about any new C&P payphones. She thought it might have been related to their new Send-A-Call feature, which they apparently have been having a lot of problems with. But that didn’t make any sense. This particular phone did have a plate below the instructional plate describing the Send-A-Call feature, which I hadn’t heard of be- fore, in place of the usual plate that says “Out of Change? Place a collect call, etc.”

Inhuman Arlington, VA

Nothing is impossible when it comes to phone company sleaze. The best example of this is AT&T warning people not to use weird looking payphones because they’ll rip you off. Of course, in more than a few instances, if you take a good look at these weird looking payphones, particularly the ones that try to look like “real” ones, you’ll find that they’re made by AT&T.