110 DEAR HACKER

110 DEAR HACKER

Dear 2600: Well, I read your magazine every chance I can get, but just about a

week ago my parents found a copy (the one where it talked about the stealth trojans and a little about a red box). Well, I made one and they found it and took it to a computer dude they know and they asked him what it was and they got pissed off and took away my laptop and all of my 2600 booklets. They even told the school to not let me on the computers unless I want to type a document and if I do they stand be- hind me the whole damn time. Now I am in even more trouble because my mom told my English teacher to look out for what I am reading in class and my friend had the brand new copy of 2600 and he let me borrow it while I was sitting in class and she took it away and called my mom. What should I do? There is no possible way to get hooked up to a computer without someone constantly on my back.

Zero

The primary obligation of any prisoner is to escape. Whether that means actually leaving or simply figuring out a way to handle things so you don’t go crazy is up to you. It seems that you should try to figure out a way to gain trust among your parents and teachers before doing anything else. Once you do this, you have a shot at con- vincing them that hacking and, for that matter, reading aren’t inherently bad things. This won’t happen overnight and it may not happen at all, but it’s worth the effort.

Dear 2600:

I have a rather interesting story that you may be interested in. I’m a junior in high school and our school has several COCOTs. So like any curious student I spent my study hall hours playing with the phone. One day I decided to dial the 1x and 11x numbers. When I got to 118 and hung up the phone, the payphone started ringing. When I picked up the phone I got a message saying your call could not be put through. I would dial 118 several times a day and the same thing would

THE CHALLENGES OF LIFE AS A HACKER

happen. Well one day I was dialing and I saw my principal eyeing me suspiciously. The payphone did the usual thing of ringing after I hung up. Later that day during my history class I got a pass telling me to come to the main office immediately. When I got there I was escorted into the principal’s private quarters where I was greeted by a police officer. The principal grinned at me and said something to the effect of “We finally got you—this time we outsmarted you.” I expected to have them yell at me for phreaking the phone or something but to my surprise they told me that they were going to charge me with prank calling 911! This was quite a surprise considering I had dialed 118 and nothing else. They then told me that 911 had been receiving calls from the school all year long and that one came in at the exact same time I was playing with the payphone from that very phone. I told them about the 118 and, to make a long story short, they checked the PBX records for the school and found that 911 had never been dialed from the school. So I was let off the hook and it turns out that there are multiple numbers that trigger the 911 system but they don’t make this information public. Why they have multiple numbers and why they don’t make it public remains a mystery to me, but the moral of the story is don’t dial 118.

Socrates It’s entirely possible that this COCOT and/or your school had a speed dial entry

for 118 that went to the police for some reason. Try it from some other part of town to see if this is the case. Congratulations on escaping the combined wrath of your school and the cops.

Dear 2600: What the hell is this world coming to? I tried a phf exploit in Netscape

the other day, and I just randomly picked an address, then I was taken to a screen that said some smart-ass remark like, “Smile, you’re on candid camera!” Why does everyone who writes an article on phf forget to mention that there is a new version of phf which isn’t always so blindly installed on the server? The newer version looks to me like