218 DEAR HACKER

218 DEAR HACKER

What you suggest is immoral, unjust, sneaky, disgusting, and horrible. It’s also incomplete. The number to call is 703-641-9292. It belongs to the Communications Fraud Control Association, that scary organization that gathers information from all of the long distance companies and that recently plastered Texas Tech with posters warning students of jail time for making unauthorized long distance telephone calls.

Dear 2600:

I think we agree that in coming years, phone literacy is going to be as important for resisting the police state as computer literacy. One example is the British disarmament movement, CND, whose mem- bers have been fighting a running battle for years over malfunctions that always seem to happen to their heavily tapped phones at crucial moments. Another concerns the fall of Allende in 1973: in the early hours of the fateful morning as Pinochet’s tanks began rolling towards the Presidential Palace, it appeared that the phones of about 2500 of Allende’s closest associates in government had gone dead. In his book on the Allende “destabilization,” the U.S. ambassador at the time marvels that this could have been accomplished in a few hours by only two phone technicians. Gee, GTE? No, ITT.

Audie O’Sirkit We never did trust them anyway.

Dear 2600: Here is a question you might have one of your staff try to answer for

the newsletter readers. It’s a problem I have and I’m sure others do too. Being I only have one phone in my house, how can I run a PC through a modem with call waiting?

KM

Call waiting is a very annoying problem for anyone with a computer. The beep of

a second call coming in frequently interferes with data flow. As a result, the phone companies are “introducing” a service that should have been available from the

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

start, and in some cases was. There are a few different names for it, but basically it allows you to turn off call waiting for one call, usually by dialing *70 or 1170 before making a call. In many areas, this feature always existed but was never publicized. Now that people are expressing an interest in it, you’ll hear about it and also get charged for it. History just keeps repeating itself.

It might be advantageous to drop call waiting altogether and just get another phone line with tripover from your first line. In most places, there is no charge for this feature, at least not yet. And it gives you the freedom of talking on the phone and sending data at the same time. A two-line phone will deliver most of the fea- tures the phone company charges monthly fees for: call waiting, three-way, speed dialing. The charge for a second phone line will just about equal all of the little charges they throw in.

Dear 2600: Recently you mentioned beeper companies not yet being raided by the

police for phone numbers. They don’t have to raid them! According to

a friend who runs a large beeper company, the authorities can, with

a warrant, legally obtain duplicate beeper numbers. Any access to the monitored number also beeps the duplicate number in the police station.

Bob from Los Angeles How clever. So now we have beeper tapping. But will the beeper companies be as

cooperative with the authorities as the phone companies?

Dear 2600: The very day that I received your Spring issue, I also got my Sprint bill.