238 DEAR HACKER
238 DEAR HACKER
Dear 2600: NYNEX has done it again! If you are a NYNEX customer, here is another thing you should know
about your favorite company. Anybody can now know how much your phone bill is. All it takes is having a touch tone phone. No secret code or black magic is needed. It’s not a back door. It’s an option on an 800 number which will gladly disclose your last phone bill. This option will also inform you, and anybody else, if you have already paid the bill or not.
To test this out: Call the NYNEX account information line, which is listed in your phone book, at 1-800-698-3545.
TTJ
This indeed caused us much concern when we first learned about it a couple of months ago. No PIN at all was required to find out your balance, information which certainly isn’t considered public by most people. We broadcast this live on WBAI’s Off The Hook program and entered phone numbers for all of the major TV networks. (CBS was overdue by several thousand dollars.) It was fixed within two days. Apparently, invading corporate privacy is the quickest way to get large cor- porations to notice privacy issues.
Dear 2600: Perhaps “all brawn, no brains” is a fitting description for IBM’s idea
of security. When a customer receives a new IBM Aptiva, they also receive the
Product Recovery CD ROM. On this CD resides all the necessary files to install Windows 95 and supporting Aptiva software. All the files on the CD happen to be zipped with a password. That password happens to be “magic”. With such a simple-to-guess password and easily cracked encryption such as what pkzip uses, why would IBM even bother to put one on in the first place?
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
The consumer has no way of finding out the password without crack- ing it, debugging the binary recovery program, or calling tech support and outright asking for it. Personally, I got them to tell me what to type by asking for the command to unzip by hand... not the recovery program method. I haven’t tried to see if they’d raise a stink if I asked “what’s the zip file password?” Anyway, all systems apparently have the same “magic” password.
The consumer has outright paid for the computer and accompanying software, and IBM has simply presented the consumer with a large pain-in-the-ass. I’d just like to say “good going” to the many men and women at IBM who so successfully have kept up the IBM tradition of retarded attempts to control the masses.
Starz N Strifez Tradition is the word and it will eventually be IBM’s downfall.
Dear 2600: In response to SW’s letter (Spring 97 issue) I would like to say that in
those AOL chat rooms, you will find nothing but idiots with programs used to screw around with AOL. Plus, sometimes (very often) a CatBot enters the room. Perhaps someone knows what I am talking about? CatBots boot you offline if you are in any coldice room (coldice2, coldice3) and you get a message that says something like “You have been booted offline: Illegal Activity.” Better yet, you get a TOS point on your account! Unless you are running on a fake AOL account, I would advise not going into these rooms for any reason.
JediHamster So where do you go on a hot day when you want to talk about cold ice? This word
control game AOL plays is one of the main reasons they’re looked down upon by so many.