| John Draper |
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John T. Draper (born 1944 ), also known as '''Captain Crunch''', '''Crunch''' or '''Crunchman''' (after Cap'n Crunch , the mascot of a Breakfast Cereal ), is a former phone Phreak . Draper was the son of a U.S. Air Force engineer; he described his father as distant in an interview published on the front page of the Jan 13-14, 2007, issue of The Wall Street Journal . Mr. Draper himself entered the Air Force in 1964, and while stationed in Alaska helped his fellow servicemen make free phone calls home by devising access to a local telephone switchboard. He was honorably discharged from the Air Force in 1968, and did military-related work for several employers in the San Francisco Bay Area. He adopted the counterculture of the times and operated a pirate radio station out of a Volkswagen van. A . ISBN 0-393-06143-4. This would effectively disconnect one end of the trunk, allowing the still connected side to enter an operator mode. Experimenting with this whistle inspired Draper to build Blue Box es: electronic devices capable of reproducing other tones used by the phone company. : “I don't do that. I don't do that anymore at all. And if I do it, I do it for one reason and one reason only. I'm learning about a system. The phone company is a System. A computer is a System, do you understand? If I do what I do, it is only to explore a system. Computers, systems, that's my bag. The phone company is nothing but a computer.” — From ''Secrets of the Little Blue Box'' by Ron Rosenbaum , '' Esquire Magazine '' ( October 1971 ) The class of vulnerabilities Draper and others discovered was limited to call routing switches that employed In-band Signaling , whereas newer equipment relies almost exclusively on Out-of-band Signaling , the use of separate circuits to transmit voice and signals. Though they could no longer serve practical use, the ''Cap'n Crunch'' whistles did become valued Collector's Item s. Some hackers sometimes go by the handle “Captain Crunch” even today; as a result of this incident '' 2600 The Hacker Quarterly '' is named after this whistle frequency. The expense of sustaining the unbilled phone calls, the redesign of the line protocols and the accelerated equipment replacement due to the blue box is difficult to calculate, or even to separate from something as complex and dynamic as the telephone long-distance network, but it is generally acknowledged to be a huge sum. The 1971 Esquire Magazine article which told the world about phone phreaking got Draper in hot water. Draper was arrested on . Draper wrote '' EasyWriter '', the first word processor for the Apple II, in 1979. According to the Wall Street Journal, he hand-wrote the code while serving nights in the Alameda County Jail, then entered the code later into a computer. However, another account had him writing the code as he served his four-month sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution, Lompoc , California . Draper later ported ''EasyWriter'' to the TV show, '' Crunch TV ''. One oft-repeated story featuring , Russia and England . Once he had set the call to go through dozens of countries, he dialed the number of the public phone next to him. A few minutes later, the phone next to him rang. Draper spoke into the first phone, and, after quite a few seconds, he heard his own voice very faintly on the other phone. This is just one example of his career in phreaking exploits. Draper was a member of the Homebrew Computer Club . Draper also claimed, in the interview with the Wall Street Journal, that he once managed to place a direct call to the White House and spoke directly with someone who sounded like Richard Nixon; Draper told him about a toilet paper shortage in Los Angeles. John Draper's story inspired several mentions in popular culture. Elements of the movie , where a hacker mentions that "Cap'n Crunch broke into the national phone system with a plastic whistle." He is also portrayed in the movie Pirates Of Silicon Valley . REFERENCES EXTERNAL LINKS
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