Nine Sheep Folds

 

When I was a kid, it was common for breakfast cereal to come packaged with a toy in the box (as if all that sugar wasn’t addictive enough). In 1963, Cap’n Crunch came with a piece of plastic that looked like a bosun’s whistle. It produced a 2600-hertz tone, coincidentally the same sound used by AT&T to control its phone network. It unlocked a loophole in the system, allowing people to hack into AT&T and illegally get free long-distance calls. These early experimenters, dubbed “phone phreaks,” laid the groundwork for what would later become modern hacking culture. Hackers built “blue boxes” that more precisely reproduced the tone. Even Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built and sold blue boxes during their college days. So, if you’ve ever watched the 1992 movie “Sneakers” and been puzzled by the character Whistler and his criminal background, now you know. If you didn’t know long-distance calls used to be very, very expensive, I can’t help you.