Hacks, Kludges and Phreaks

It's a fine line between clever and malicious and AI is upping the stakes

Read first, then Listen!

Read first and be gobsmacked by the listen

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My first life hack:

1. Buy a 6-pack of RC Cola and get a second 6-pack free - BOGO! Back then a 6-pack cost around $1.20

2. Drink 12 bottles of RC Cola

3. Return the 12 bottles and get .10 cents apiece

4. DRINK ALL THE RC COLA YOU WANT FOREVER (or at least as long as the BOGO deal)

All the RC Cola you could drink was pretty sweet, but it was more than that - jubilation in beating the system. Being clever. Taking it to the man.

That’s the hacking mentality. Hacking began grounded in the clever. Computer programming is the ideal playground to invent creative and innovative ways to connect systems or write a program to do a thing with less code or more efficient code. Even do a thing that’s never been done. For a supremely cringey but peak Val Kilmer (pre Iceman) take on OG hacker culture, check out Real Genius.

Look up hacker now - it’s more than the good guys (white hats) and the bad guys (black hats), hacking is big business. How many data breach notifications have you gotten in the last six months? omg those make me so mad - you have one job, protect my data!

Here’s a shocker - hacking predates the Internet - it even predates personal computers. Hacking started with the telephone system and it was called phreaking (yep freak but with a ph like phone). The telephone system was a perfect target for burgeoning hackers - it was the world’s first global communication system. If you wonder how the Internet came to be check my TechTale origin story - What’s in a name?

Ever heard of the Captain Crunch whistle? Maybe not the whistle, but I bet you’re familiar with the top shelf crunchy sugar cereal. If you hunger for more about the multi-billion dollar cereal industry here’s another stellar TechTale: Lego my Logo!

My college roommate and best friend Rich would stuff jumbo dining-commons sized bags of Captain Crunch into his backpack and we’d have them with beer to fend off late night munchies. Isn’t that a better use for Captain Crunch than spinning up your 8 year into a sugar frenzy before you send them off to school?

If a pile of crunchy sugar isn’t enough to get you to buy a box, you buy it for the whistle, see? John Draper, AKA his hacker name Captain Crunch did just that, and in his subsequent sugar frenzy, discovered the whistle was exactly the same frequency (2600hz) that AT&T’s long distance switches used to transfer a call over to a long distance line. Thus the first phreak was born - long distance calls for free thank you BO’SUN WHISTLE:

Technically the CAP’N CRUNCH BO’SUN WHISTLE © 1971markus@wikipedia.de, CC BY-SA 4.0

Draper quickly figured out how to hack all the audio tones that controlled early telephone systems. If you’re old enough to remember a touch-tone phone or the squeal of a modem you know the tones I’m talking about. If you're not you’ll have to trust me or you can learn more and even see a picture of an ancient modem in TechTales The Need for Speed.

The power of audio tones in electronic signaling were used in other early tech as well. My sister and I scored an old console color TV for our apartment complete with the first remote control, an amazing Zenith Space Command. No batteries, no infrared, no volume, no mute - two mechanical buttons hit against different sized aluminum rods to generated a high frequency ultrasound tone to switch the channels. Like a tuning fork (except beyond human hearing frequency).

This was the same idea the telephone switches used but the Space Command wasn’t as precise. Ironically the ring tone of our old analog phone would confuse the TV and it would start switching through channels like it was possessed. Fortunately, there were only 13 channels so if you waited another ring, it’d cycle back to the original channel. Peggy had (still has) a collection of bangle bracelets that, when jangled, also confused the TV into changing the channel. A bowl of the Cap’n with beer and jingling bangles made for an entertaining evening.

The Captain Crunch whistle spawned a generation of phreaks. They built phreaking Blue boxes that generated all the right tones to scam AT&T. What the phreak man?

The 80’s movie War Games showed off a bunch of phreaking tricks and yep I talk a little about that in another TechTale called Friction is the enemy! John Draper met up with Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs in Berkeley and before Apple sold computers, Woz and Jobs had a go at selling blue boxes.

A Kludge is a bit different - it’s a quick and dirty solution to a tricky problem. Think Rube Goldberg and duct tape and baling wire. For example, say a variable in your program keeps getting doubled - instead of trying to debug your code to figure out why - just add a function that divides it by two! Kludges are often called Hacks and vice versa.

AI trickery has opened up a new frontier in hacking. More than free RC Cola for life is yours with a combination of hacks, kludges and an entirely new way to get phreaky. Also jail time.

Michael Smith of North Carolina is our protagonist in one example of hacking gone AI wild through arbitrage. Spotify was the target and Smith created hundreds of thousands of songs along with an army of bots or fake users that streamed them billions of times.

Smith made over $10 Million dollars on Spotify royalties for the fake songs. Spotify pays a fraction of a cent per stream. Smith needed a lot of songs and yep he used AI to create them. Catchy song names were AI generated too - like Calorie Screams and Zygotic Washstands. Michael hacked together a bunch of other tech like buying email lists for his users and using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to make it look like his users were streaming the songs all around the world.

It was a kludgy mess and now the Attorney General say’s it’s time for Smith to face the music. See, lawyers do have a sense of humor.

We’ve come aways since the BO’SUN WHISTLE. The new element here - or phreaking re-invented - is AI using Language. In this case it’s also making music to go with lyrics.

There’s something bigger afoot and I had an epiphany as I was writing this article. About a year ago I wrote a post called FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE launching Wirepine and this blog. In that post I traced the evolution of Internet/Social Media communication:

1. Text - Twitter

2. Pictures - Instagram

3. Video - TikTok

Substack as a platform that came after of course has all three in spades. As I've written and watched AIs evolution over the past year - I've wondered - is their a new medium of AI? Sure AI can generate text, pictures, video, music, but the thing that's groundbreaking is Language. It's speech. It's computers communicating with humans as peers - by speaking and listening just like we do most of the time.

I suspect I’ll have more to write about that - what do you think?

best, Andrew

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Postscript

Listen to the the audio summary at the top. It’s generated by a new AI service called NotebookLM from Google. I gave it nothing but the text of the article. It … elaborated and expanded and arguably did a better job driving my points home than the article does. It’s also feels a little generic, a little vapid - especially if you are a podcasts listener.

The AI audio summary get’s weirdly introspective in the end, even joking that they could be confused for AI (which of course they are!) and then philosophizing about the larger societal impacts of AI. I leave you with this quote near the conclusion:

AI could become the Ultimate Phreak