Mike Ritland
speaker
855 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Feb 2025
Mike Ritland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
The Shawn Ryan Show · #164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare · 29 Jan 2025
podcast
We're going to take all the things. Keeps you busy, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
See what I can say.
Oh, yeah, yeah. So all the security stuff I was doing, the times I was doing help desk and stuff like that, security, for the most part, anything security-connected was a hobby. So even the overclocking and water cooling, that was a hobby too, but... Yeah, 2600 is kind of a hacker zine, I think they're quarterly.
There's lots of people writing in to show tricks they've done, whether it's with pay phones, phone freaking. Wait, so what is 2600? It's a hacker zine, basically. Like a magazine? Yeah, like a little magazine. You can go to Barnes and Nobles and get it.
I think it's quarterly, where they will just publish a new set of little articles written by different people that talk about how to hack something, how they hack something, just cheats on systems, just sometimes politics, just hacker-minded stuff. Gotcha. But that was also, when I first got into that, phone phreaking and stuff was more popular then as well.
Yeah, so that's hacking with phones, basically. So this goes back way, way long ago. God, I think the guy's name was Joy Bubbles, actually. Deaf guy. Or, sorry, not deaf. That wouldn't make any sense. Blind. And he noticed that there were, like, tones on a phone when, you know, connecting to overseas and stuff.
Like, this is way back when, you know, you had to pay long distance and stuff like that, right? But phone calls cost a lot of money. But he noticed they made, like, certain tones and stuff, so he had perfect pitch, and he would just whistle them back. And he noticed, like, the phone network would do stuff when you did that. So, yeah. There's what we call in-band signaling.
When you can hear the signal, the other end, you know, there's like the switch panel of the phone networks hear these tones, and it's like, you know, when you push numbers on the keypad and they make a tone, right? Yeah. If you do it in a certain sequence, it's like, oh, it hears that. There's other tones that the keypad doesn't make that tell it to do other things.
It's where the 2600 comes from, actually, 2600 hertz. I can't remember what that does, but... At the moment. But it would allow certain administrative type functions. And it's like routing around like, oh, you paid and now you can route long distance or something like that, right?
So hold on, hold on.
Yeah, I mean, at least at the time. Things have changed since then. But yeah, it was just the tones. You could literally whistle those tones or hum them or whatever. So blueboxing was the other thing it's called. There's many boxes, many colors, but blueboxing just replicated that.
You could literally quickly dial a number or whatever you wanted to do, do the administrative codes, play it right into the mouthpiece, and you would dial and do all these things.
Believe it or not, that's how Apple started. Woz and Jobs made some of their first money selling blue boxes. What is a blue box? So it's the device that would allow you to more or less get free phone calls in the age of having to pay for long distance and stuff. Like go to a pay phone, just pull out your blue box, hold it up to the mouthpiece, press some buttons, make it do what you want.
Call whoever you want. It was illegal at the time. There was a magazine I got into by a guy named Cap'n Crunch at the time. He got that name because there is a whistle inside of the Cap'n Crunch cereal. that just happened to make that 2600 tone when you blow it. So he didn't have perfect pitch like Joy Bubbles did, but he had the whistle.
So you just blow that into the phone, then you open up certain access with Cracker Jack. Not Cracker Jack, but Cap'n Crunch style toy, which is really cool. But, yeah, you can electronically reproduce those sounds, and that's what they were doing with the blue box. There was, like, red boxes and rainbow boxes.
There was so many different boxes that would do different things that people would figure out, and they would share that with each other. And, yeah, it was technically criminal, but a lot of people did it at the time. And, yeah, Woz and Jobs took that money and started Apple with it. Nice.
Very cool. And I would love to meet that guy one time, but he's a great example of like the old school hacker that was way more about like mischief and just figuring out how things work and not necessarily anything criminal.
Great example.
Yeah, so I wasn't working there. I was just enjoying it. And there were a lot of different cities would have meetups. Like, hey, 2600 meetup. And you go and meet people that are into that stuff. Really tiny where I was from, so I didn't really go anywhere. But that was cool. It would get you into just more like, hey, here's other ways of hacking that you didn't know about.
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