
Bad as Shit - rglover
http://www.textfiles.com/anarchy/JOLLYROGER/152.jrc
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300bps
I had a similar situation when I was 14 years old making prank phone calls. It
was 26 years ago and I stumbled on a block of numbers that contained every
phone company error message. You know... You have to dial 1, Don't dial a 1,
deposit a quarter, etc. Most of those numbers work to this day - 215-257-0012
to 215-257-0017.

The best trick I ever did with them was to record the message, "We're sorry,
you must first a dial a 1 to call this number" message onto my answering
machine when I was 21. People would call me, get my answering machine that
told them to a dial a 1, hang up then dial a 1 and then get the real phone
company error message, "We're sorry, it is not necessary to dial a 1 when
calling this number." I didn't get a single message for two weeks since people
were basically caught in an infinite loop.

I thought it was pretty funny until I came home from work one day and the
phone company was digging holes around my house. Apparently my mother reported
a problem on my line to the phone company who couldn't figure out how the hell
my line got mixed up like that so they just started digging.

~~~
sageikosa
Back when the registrar at Penn State could be accessed either directly
(standing in line), or via phone dial-in, my roommate and I recorded the
registrar's welcome message as our answering machine message. His mom was not
amused, but everyone else on campus who regularly called us enjoyed it.

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peterwwillis
I enjoyed scanning BellSouth's 780 oddball exchange (amongst others) as a kid.
It was their exchange to provide services to customers as well as linemen.
Sometimes you'd find a modem, sometimes an operator, sometimes an automated
service like ringback or ANAC. Some of these numbers would allow you to
control other lines or listen in, and abusing them resulted in jail time.

I would have a little black book with a number and what I found on the end of
the line, with pages and pages filled with weird unknown uses. Here's a
similar list of them compiled by someone else:
<http://www.angelfire.com/ga3/bigbossnms/exchange.html>

Funny now that I look back on it; apparently they transitioned these to 1800
numbers.
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0vLlaOY...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0vLlaOYd06UJ:www.psc.state.fl.us/library/orders/03/01971-03.PDF+&cd=10&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a)

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tptacek
I remember reading this when I was a teenager. I'm embarrassed that I ever
found it credible.

~~~
jerf
There's a category I have for this sort of thing, which I don't have a good
word for. The stories from the Daily WTF also generally get slotted in here.
It's "crazy stuff really _does_ sometimes happen in the real world, but you'll
never be able to verify this specific story either way".

Did this specific story happen? I'll never know. But there's equally crazy
stories that have happened. Not necessarily a lot, but non-zero. Much moreso
for the Daily WTF; every story is obviously not pristine, unvarnished truth,
but I've seen dozens of people pile on to how impossible a particular story is
when I've witnessed the moral equivalent in my own experience, so....

(Fortunately the truth value of this story doesn't matter.)

~~~
tptacek
I think we can be pretty confident that nobody called "The President's Secret
Bomb Shelter" from a pay phone, and nobody's uncle got in trouble for asking
about a phone number.

~~~
fuzzywalrus
Its a good way to check if your bullshit meter is working properly...

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themstheones
This seems made up to me. A bit too much like the movie Sneakers or something.
Plus the resolution with the uncle being able to get the answer seemed too
convenient. Is this a confirmed story?

~~~
jff
I'd say the second half is probably false. I wouldn't doubt that somebody
managed to find a weird number where the owners were evasive, but this sound a
lot like "My uncle works at Nintendo and he told me there's a secret level if
you can get Mario to jump into the sun".

If the number was such a big secret, how did his uncle, working at a random
federal agency, find out what it is? Need to know should have kept it from the
uncle, and goddamn common sense (and the threat of prosecution) should have
prevented him from blabbing to his idiot phreaker nephew.

Edit: this guy watched too much X-Files as a kid. Replace the caller with
Mulder and the uncle with A.D. Skinner, you've got something straight out of
an episode.

~~~
lanstein
There is a -1!

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8GOytc32RE>

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mwally
If you like these kinds of stories, here is the ultimate classic:
[https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B5iZB7A31G4Ic1VNS05TN3Zxa0k/...](https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B5iZB7A31G4Ic1VNS05TN3Zxa0k/edit?usp=sharing)

~~~
dominicgs
If you prefer not to use Google docs and just read the text, it's also part of
the JRCB, so can be found here:
<http://www.textfiles.com/anarchy/JOLLYROGER/150.jrc>

I remember being passed files from the cookbook on floppies at school, I
thought it was the greatest sources of information at the time, along with the
"Book of Forbidden Knowledge" that you used to be able to buy from ads in the
back of magazines.

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jcase
For some reason it reminded me of "The Electronic Money Mill". Original site
is gone but The Internet Archive has a copy:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20080412233535/http://www.msen.co...](http://web.archive.org/web/20080412233535/http://www.msen.com/fievel/mmill/index.html)

Fun (semi-fictional) read about Electronic Funds Transfer, crypto and the FBI.

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bitwize
As soon as the operator hung up without verifying the number I was expecting a
"World War III phone" style punchline to this.

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Aardwolf
"However, if he dialed 804-840 and four rather predictable numbers, he got a
ring!"

What are those predictable numbers? Is this a US thing? Thanks!

Super exciting article btw, what year is this from?

~~~
wcfields
___What are those predictable numbers? Is this a US thing? Thanks!_ __

Probably '1600' for the street address of the White House.

(For those non-Americans the White House is located at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave
in Washington, DC)

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scrapcode
I remember reading this in the ACB many years ago. Thanks for digging this up.

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languagehacker
Anarchist cookbook classic

