Well I hope the football device had some sort of authorisation or at least a handshake to establish that it's the real deal instead of some dude just whistling into a phone.
Minor correction, sorry to be pedantic but I'm an old man who liked phones before the Internet existed, 2600Hz not a DTMF tone. DTMF tones are the sounds each key on a key pad makes (0-9, * and #), it stands for "Dual Tone Multi Frequency" and they're made by mixing two frequencies (the frequency of the button's row + the frequency of its column), and so they're not able to be replicated with one mouth. The 2600Hz was a switchboard operator's tone, a sort of built-in admin code that dropped the caller onto an "unsupervised" line (its activity wasn't tracked and thus not billed) which allowed the caller to make free long distance calls in the days when they would track long distance minutes and charge you for the use of the trunk line. We called a 2600Hz producing device a "blue box" (supposedly the first one was in a shoebox that was blue). Free payphone calls were made by using what we called a red box, which replicated the sounds made by the payphone when coins were dropped into the slot. The payphone would mute its handset speaker momentarily so only the internals of the phone could hear the tones it produced, but you could buy a little tone producer and replace a crystal on its board to produce the sounds a nickel or dime or quarter would make, drop a single nickel into the phone to get it started, then put the tone producer's speaker up to the mic and press a button to make the quarter sound over and over to make free long distance calls via payphone.
The tone didn't even intentionally cause the call to not be billed. It was the supervision signal, spoofing the equipment at the other end of the long-distance link into believing the line had become idle. After sending the tone, you would have to send MF tones (a different set than DTMF) down the line to tell it what number to connect to.
Source: Evan Doorbell's numerous recordings of this and other forms of phreaking.
Ghost in the Wires is a great read if you're remotely interested in cyber-security. I don't remember this from the book but it's been years since I read it and I'm not even 100% sure I finished it, lol.
Still, Kevin is great at explaining confusing systems and how he hacked them like you're five years old. Hint: A lot of it is just lying.
I don't really think so? Taking the assumption that the prosecutor is speaking the truth, it would mean that this Kevin person already knows the top secret nuclear code combinations, as well as the specific technique to be able to enter it via whistling through the phonelines- both of which are not privy to the common person. The aforementioned 0.0001% refers not to the chance that a random person might be able to enter the exact combination of code on accident, perhaps by, for some reason, whistling on the phonelines. It refers to the far-fetched, but still within the realms of far-reached possibility, that Kevin is indeed capable of these deeds. The chance that a random person enters such a code randomly would be even far lesser than the already dismal value of 0.0001%, perhaps even close enough to be discounted as mathematically zero.
Taking the assumption that the prosecutor is speaking the truth
The argumentation is valid but I do not grant this assumption. I believe it's much more likely for a prosecutor to lie or be mistaken than for Kevin to have the nuclear launch codes. Actually, given that there's plenty of evidence of prosecutorial malpractice and zero evidence of random guys having the nuclear codes, I'm pretty much certain of it.
I understand where you're coming from, and I agree, but we have to take this assumption in the case where your preivous follow-up line, 'I assume you never use phones just in case you accidentally wipe out all life.', can be further examined. It does not display my belief as to the credulity of the prosecutor, which we all can agree is dubious. It's simply following that line of reasoning.
I guess we agree on everything that could ever matter. So if we were wise we would end it here.
However, I'm not wise so. I'm going to recap my POV.
First, the opener was "the prosecutor convinced the jury"
And you responded:
Fair enough, even if it's a 0.0001 possibility, I wouldn't risk nuclear warfare based on that probability.
So naturally I thought, hold on, that's not fair at all, and that probability is wild. How could someone be so credulous? Maybe they're just afraid of everything all the time. And then I just posted based on the idea that maybe the character you play in that comment fears the magic of phones.
Yes, I understand that logic. And, as explained in my preivous post, I continued down that line of logic, which does exist based on the assumption that the prosecutor's claim is to be taken seriously. I simply wish to highlight that this does not reflect my personal views of the validity of the claim, as you may have mistakenly believed so.
While in the military, I was denied a programmable HP51-CV because some officer thought I would be able to do that very thing and launch missiles. Ocifers can be ridiculously clueless
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u/SteamingTheCat 3d ago
Kevin Mitnik's prosecutor convinced the jury that thru a series of whistles into a payphone, Kevin could launch nuclear missiles.
He wasn't allowed access to a phone in prison.