This Week in Security: Signal DRM, Modern Phone Phreaking, and the Impossible SSH RCE https://hackaday.com/2025/05/23/this-week-in-security-signal-drm-modern-phone-phreaking-and-the-impossible-ssh-rce/ #ThisWeekinSecurity #HackadayColumns #SecurityHacks #phreaking #recall #signal #News #CVEs #ai

This Week in Security: Signal DRM, Modern Phone Phreaking, and the Impossible SSH RCE - Digital Rights Management (DRM) has been the bane of users since it was first intr... - https://hackaday.com/2025/05/23/this-week-in-security-signal-drm-modern-phone-phreaking-and-the-impossible-ssh-rce/ #thisweekinsecurity #hackadaycolumns #securityhacks #phreaking #recall #signal #news #cves #ai

Imagine the look of confusion when I told my younger coworkers that my friend got suspended for using a Red Box in the highschool cafeteria.

I'm really disappointed that #phreaking is not a followed hashtag here. Lord knows there are enough geeks here, certainly enough old geeks here.

I wish I had been around when #phreaking was a thing

Gonna tell the kids this is how we got free long distance calls from payphones.

In 1903, as Guglielmo Marconi prepared to showcase his "secure" wireless telegraph at the Royal Institution, the demonstration was suddenly hijacked. Instead of Marconi’s message, the machine tapped out "Rats" in Morse code, followed by crude poetry mocking his security claims.

The culprit was Nevil Maskelyne, a stage magician and radio expert who knew Marconi’s system wasn’t as secure as advertised. Using his own transmitter, he exposed its vulnerabilities, marking the first recorded instance of hacking and signal hijacking.

In the early days of the internet, before slick blogs and endless social media feeds, TEXTFILES.COM was a goldmine for hackers, phreakers, and digital explorers. Launched in 1998 by Jason Scott, the site preserves thousands of underground documents from the BBS era. Guides on phone phreaking, early hacking techniques, and cyber counterculture manifestos are all there. It is a time capsule of raw, unfiltered knowledge from an era when the internet was wild and untamed. If you want to see where digital rebellion started, TEXTFILES.COM is still up, still free, and still essential reading.

In 1985, a group of hackers published the first issue of Phrack, a textfile magazine covering hacking, phreaking, and cybersecurity before those terms even had mainstream recognition. Over the past 40 years, Phrack has survived takedowns, legal threats, and the rise and fall of countless hacker groups. It remains one of the longest-running underground publications in history. A testament to the resilience of hacker culture.
Phrack remains as relevant as ever, continuing to inspire and shape the future of cybersecurity and the broader tech world. Here’s to 40 years of disrupting the system.
#Phrack #40YearsStrong #HackerCulture #Phreaking #TechHistory #CyberSecurity #DigitalRevolution #HackTheSystem

Exciting new (open access!) article from Jacob Bruggeman comparing "telephone enthusiasts" in the UK and phone #phreaking in the US. He argues compellingly that each contributed to a global movement of telco hackers.

Love this note about the availability of documentation: "To anyone paying close attention, the electronic keys to the telephone systems of both countries were ready for the taking."

Jacob A. Bruggeman, "Phreaking the U.K.", Interfaces, vol 6, 2025. https://cse.umn.edu/cbi/interfaces

Hello darling. Nice to see you. Its been a long time, you're just as lovely as you used to be. #phones #phreaking #landlines #omg #lol #wtf

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdD1LQs5Xak
#BoxingDay #Phreaking

This morning I have discovered iOS knows the word #phreaking but not Cuisinart. I am on board with this choice.

Unexpectedly Interesting Payphone Gives Up Its Secrets - Reverse engineering a payphone doesn’t sound like a very interesting project, at l... - https://hackaday.com/2024/12/11/unexpectedly-interesting-payphone-gives-up-its-secrets/ #reverseengineering #phreaking #assembly #firmware #payphone #cdp1802 #phone

Mistodon: and now for something completely different -- we're not showing off art (well, thanks for this nice logo, grymmjack!) but rather, we're requesting some of it! Our crew is celebrating its 30th anniversary at the end of this month, and we want to give everyone the opportunity to take part in the festivities and party like it's ... 1994.

If you have something specific in mind, we're very interested to see what you've got -- but if you could use a prompt to get the creative juices flowing, we have some suggestions:

1) We will be circulating an uncoloured, unadorned #Mistfunk logo outline and challenging the typographers among you to shade/colour/finish it off _in your own style_, hopefully yielding compelling variations on a fun theme.

2) There are thousands of artworks in our 30 years of back catalogues, and we would love to see some creative remixes, remasters, radical re-interpretations, skilled restorations and postmodern deconstructions of your favorite classic works from our back stacks.

3) As though you just fell through a time wormhole into 1994, draw up a promo for the same kinds of things we used to advertise in our packs -- the KiTSCHNet echomail network, Kithe e-mag, our WHQ the Screaming Tomato BBS (or its successor The Jade Monkey, if you prefer), or the PabloDraw ANSI editor (still under active development!) Or maybe you have a different cyberspace lost cause of 1994 that you'd like to give a last huzzah to -- a favorite MUD, newsgroup or GeoCities neighbourhood ... here's your chance!

4) If you care to open up the Moebius ANSI editor and join our networked server for the making of collaborative #ANSIart, in keeping with the #phreaking and #telephony roots of the underground computer artscene, we're hoping to collect a wide assortment of small ANSI vignettes of famous people, real and fictional, from TV, movies and real life, all taking part in a conference call on landlines, mobiles and cellular phones.

Please try to get your subs in not long after Nov 23rd, because we've gotta release this beast the following weekend! If you have any questions, you know where to find us!