Friday, April 20, 2007

Signs of hacking

Josh's post below reminds me of the days when I read 2600 magazine, a quarterly devoted to all things hacking. It was way over my head at times; some articles reproduced an entire page or two of code (that you could use to, say, hack into a customer-service computer on the floor of Circuit City).

But boy did it appeal to my countercultural urges, not to mention the urge to save a few bucks. 2600 is so named because that is the frequency of the tone necessary to hack a payphone. When you pop a quarter into one, as you may or may not remember now, you hear a little audio tone, actually two alternating notes in a short burst. Someone enterprising somehow figured out (difficult to imagine how) that if you used a little whistle found in the bottom of some boxes of Cap'n Crunch cereal, you could reproduce the sound, which tricked the phone into thinking it had a new quarter on board. I'm dead serious. Sticking it to the Man, 21st-century style.

Then you have the cultural "hackers," who don't know much about computin', but know how to jam the gears of the mainstream machine. Among the heroes here are Adbusters magazine and Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping. (Sorry, Rev. Billy's site launches audio automatically. Isn't that always annoying?)

I remember one "culturejamming" stunt in New York. Picture a giant banner in midtown advertising a coming retail outlet of favorite liberal bugaboo DeBeers, which has an impressive/disgusting control on the dangerous international diamond market, often peopled on the supply end by gun-wielding gangs, many of them based in Sierra Leone. An elegant, bejeweled black model is pictured shilling with looks alone for the South African company, whose famous slogan you already know: "Diamonds are forever." In the middle of the night, a team of pranksters replaced the banner with one that looked more or less the same, except an African tribesman was pictured at right and the slogan on the left read "The Bushmen aren't forever." Lo and behold, I found the replacement simulated online.

Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:35 AM

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