Phreaking among the Gauchos
Connecticut Hacker Newsgroup - Issue 3
By Viktor Arevalo <viktare@well.com>
I told myself I was lucky when I returned to Argentina after ten years in Europe. I had read in Ed Krol's The Whole Internet that Argentina rated BIUF, an international connectivity rating better than Australia and much better than New Zealand.
Gophering, I even discovered a couple of Argentine addresses: the Foreign Ministry and La Plata University. "Argentina equals Switzerland as to Internet capacity," I celebrated in advance. "An internaut will miss nothing down there." The only minus point listed, compared to the USA, was the absence of OSI/ISO connectivity, of no consequence whatsoever for TCP/IP or the Internet as a whole.
When I arrived in Rosario on the Parana River, I found just a conventional phone jack in my house. I verified the jack right away: an old pulse line, with international access only feasible through an operator after waiting half an hour or more. The next day, I went to the nearest office of France Telecom S.A., the telco monopoly. A dour girl with a hare-lip and the body of a Greek goddess assured me: "You're fortunate, where you live you can tone dial internationally just by paying us $50". I signed a form and paid. Then I asked cheerfully, "Can you give me the addresses of some Internet access providers in the city?" The girl turned red and uttered back angrily, "Please, sir, don't make me such proposals! I'm a decent woman, I don't provide such things!" I didn't dare to inquire what the Greek goddess with the hare-lip had understood I wanted from her. I returned home baffled and worried. Nobody I met had the least idea about Internet.
Weeks passed. I noticed one day that I could tone dial internationally on that phone. I fired up my modem, called halcyon.com in Seattle and opened a common dial-up account and a SLIP account in less than 5 minutes. Then I connected to pipeline.com in New York and downloaded a file, 1,544,070 bytes, with ZModem. The download took 24 minutes, at a speed of about 11.000 bps-not bad for a place so far-and away. Before jogging, I called the international operator and asked, "How much cost per, minute to USA'?" He answered: "3.52".
"3.52 what, explain, please!" He stressed back: "3.52 US dollars, Sir, do you understand Spanish'? Dollars, Sir." The stupid 30 minute test had cost $105.60. My usual two daily hours on the Net would gulp more than thirteen thousand dollars a month. The only way to reach Internet from Argentina: dialing international calls at the outrageous rate of $3.52 a minute. No way.
After months of total incommunication and frustration, I met Kurt, who described himself as "a German visiting professor in Argentina from the University of Leipzig." His specialty was some obscure branch of optical links beyond my understanding. Even if he weren't a German scholar in such an unnatural and odd place like Rosario, Kurt would cut an imposing figure: black suit with a neatly knotted tie over a snow white shirt. Hovering over the suit were piercing black eyes framed by shoulder length black hair and a beard worthy of an Ayatollah.
When I told him about my isolation because of the phone rates, he responded: "Internet, Donnerwetter, my colleagues and pupils pass hours and hours on the Internet, they don't pay a cent. Please, Herr Kollege, come next Friday evening to our workshop about TCP/IP. I'll show you everything. First, I had to help a little bit, but they don't need me now anymore. These kids are really smart."
What an outspoken jerk I'd been. Of course there was Internet at the University, like everywhere in the world, with one or several 64K high speed links and racks of modems. Surely they'll loan me a point to point line, if I know how to ask for it. Why not? How foolish to have lost so many months with snail mail and faxes!
Next evening, I went to the Technological University clothed like an IBM executive of the old times with my darkest tie and my whitest shirt. The facilities reminded me of some cluster-bombed buildings in Abadan, South Iran, during the Gulf War. All window panes broken, all walls cracked. One could see and smell the decay and dirtiness of decades. I asked a fellow, some kind of guard or janitor, about Prof. Kurt and he answered with mocking disdain: "Ah,the German that looks like Rasputin, yeah, he's down there in the cellar with his lunatics. Is there some special show that you come so costumed?"
I tried to find the cellar, but got lost. All of a sudden, behind me, I heard to my relief the metallic voice of Kurt in impeccable Hochdeutsch: "Oh, Herr Kollege, you're here, quite early, people arrive in Argentina mostly an hour late. Come, please, we are about to begin the session." We went down a dimly lit flight of stairs. A massive, rusty iron gate, a piece of ancient design, offered access to the cellar, a total underground construction, most unusual in Argentina. Perhaps it was the remnant of some older building swallowed by the foundations. Six personal computers rested on a long table against one wall: cheap clones, mini-tower cases, 14" Samsung color VGA screens, rank and file in Argentina all running Windows 3.1. I couldn't see any cables and couldn't say if they were networked or not.
The atmosphere of the huge vaulted cellar reflected order, almost obsessive order, an cleanliness of the humblest sort. Greenish lights shone from side wall niches, indirect lighting perfect for working at the computers, but weird for anything else. How the place looked, nobody would say we were in Argentina. The setting was typical East European.
Four young Men and two girls, all in their twenties, sat before the screens, The acted polite, neat and grave, as though they were performing a ceremonial task. All greeted me respectfully, too much so for their local customs. They all stood up and gave me their hands. One told me: "I'm Nathan, we just assist Prof. Kurt. We worked as a team to learn abou the Internet and it's protocol.."
Nathan explained further: "we now run Windows in a peer to peer net. We usually call sirius.com in the USA on our V34 at 28800 We try at least, sometimes it fails and fails".
Nathan dialed a common touch phone, and When he heard something on the other side, he, threw a sharp screech through the phone mouthpiece with a walkman headphone connected to an IBM notebook. Then I perceived again the characteristic playing of phone numbers in tone. "This is CCITT five"' Nathan said.
A short modem negotiation of screeches came, sirius appeared and popped a SLIP node number, Nathan registered it and jumped to his desktop computer. he fed the address into Trumpet Winsock and ran Eudora to fetch mail. It surprised me how much mail they received and how much they sent back.
I asked Kurt if We could run Mosaic or NetScape.
It took no more than a minute to load Mosaic and it's, "What's New" page; the speed impressed me. "What's New" suggested a new Web page devoted entirely to cats. There we went: a center for cat owners and fans, where you can peruse all aspects of feline existence and ask counsel about your cat, even if it is on drugs like Prozac. We were roaming the Net until late, about 5am. An exhilarating experience after, so many months of exclusion! I could even log into CompuServe with WinCom through the Internet SLIP connection, using a small shareware program called comt that emulates a Hayes modem on TCP/IP.
Mosaic and NetScape brought images lightning quick for such a forgotten corner of the world, astoundingly quick. We used the Swedish telnet, freeware Ewan for telnet, which was excellent For email, Pegasus and Eudora were constantly checking in the background. For News they had the classic Trumpet News and Win News. All programs ran on all six pc's without a glitch. Time flew.
My backached, my eyes were swollen and my hands missed the keys. It was late, very late. All of a sudden I realized how different these people behaved from the hackers and internauts I knew. their commentaries were objective, sparse, and unobtrusive: about download speeds, better logging scripts for Winsock, or the advantages of PPP over SLIP.
They never bragged about what the accomplished. Kurt sat all those hours somewhere in the dark and didn't speak a word. He was working, perhaps writing at his tiny Toshiba protege'. Silence could be absolute in the cellar for 20 minutes, the mushy keyboards didn't even click. sound came only through the walkman, creating an eerie, ghastly atmosphere.
After the amazing session, I invited them all to a coffee breakfast in a shabby, dusty bar. All bars were shabby and dusty in these surroundings, but the coffee tasted great and the pastry was still warm from the ovens.
I felt exhausted. buoyant and worried. I told Kurt: "Great, this technological university seems ahead of all others in Argentina. How do they manage the phone bills? Do they enjoy an optical link with a flat rate? Where's the backbone?"
Kurt answered in his too-correct, cacophonous Spanish: "The University pays nothing. The cellar itself lies outside the premises of the university, it is a leftover of a mansion demolished 30 years ago. We use it and nobody objects. We wired and air-conditioned it using borrowed materials, the university provides nothing and opposes nothing. How do we call long distance? I thought you knew.
We simply phreak, Viktor, phreak and phreak!
We have gathered some 135 direct country services, 800 numbers for collect calls, we seize one or several trunks and stay online all the time we wish".
"Is it legal?" he continued. " I don't know. Is it fair? Yes. it is. We harm nobody. The phone company, a private French monopoly, voracious like a school of piranhas, charges $3.52 per minute to the USA. University teachers, students, young people, don't have a choice: if they want access to the Internet, they must phreak. We don't need any special hardware like the old blue boxes or the modern demon dialers from Holland. BlueBeep covers all our wishes. BlueBeep is a freeware from Hamburg that generates the trunk tones through the cheapest SoundBlaster clone. If you have the smallest doubt, you phone its author, Uncle Dittmayer, for help and he never asks a cent for support. We opened, of course, some SLIP and PPP accounts with American service providers on the West coast. We navigate the Net at a modest but acceptable speed under Windows. Internet is here a matter of survival, not like in the USA or Europe ... the university is totally bankrupt in Argentina, textbooks in the library are 20 years old, if you can find them. All subscriptions to scientific journals were canceled a decade ago."
I was shocked. Where I worked more than ten years in Europe, they punished phreaking as a federal offense, a crime. On the contrary, Kurt described phreaking in Argentina as the only path to Information Justice against the monopolies. The revelation took me absolutely unprepared.
The only backbones I had found where those in my own back and they began to ache terribly. I felt depressed and giddy. I showed the most sincere mixture of understanding and confusion. I slept that Saturday ten hours and dreamed nonstop about Tolkien's stuff: elves, dwarfs and orcs with phones but without a happy end. I never returned to that cellar.
I needn't resort to phreaking. Providence, personified by some old pupils of mine and friends in Switzerland, rescued me from the isolation of the Pampas. After delicate negotiations with German and Swiss banks, they hired for me a callback service with no time limits and at a flat rate, they say. They pay. The best present I ever had. I ignore how much it costs, but it works transparently and never lets me down. Kurt didn't comment much on my absolute *callback legal solution. He considered it morally inferior compared to phreaking and too dependent for his values. He told me: "You have to thank somebody for getting your rights, you degrade them to privileges and your solution remains purely personal. You harm nobody indeed, but you help only yourself."
At the end of November 1994, I met Prof. Kurt once more in a dilapidated pub near the harbor. He wanted me to help him in debugging some C++ routines; the problem was tough and we worked five hours on it with our notebooks. Then we ate dinner together. He commented that evening, "I understand your absolute reluctance to phreak. Anyway, what the students do with the phones in the cellar is very simple, any kid could do the same and phone all over the world without paying a cent. But the real possibilities, the great changes, are in the future. We could install here a cloaked Internet node with all the facilities of a large service provider, say like The Little Garden in the States or Rhein-Main in Germany. We could make a clean connection with the main optic link, which passes some twenty meters from the institute cellar.
Then the students will enjoy unlimited bandwidth, the bandwidth equivalent to 35 simultaneous ISDN connections. And the telcos would never know or suspect anything. Even if they knew, they would never spot our cable, not in a thousand years."
It seemed to me that Kurt knew what he was talking about up to the smallest technical detail, but ignored completely the legal implications and the political realities in Argentina. I liked Kurt and was distressed about the needless dangers he ran. I told him: "The legal consequences of your technical jump could be far reaching, too." And what I didn't say, but pictured in my thoughts, was Prof. Kurt without his notebook vegetating in some dungeon. But the mad all are in God's keeping. Anyway, I admired Kurt: he wasn't flashy, but did things in a solid dominating way. Even his dreams based on facts, he had a fanatical dedication: he wanted to end the Internet isolation of Argentina and the official hypocrisy hiding it. He stated to me his principles and
I could not contend their *morality;
- We don't harm anyone
- The telcos bar the public from any Internet access, but officially declare Argentina as enjoying all Internet services.
- People need the Internet here much more than in countries where the universities really work. Argentine universities are hollow shells without any resource or mission whatsoever.
- The telcos monopolize so much bandwidth that our calls take away nothing, just a little bit of their surplus, the discarded dark fiber.
But principles, and reality need a revolution to coincide.
Agraule, a graduate from the cellar team, a sad-looking and beautiful girl, told him once in my presence:
"Yes, Prof. Kurt, perhaps you're right, but it's much better to keep a low profile, Laws and judges don't have much to do with justice in Argentina. We have to prepare ourselves for the future. To break into any cable would first make us grow in numbers, and then destroy us all. It's too dangerous. You know too much for us, your wisdom will burn us out if we drink it all in one year. We need limits and goals, knowledge can be like rhino ammo and blow us away." Sunday mid-afternoon in January, torrid, unbearable hot, a deserted city. I almost hate the cicadas now. They are funny bugs first, then they batter the eardrums so much you cannot think. The people, the few people that remain in Rosario, sleep long siestas. I have to avoid siestas at any rate, they provoke head-aches and nausea in me, I was typing at my notebook and finishing the first draft of this article when the doorbell rang. A yawning old maid shuffled into my home office saying, "A foreigner, Senor, wants to see you".
Kurt came in: "Viktor, dear chap, I'm going back home and want to say good-bye. I hope I'll return next winter. But perhaps you don't stay much longer in Argentina. You suffer too much isolation, it's not the right place for you. Go away as soon as possible!" I responded, "Oh, yes, perhaps we meet again somewhere else, but I'll have to remain here half a year at least to streamline the farm. Do you return to your chair at the university in Leipzig'?"
Kurt answered, "Yes, something of the sort, a lot of matters pending." I asked, "How long have you taught at that university in Germany?" "When the Democratic Republic ceased to exist, they had to send me somewhere," he told me. "They sent me to Leipzig. They ordered me to leave Berlin, too, but for legal reasons. I'm under some sort of prosecution, you know, such things take years and years to clear." I asked, "What the hell, they prosecute you there because of phreaking?".
"Oh no, Viktor:'he said, "I wish it were so simple. I worked all my life, even before graduating and habilitating as a full professor, at the STASI (the East German Secret Service). They paid me as a university professor but my chair was without pupils and without university." I said jokingly: "Were you a communist James Bond, Kurt?" Kurt answered: "No, I hate spying and am not gifted for it. I was the manager of a whole technical area for computers and international telecommunications. We had to blow all STASI hardware and data before the takeover. I obeyed our orders to the letter. Now they try to find fault with such actions. That's of no consequence for my life, my career's closed, and I'll stay as a professor in Leipzig for life. A boring task indeed! Now, listen: I, we, could try to crack Intellink. It's easy. It's a quest."
When Kurt left, I felt I had found the last piece of a puzzle. I knew the local phone companies were no match for Herr Professor Kurt. Alas! It is a great and terrible world. BIUF or not BIUF, what does it matter. Mr. Krol?
