Electron, a Melbourne hacker and rising star in the Australian underground, had been logging into a system in Germany via OTC's X.25 link. Using a VMS machine, a sort of sister system to Minerva, he had been playing a game called Empire on the Altos system, a popular hang-out for hackers. It was his first attempt at Empire, a complex war game of strategy which attracted players from around the world. They each had less than one hour per day to conquer regions while keeping production units at a strategic level. The Melbourne hacker had spent weeks building his position. He was in second place.
Then, one day, he logged into the game via Minerva and the German system, and he couldn't believe what he saw on the screen in front of him. His regions, his position in the game, all of it—weeks of work—had been wiped out. An OTC operator had used an X.25 packet-sniffer to monitor the hacker's login and capture his password to Empire. Instead of trading the usual insults, the operator had waited for the hacker to logoff and then had hacked into the game and destroyed the hacker's position.
Electron was furious. He had been so proud of his position in his very first game. Still, wreaking havoc on the Minerva system in retribution was out of the question. Despite the fact that they wasted weeks of his work, Electron had no desire to damage their system. He considered himself lucky to be able to use it as long as he did.
The anti-establishment attitudes nurtured in BBSes such as PI and Zen fed on a love of the new and untried. There was no bitterness, just a desire to throw off the mantle of the old and dive into the new. Camaraderie grew from the exhilarating sense that the youth in this particular time and place were constantly on the edge of big discoveries. People were calling up computers with their modems and experimenting. What did this key sequence do? What about that tone? What would happen if … It was the question which drove them to stay up day and night, poking and prodding. These hackers didn't for the most part do drugs. They didn't even drink that much, given their age. All of that would have interfered with their burning desire to know, would have dulled their sharp edge. The underground's anti-establishment views were mostly directed at organisations which seemed to block the way to the new frontier—organisations like Telecom.
It was a powerful word. Say `Telecom' to a member of the computer underground from that era and you will observe the most striking reaction. Instant contempt sweeps across his face. There is a pause as his lips curl into a noticeable sneer and he replies with complete derision, `Telescum'. The underground hated Australia's national telephone carrier with a passion equalled only to its love of exploration. They felt that Telecom was backward and its staff had no idea how to use their own telecommunications technology. Worst of all, Telecom seemed to actively dislike BBSes.
Line noise interfered with one modem talking to another, and in the eyes of the computer underground, Telecom was responsible for the line noise. A hacker might be reading a message on PI, and there, in the middle of some juicy technical titbit, would be a bit of crud—random characters `2'28 v'1';D>nj4'—followed by the comment, `Line noise. Damn Telescum! At their best as usual, I see'. Sometimes the line noise was so bad it logged the hacker off, thus forcing him to spend another 45 minutes attack dialling the BBS. The modems didn't have error correction, and the faster the modem speed, the worse the impact of line noise. Often it became a race to read mail and post messages before Telecom's line noise logged the hacker off.
Rumours flew through the underground again and again that Telecom was trying to bring in timed local calls. The volume of outrage was deafening. The BBS community believed it really irked the national carrier that people could spend an hour logged into a BBS for the cost of one local phone call. Even more heinous, other rumours abounded that Telecom had forced at least one BBS to limit each incoming call to under half an hour. Hence Telecom's other nickname in the computer underground: Teleprofit.
To the BBS community, Telecom's Protective Services Unit was the enemy. They were the electronic police. The underground saw Protective Services as `the enforcers'—an all-powerful government force which could raid your house, tap your phone line and seize your computer equipment at any time. The ultimate reason to hate Telecom.
There was such hatred of Telecom that people in the computer underground routinely discussed ways of sabotaging the carrier. Some people talked of sending 240 volts of electricity down the telephone line—an act which would blow up bits of the telephone exchange along with any line technicians who happened to be working on the cable at the time. Telecom had protective fuses which stopped electrical surges on the line, but BBS hackers had reportedly developed circuit plans which would allow high-frequency voltages to bypass them. Other members of the underground considered what sweet justice it would be to set fire to all the cables outside a particular Telecom exchange which had an easily accessible cable entrance duct.
It was against this backdrop that the underground began to shift into phreaking. Phreaking is loosely defined as hacking the telephone system. It is a very loose definition. Some people believe phreaking includes stealing a credit card number and using it to make a long-distance call for free. Purists shun this definition. To them, using a stolen credit card is not phreaking, it is carding. They argue that phreaking demands a reasonable level of technical skill and involves manipulation of a telephone exchange. This manipulation may manifest itself as using computers or electrical circuits to generate special tones or modify the voltage of a phone line. The manipulation changes how the telephone exchange views a particular telephone line. The result: a free and hopefully untraceable call. The purist hacker sees phreaking more as a way of eluding telephone traces than of calling his or her friends around the world for free.