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BLUEBEEP.DOC
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.DOCUMENT BlueBEEP Documentation
.TOPIC Editorial
.SUBTITLE Hello and goodbye - an adventure 2 years in the making
- Welcome to BlueBEEP 1.00 -
Today, it's been two years since I sat in my room in Hamburg
and casually decided that I am going to start the next couple days
on writing a little blueboxing tool for myself and my friends. It
should be a project that changed the world; mine, and those of others.
Five days later, the first version, 0.01 was finished and I called
my friend uptown. "I wrote a little bluebox in Pascal. You want me to
send it over to you so you can check it out?" The next day he rang me
up in the evening and told me that he liked it a lot, and if I could
add a couple of features. He also suggested that I should give it a try
and upload it to a local warez board so we could see if other people
liked it too.
A warez board. Holy shit.
About a week later, I called my local uucp email provider to see if
that girl I was writing with already sent me a reply. When I logged on,
I didn't find 1 message.
I found 57.
A total of fifty-seven people from all over the world had sent me
letters about how much they liked BlueBEEP and what kind of features
they were missing direly from other, older blueboxes that were out. Or
those cool menus they had in that Amiga bluebox. Or this. Or that. It
was out of control. As much as everyone rags on the warez scene, it's
sure as hell the best digital junkmail network you can imagine; you
throw something into it, and thousands of warez puppies make sure it
ends up in everybody's front yard. God bless WaReZ.
The overwhelming interest in the program never subsided. If
blueboxing died in one country, other people in a different country
finally figured out what they could do by shooting some signals down to
a remote CCITT long-distance switch. It was seeping down from the more
elite countries all the way to the bottom: USA, Canada, Western Europe,
then Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Brazil.. It blew me out of my chair.
While I kept on developing BlueBEEP, I received a clip from a norwegian
newspaper in the mail. A big article, with an image that pictured a
very concerned looking guy in a suit in front of a PBX system. From the
norwegian blah underneath I could only tell my handle was mentioned.
And BlueBEEP. In a huge double-page article with screen-shot. WTF! The
english translation that was neatly made on a laser printer, made me a
little bit wiser.
"SHELL NORWAY IS SUFFERING MAJOR LOSSES FROM A PROGRAM THAT IS BEING
PASSED AROUND IN THE NORWEGIAN COMPUTER UNDERGROUND FOR UP TP Nk. 20000
PER COPY. THE PROGRAM, WITH THE RIGHT SETUP, ENABLED THE USER TO USE
SHELL'S TELEPHONE SWITCHING SYSTEM TO MAKE FREE PHONE CALLS AT SHELL'S
EXPENSE. BLUEBEEP, AS THE PROGRAM IS CALLED, WAS CREATED BY A COMPUTER
HACKER FROM HAMBURG, GERMANY WHO GOES BY THE NAME OF "ONKEL DITTMEYER".
LOCAL INVESTIGATIONS IN GERMANY ARE STILL PENDING AT THIS TIME..."
The suit on the picture threw me evil looks, and I sat down. Here we
are, giving people free tools to explore the phone system, learn, and
trade K-RaD 0DaY WaReZ for free! Then some asshole turns it into
white-collar crime and we get blamed for all the shit. Luckily, in
the long run, nobody ever came to my house and asked me to "move it"
downtown. Our "local investigators" must have been too busy scooping up
the guys that got jumped by some Turks last night. Busy Police is one
of the few good things about living in a crappy neighborhood.
However, BlueBEEP made it through. Maybe not in a steady flow, but
I always managed to come up with something new and throw it into the
big junkmail machine. In December '93, I flew to the states on some
saved-up money and attended HoHoCon. I had just completely rewritten
BlueBEEP from pieces, cluster by cluster, from my hard drive that had
just crashed. It took me about 5 days of coding - without a break. The
combination of loud music, coffeine and painkillers is a productive
one,I was just comfortably feeling numb while and about 2 weeks after
I did it. All programmers must have these moments. In Texas, a couple
of the people there had already played around with the program, and it
was up on most local h/p bbses there. I was supposed to talk about the
program, but by the time my english was bad and I was too chicken to
go up and dare to bore 350 hung-over and grouchy hackers! (sorry dFx)
DrunkFux should get some credit here, because I always harrassed him,
both '93 and 94, to give me a speaker slot and I never took him up on
it at the actual con. I better watch out now! But you can't see him
coming, each time I see him he has a different hair color. He'll
probably print my name on the TOP TEN CHICKEN LIST when he makes next
year's HoHo-shirts. Eye phear!
After that, I couldn't really program too much because my life
turned out of control, and I never had the time and the piece of mind
to focus on and do some good programming. Somehow, I managed to release
0.09 and 0.10, 0.10 with some really interesting improvements, like the
internal file structure etc. Since Summer '94 or so, nothing much was
done on the code because until recently I couldn't get the 3 necessary
components together: Inspiration, Peace of Mind and Hardware. Now that
my life is somewhat calmer now, my straightforwardness and my focus
has returned but BlueBEEP - for a long time now - is basically sucked
dry for improvements. There is no useful feature that could be added.
If it was there and it made sense and it was possible to realize it,
some user let me know about it and it has been implemented. For a
couple months already, there are no more useful suggestions coming in
on how I could be improved. Want a wardialer? Try ToneLoc. Want a
terminal? Try Telix. Want cryptostuff? Try PGP. Nothing really made
sense, and that's the state the program is in right now. With this last
version, I just added some tiny little details and fixed some bugs. One
thing is special about it though:
IT IS THE LAST RELEASE
I will make no further improvements, bug fixes or releases of this
proggy. For fairness, learning and to keep the hacker spirit of the
50's and 60's alive, I make the whole unabridges source code available
to everybody for improvements, very like the way it was done at MIT
when programming was coming to life back in the days.
If you would ask me if I think that publishing the source code is
a good idea, I would have to say no. It is unevitable that some teenage
lamers from all over the world are going to come out with bad bluebeep
hacks that don't really work, that people are gonna steal parts of this
code and use it without giving me the props, and that people are going
to flame at me on how bad my programming sucks (feel free). It is
definitely not smart, but it's Right. And, tons of people are bickering
for linux/windows/os2/insert_os_name_here versions. Well, go ahead,
port the thing (I did't tell you it was fun, remember that!) and give
me the credit. I am not good enough a programmer to port it into all
those environments, but if you think you can do it for just one, go
right ahead. Unless anyone is going to sell this code or portations of
it, it's cool with me. Just let me know if you can, OK?
Some acknowledgements to people who really helped along the way:
Prime/Spyce - for getting me into boxing in the first place
Urmel - for making some cool adlib sound routines
ECR - for stealing them from Urmel and giving them to me :)
LowCyl - who betatested it in the rough WaReZ reality, 24/7.
Tr8or - who always came up with something good.
Werdohl M.R. - for keeping all of us entertained at all times
DrunkFux - for his talent in organizing cool events
Beetle - who opened my eyes on many ideas and helped me manage
Carlos (C.A.T) - for running the BlueBEEP Fan Club in Brazil
and wife
#phreak/#hack - stuck on a higher level (gnawt) try #k0dek1dz
Pluvius - just for being a cool contact
and all those that cheered, complained, suggested, rumored, uploaded,
ftp'ed, traded, toted, spread, criticized and used BlueBEEP all along.
Happy Birthday and goodbye.
- Onkel Dittmeyer, April 1st, 1995
.END
.TOPIC GAWD-DAMN!
.SUBTITLE Something came along and nuked the docs!
|RGAWDDAMN, |WSHITFUQ, |YMUTHAFUQIN JEZUZ KRIST! |ZBVERFLIXT 'N ZUGENAEHT!!!!
Just when I was editing this file tonight, a straight text file about
90k in size, my editor crashed while saving the file and completely wiped
it out. However, the documentation of the source code was not affected and
you can still read it as source.doc (plaintext). I will re-write and release
the fixed documentation in the next couple of days; however because I want
to keep my promise of having the source out on April 1st, BlueBEEPs second
anniversary, I am releasing it anyway. You can grab the full documentation
in a week or so at ftp.fc.net, and I bet it will also be traded around on
#phreak/#phreak/#warez*. Stay tuned. The editorial survived the crash; chew
on that in the meantime ;-]
|COnkel Dittmeyer / [email protected]
|BApril 1st, 1995
.END
.ENDDOC