For about 2.5 years now, Frappr.com has been pinpointing the location of PLAers all over the world. Are you on the map yet? Add yourself immediately so that you can feel that your miserable existence means something, just like the other 2,013 people who have put their pin on the map.

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The elusive Jolly Spamhead was located today when he slipped up by signing RBCP’s guestbook with a friendly message. Mr. Spamhead is alive and well and maintains a Myspace page. You can go there to read an entry about him being found. Or him finding us, or whatever. Anyway, welcome back, JS!

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Our April Fool’s joke on the world was so stealthy and so obscure and so brilliant that hardly anybody even noticed they were being fooled! But the joke is on all of you. You see, all that maroon color on this page uses the hex color code of #8C0000. And I changed the code to #8C0010 which is a slightly different shade of the same maroon! And none of you had a fucking clue either! HAH! The best part is that some of the pages on phonelosers.org remained at #8C0000 and others were #8C0010 all day. So half the time you were seeing maroon and the other half you were seeing maroon. Watch out next April 1st, suckers!

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Apparently everyone’s least favorite bridge troll Tr0n is in prison. “For being the 1337est hax0r of them all?” you’re probably thinking. Not quite. Tr0n was overheard in the Oregon prison exclaiming, “I’ve been taking it up the pooper since you were in diapers, kid! Ibaibaibaiba!”

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I got an email recently from an old PLA acquaintance (RiSc-Z3r0-> at Crackbox) asking me if I’d heard from Jolly Spamhead. I sure haven’t! And it turns out I haven’t heard shit from a lot of people in a lot of years. Good ‘ole Jolly Spamhead always seemed to somehow linked to various website defacements (remember KKK.com?) that gave shouts to the PLA. Has anyone heard from him??

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A lot of radio and TV hackerish-type shows have been popping up in recent years, some even worth listening to or watching. Most of these shows have archived their episodes and they can sometimes be very entertaining. Take some time today to discover some new shows that you like. They can be a nice replacement for the radio and TV that you’re used to. Here’s a list of shows you might be interested in. If you’d like to submit your own show archive to us, then do it.

• Steal This Radio Show MidKnight and El Gordo Uno’s new radio show.
  
• Default Radio
  
• Whitesword TV Whitesword does a lot of Urban exploring and films it for us.
  
• Radio Freek America
  
• Radio Prank This is a live stream of nothing but prank phone calls.
  
• Hektik Radio
  
• thebroken Very good TV show.
  
• Off The Hook This is a little show that Emmanual decided to start up recently. I don’t think it will last.
  
• The Haxor Radio Show
  
• PLA TV So it’s not a “show” really…but it’s a lot of videos that you might enjoy.
  
• Majestic’s Archive This isn’t a radio show, but an archive of several different radio and TV shows.
  
• Doug TV
  
• UberLeeto A weekly internet radio show hosted by Kizzle.
  
• HackerMedia A news source for the hacking/phreaking/geek media scene. Lots of episode archives from various shows.

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Today only, well maybe tomorrow too, you can watch RBCP kill ants LIVE on his web cam! This is a spectacle never seen before! You know why phonelosers.org is cooler than 2600, L0pht, Phrack and Defcon all put together? Because they don’t set up webcams for their ant traps. That’s right, only the PLA can bring you this kind of action!

Last night I’m chatting with Murd0c who is a regular user on Cal’s Forums and the guy who helped me hack a movie theater’s recording line awhile back. We’re chatting on Yahoo IM and he casually mentions that he’s going to be flying from Kansas City to his home in PA tomorrow and that he has a layover in St. Louis which is just 40 minutes from my house and that I should meet him at the airport. I ask him what time is the layover and how long. He says it’s a 2 hour layover which starts at 1:30pm. And I tell him that I can’t make it because I’ve got other things to do.

So this morning I’m talking to RijilV who happens to live next door to me. I mention that murd0c will be in town in an hour so we decide that it’d be fun to go visit him. And we do. We don’t know his flight number so we manage to get his mom’s number, hoping that she’ll answer her phone and she’ll tell us. But the only problem with this whole plan is that MURD0C WAS LYING TO ME. He never had any kind of layer in St. Louis, he’s just a compulsive liar and I was retarded enough to believe him. We spend about 30 minutes walking around the airport and looking at the Arrival screens trying to find the flight that might be Murd0c. Then we take a shuttle bus

Paging Mr. Murd0c Walking around asking random people if they’re murd0c doesn’t work so we have the information booth page him. RijilV writes down the number they use to page people.

to the other side of the airport and check all the monitors there. Nothing really resembles anything that he could be flying in on. I call up Southwest Airlines to see if he’s on any of their flights today and he’s not.

Ever since we’d left the house, I’d been calling his mom’s cell phone so I could ask her the flight number. And around this time she finally answers the phone and she thinks I’m murd0c at first. When I tell her I’m not, she gets really pissed off and demands to know who I am. I tell her that I’m a friend of his and that he was supposed to be at the airport and I just wanted to meet him. She gets really defensive and says that he didn’t have any layovers and was flying straight to Pennsylvania. I mean geez, you tell a lady that you’re a 30-year old man wanting to meet her teenage son in another state and she gets all mad. She finally hangs up on me and RijilV calls her back, gets her voicemail and says something like, “Yes, we have your son here and we need you to confirm his identity. Please call us back…”

We wandered around the airport for another 30 or 40 minutes. RijilV played around on an unattended Windows machine in the luggage area for awhile and finally rebooted it, hoping it might somehow crash murd0c’s flight. Then we videotaped some guy trying to sell us some kind of book on reincarnation. After pondering stealing luggage from the carousels, we finally decided that murd0c really wasn’t going to show up and we left. I made another call to murd0c’s mom and told her that she was right - her son really didn’t have a layover flight in St. Louis. Then she quizzed me about who I was for a few minutes and I hung up. Then RijilV decides to call up and apologize for the voicemail he left for her. She hangs up on him. Right around this time is when Murd0c starts calling RijilV’s cell phone. RijilV answers and yells at murd0c for about a minute straight, for lying and making us drive to the airport. He tells murd0c that my car got fucked up while it was at the airport and that it’s making a horrible noise. Which was really believable since my car happened to be making a really horrible noise at the time. And he told him that as soon as we get home we’re going to delete his account on Cal’s.

Neither of us were pissed really, we just wanted to make murd0c worry. And it worked. Murd0c starts calling RijilV’s cell phone over and over and over and leaving messages. For the entire drive home, murd0c calls and leaves voicemails to RijilV. Then he calls my cell a few times but doesn’t leave any messages. When we’re almost into Alton again, RijilV makes me stop the car as he’s calling and answers the phone. He jumps out of the car so that murd0c can hear the traffic rushing by and is yelling things like, “Yeah RBCP’s car broke down, we’re not even out of St. Louis yet. Hey I gotta go, the tow truck is here!” And he hangs up on him.

Frantic Messages RijilV won’t answer his phone so Murd0c resorts to text messaging him in addition to leaving messages.

About 10 minutes later after we’ve made it across the bridge and back into Alton, murd0c sends a text message to RijilV begging us not to destroy him for this. Then he starts calling my cell phone over and over which I don’t answer. We decide that we won’t talk or chat with murd0c for a full 24 hours just to make him sweat and lose sleep. I guess that won’t work now since I plan to upload this update in a few minutes and he’ll see it tonight. But that’s probably a good thing, I imagine murd0c isn’t too happy right now. Don’t worry, murd0c, you’re still our friend! We had a pretty good time at the airport and listening to murd0c panic definitely made the pointless trip worth it. But I hope murd0c never actually has a real layover here cause I sure won’t visit him after all this.

UPDATE 4/23/2003: Today I pranked murd0c’s mom again. And it was funny as hell. And I screwed up the recording of it so I can’t share it with anyone. And that sucks. But then his mom called me back and I wasn’t able to answer in time so I called her back. Murd0c didn’t seem happy about this. So here is the 2nd phone call and here is the chat log of murd0c not enjoying the news.

12/22/05 - Dave from Ownz: I am ?Teh Zexy > R u TeH Secksee ? :{__

09/28/05 - Nawleed from Murdocs ass: Haha, Murdoc sucked my dick

RBCP’s First Redboxing Tape This 10 year old tape contains 1 dime tone, 8 quarter tones, a recorded prank call, then the awesome hits of Winger, The Cure, Skid Row and Paula Abdul!

Today I was reading the posts on the UPL BBS and I spot one where they’re talking about red boxing not working anymore. Bullshit, I think. For over 10 years now people have been telling me that red boxing no longer works. When I first read about red boxing on WWIVnet in 1991 I started asking people on there about it and several people went into great technical detail about why red boxing wouldn’t work. Some said it never worked and some said it used to but didn’t anymore. I didn’t listen and i tried it anyway with my mom’s old tape recorder and of course it worked. It took me about 30 minutes to record some good tones from one pay phone to the other. I probably wasted $10.00 in quarters that night trying to get the tones just right, not knowing that I could dial differently and not have to lose my quarters each time. But it worked and ended up being worth the money and effort.

The people on WWIVnet didn’t believe me. Some said that if I was successfully red boxing then my local phone company must be running really old equipment or the pay phones must really be old. I start driving all over town, creating a log of every pay phone that will accept my recorded tones. Pretty much every pay phone worked except for the few COCOTS in town. They said it must just be Illinois. So I start a cross-country trip of red boxing every pay phone I run into. It works everywhere and people finally start to believe me. 2600 Magazine does an article on converting a tone dialer into a red box and suddenly red boxing is a huge fad for the next decade.

For about 5 years now I’ve considered myself as some kind of hub for red boxing knowledge. Yeah I know, it’s a lame title to hold yourself to. Even though I quit red boxing years ago I get emails every day from people about red boxing. For these 5 or so years now people have always claimed that red boxing doesn’t work where they live. It was never true, the people trying just didn’t try hard enough or they were trying to box a COCOT or their tones were distorted or the volume was too low on their device or that particular phone was muted or the moron put the wrong kind of crystal into his tone dialer or they didn’t even actually TRY it before they told me it didn’t work. It was always something but red boxing always worked if you put a little effort into it.

Back in 2000 someone on a message board made a claim that red boxing was really dead this time so I went out and got a clearanced tone dialer and built a red box so I could try it and prove him wrong. It worked from almost every pay phone I tried so I got to point and laugh at this guy. Then recently on the UPL BBS ChaoS writes, “You can box local calls, but not long distance because at&t has discontinued use of their ACTS long distance service. So, only local calls are able to be put through.” Here’s another guy who didn’t try hard enough, I think to myself. But I’m getting a lot of emails from people lately saying the same thing so I decide to go out and see for myself. I dig around in a few drawers and locate my old red box that hasn’t been used in several years. I blow off a layer of dust and try it out but nothing. I check the batteries and see that they’ve leaked all over the place so I go to find some new ones. In a few minutes I’m off with my red box and camera in hand.

I start driving through Alton in an attempt to prove ChaoS wrong. The first pay phone I drive up to on Milton Road is missing from it’s stand. The next one I find at Reister’s Auto is in such bad shape that I’m afraid to touch it for fear of disease. I finally find a drive-up phone at the Mini Coral. I dial a random number in South Carolina and a voice tells me, “We’re sorry, your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please check your instruction card and try again.” I look at the instruction card to confirm that I’m dialing correctly. I try another random phone number in Oregon and get the same message. Weird, maybe the coin box is full. I drive over to the next block and try the pay phone at the post office. (The very pay phone that Fuzzy Bird got pissed off about his calls being so damned expensive.) I get the same message. This isn’t going very well.

I walk around to the other side of the building and try the phone by Subway, same thing. Then I get back in my car and pull up to the phone in the parking lot only to get the same message again. I’m starting to believe it won’t work as I dial “0″ to ask an operator about it. I tell her I want to make a call with coins and she puts me through to AT&T. AT&T asks for my number and then asks me to deposit $4.80 for the first 3 minutes. It works! I box in about $3.00 and pause to jingle the money in my ashtray by the phone as I say, “Boy, I sure do have a lot of quarters here!” so the operator will believe me. I was trying to get her pissed off so she’d say something comical like, “I’m going to send the police over there to get you!” but no luck. She believed my tones were real and put my call through. The random number I tried was a disconnected line so I guess she got the last laugh on that one.

There’s still gotta be a reason I can’t dial my calls direct anymore so I call back in and get another AT&T operator to talk about my problem. She tells me that all the phone companies in the United States are completely phasing out coins on pay phones and very soon I won’t be able to even have a live operator accept my coins. “Do you know what date exactly I won’t be able to red box anymore?” I ask her. She says there’s no exact date but most likely by summer if not sooner. So it’s finally true! The days of red boxing are numbered. The days of coin refund checks are forever gone. I slapped a PLA sticker on the phone and stopped by the Piasa Pantry for a Pepsi. As Janay the cashier was taking my money I commented, “Did you know that AT&T stopped accepting ACTS tones so owning a red box is pretty much useless now?”

“Yeah I found that out the hard way during Christmas break,” she replied. “It’s not like it matters though, all the cell phone carriers are practically giving away free calls so it’s almost pointless to red box anymore.” And she’s right. Who the hell red boxes this millennium anyway? Anyone who owns a cell phone can talk for free on the nights and weekends (and sometimes more) and they don’t even have to be inturrupted every 3 minutes to deposit more money. And just about every other method of free illegal phone calls will still work. Using calling cards, diverters, PBXes and call forwarding isn’t going to die any day soon. The only thing red boxing really ever had going for it was that any idiot could do it and it was an extremely cool thing to show off to people. When I got home I dug through my email and found one where a guy named Ben Lazan sent me an article about pay phones no longer accepting money. The article is actually a press release from AT&T’s web site, stating that they’re eliminating coins as a payment option. You can read it here.

So you heard it here, red boxing is most likely over with. Sometime soon I’ll update my Red Boxing for Dummies page to reflect the change. I honestly never thought it would happen but it seems like it finally has. I already decided to stop selling the crystals as PLA merchandise since Radio Shack discontinued the tone dialers a few years ago. Don’t go selling your red boxes though, remember those are a piece of H/P history! And to all the people who’ve recently bought 6.55 MHz crystals from me only to read this article and find out that it doesn’t work anymore, I say, “HAHAHAHA, YOU SUCKERS, I SURE SCREWED YOU GOOD! BUHAHAHAHA! You shouldn’t be trying to steal from the phone company anyway.”

Many phone phreaks have utilized the usefulness of a Palm organizer over the past several years. What they don’t realize is that their Palm organizers can help them in their everyday phreaking activities. Here are a few of our favorite Palm programs:

• Pay Phone Commander v2.4 - phone company technicians use their TechNet terminals for everything from finding spare pairs when installing new service to basic pay phone maintenience. The Pay Phone Commander emulates the TechNet commands that let a technician access public phones via the infrared port that is found on most pay phones below the coin box. The layout of the program is very simple to use and lets you perform routine tasks like changing the way the phone bills you (making LD calls free) and emptying out the coin hopper with one stroke of the sylus.

• Palm Red/blue Box - you’ve heard people claim that red boxing won’t work on the Palm since the Palm can only handle a single tone at once and a red box emmits 2 different tones simultaneously. Well that problem is solved thanks to the Palm Red/blue Box. Instead of playing the tones simultaneously, it alternates between the 2 tones very rapidly which fools the phone company’s system into thinking you’re really depositing money. This program works perfectly for all the coin tones as well as the blue box tones.

• ToneLoc Palm Edition v1.0 - based on the best war dialer ever made, ToneLoc makes it’s comeback once again. Now you can program your Palm to dial thousands of numbers in sequence without fear of the phone company catching on and tracing the calls, you just place your Palm inside a TNI box or telco box and let it dial away. Just like ToneLoc, it saves any computer carriers it finds for you. You can also use this program as a pager bomber, just enter a pager exchange and the number that you’d like to show up on thousands of pagers.

• Cell Phone Toolbox - this is a great program to use in busy malls. It uses the Palm’s infrared port to grab ESN/MIN pairs from nearby cell phone users. Most digital cells phones have built-in infrared ports that shoot out their ESN/MIN pairs and phone number every few minutes while the owner of the phone is using the phone. Go to a busy place and you’ve got ESN/MIN pairs bouncing all over the place and the Cell Phone Toolbox will grab them and log them for later use. You can use the ESN/MIN information to clone that person’s cell phone (which this program will do with the proper cables) or since it also grabs the phone numbers of nearby users, you can use your own phone to call them up and screw with their heads. This program is sure to bring you plenty of entertainment.