Hacker News: plapsley

New comment by plapsley in "Phone Trips"

plapsley — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 18:55:37 +0000

This is such a great site. Any of Evan Doorbell's "How I Became a Phone Phreak" or "Sounds of Long Distance" are especially great.

New comment by plapsley in "Joybubbles – The Forgotten Story of an Accidental Phone Hacker"

plapsley — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:52:06 +0000

Rachael Morrison and her team poured their heart into this and it shows... it is just so good. (Disclaimer: I was interviewed for the movie and narrate parts of it.) See it if you can.

New comment by plapsley in "Joybubbles, early phone phreak, Documentary"

plapsley — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 17:23:29 +0000

Rachael Morrison, the director, was kind enough to invite me to the premier at Sundance, since she interviewed me for the film. She and her crew did an amazing job. She found so much archival material and she and her team stitched it together to tell a moving and historically accurate story. People were in tears after the premier. Just so good.

New comment by plapsley in "The best things and stuff of 2025"

plapsley — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 16:53:30 +0000

Hey Fogus! A few links or resources you might enjoy:

* Nationwide Operator Toll Dialing, 1945: https://explodingthephone.com/hoppdocs/nootd1945.pdf

* General Switching Plan for Telephone Toll Service, 1930: https://explodingthephone.com/hoppdocs/gspts1930.pdf

* (Book) Engineering and Operations in the Bell System, 1984: https://bitsavers.org/communications/westernElectric/books/E...

* (Shameless plug) My book on the history of phone phreaking, Exploding the Phone, which has a lot of stuff on Engressia in it: https://explodingthephone.com/

Also, there is a documentary film coming up at Sundance about Engressia! https://festival.sundance.org/program/film/6932fad21a5535277... Very excited to see it!

New comment by plapsley in "The Hobby Computer Culture"

plapsley — Tue, 27 May 2025 21:37:43 +0000

That's awesome, thank you!

New comment by plapsley in "The Hobby Computer Culture"

plapsley — Tue, 27 May 2025 19:56:52 +0000

Evan's stuff is excellent and worth watching/listening to.

Shameless plug: if you like his stuff, you might also like my book, "Exploding The Phone", which is a history of phone phreaking. https://explodingthephone.com/

Evan narrated the Audible version. :-)

New comment by plapsley in "Joining Sun Microsystems – 40 years ago (2022)"

plapsley — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 18:19:12 +0000

Thanks for the mention and honored to be in the same mention as Soni and Goodman's book on Shannon!

New comment by plapsley in "Decoding the telephony signals in Pink Floyd's 'The Wall'"

plapsley — Sun, 22 Dec 2024 21:48:32 +0000

CCITT (ITU-T) version can be downloaded for free (!) from their website. https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-Q.140-Q.180-198811-I/en Specific download link in English is https://www.itu.int/rec/dologin_pub.asp?lang=e&id=T-REC-Q.14...

New comment by plapsley in "Decoding the telephony signals in Pink Floyd's 'The Wall'"

plapsley — Sun, 22 Dec 2024 21:30:12 +0000

Yes. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signaling_System_No._5

SS5 was derived from AT&T's US MF signaling system, described in "Signaling Systems for Control of Telephone Switching" by Breen and Dahlbom, Bell System Technical Journal, November 1960. PDF here: https://explodingthephone.com/hoppdocs/breen1960.pdf

The BSTJ article has a discussion on international signaling on pp. 1430-1441.

New comment by plapsley in "Decoding the telephony signals in Pink Floyd's 'The Wall'"

plapsley — Sun, 22 Dec 2024 21:25:17 +0000

Yes! This is what I concluded when, a few years back, I did a similar analysis to what matthiasl posted. If you're interested in this kind of thing, please check out my book, Exploding the Phone. https://explodingthephone.com

New comment by plapsley in "Phreaking"

plapsley — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 16:03:57 +0000

Oh yeah. Something I was so interested in, I wrote a history book about it: https://explodingthephone.com/

If you like old documents, check out, e.g., https://explodingthephone.com/search.php?q=captain+crunch&so...

Someone mentioned phrack above. There was (still is!) also 2600, and before that, YIPL/TAP, the original phone phreak newsletter: https://archive.org/details/YIPLTAP_1-91

If you get up Seattle way ever, be sure to check out the Connections Museum, where you can see not just old telephones, but old telephone switching equipment, lovingly maintained by some amazing people: https://www.telcomhistory.org/connections-museum-seattle/ They have an amazing youtube channel as well: https://www.youtube.com/c/connectionsmuseum

New comment by plapsley in "2600.network Dialup Service"

plapsley — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 13:57:16 +0000

If you want something really ancient, check out YIPL/TAP, which was the first phone phreak newsletter (started publishing in May 1971) that was the granddaddy of 2600. You can get it on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/YIPLTAP_1-91

New comment by plapsley in "2600.network Dialup Service"

plapsley — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 13:55:14 +0000

Thank you, appreciate the plug! :-)

New comment by plapsley in "2600.network Dialup Service"

plapsley — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 13:54:55 +0000

Thanks!

New comment by plapsley in "2600.network Dialup Service"

plapsley — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 13:54:48 +0000

Thank you!

New comment by plapsley in "2600.network Dialup Service"

plapsley — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 13:54:38 +0000

Thanks for the kind words, they mean a lot!

New comment by plapsley in "2600.network Dialup Service"

plapsley — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 13:53:57 +0000

That's a very kind question, thanks! In terms of what I get in the end, it doesn't really matter where you buy it (e.g., Amazon, local bookstore, whatever), although I'd love it if you supported your local bookstore -- they need help! Format matters a bit more in terms of royalty percentage (I get a higher percentage on ebooks)but ebooks also are priced lower, so the net to me between paperback and ebook is not much different.

New comment by plapsley in "2600.network Dialup Service"

plapsley — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 13:46:08 +0000

Thanks for the heads up! I'll attend to that!

New comment by plapsley in "2600.network Dialup Service"

plapsley — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 00:35:49 +0000

Shameless plug for my book on the history of the subject, for those interested: https://explodingthephone.com/

New comment by plapsley in "Ask HN: Books you read in 2023 and recommend for 2024?"

plapsley — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 16:50:18 +0000

Author of Exploding The Phone here, thanks for the mention and glad you enjoyed it! One thing I did that I'm pretty proud of is that I put almost all the research documents that I dug up (FOIA, newspaper articles, etc.) up on my website, where you can dig through them. E.g.: http://explodingthephone.com/search.php?q=blue+box&sort=rele... (please pardon the lack of https!) And to the other commenter about Evan Doorbell's excellent tapes about phone phreaking: I was lucky enough to get Evan to narrate the Audible version of my book!