[Noisebridge-announce] Phil Lapsley, awesome phreaking historian, speaks! Noisebridge, 6.30PM, this Friday 5th April

Danny O'Brien danny at spesh.com
Wed Apr 3 06:09:00 UTC 2013


(As attendees to Five Minutes of Fame heard this month, Phil's book is
genuinely brilliant -- and RFC 977 isn't bad either. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc977  

Come along this Friday to Noisebridge and hear about the book, then
exchange anecdotes about the NNTP protocol with intermittently connected
sets of friends afterwards. - dob )

Phil Lapsley discuss his new book on the history of phone phreaking,
"Exploding The Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who
Hacked Ma Bell", this Friday night, 4/5, at 6:30 pm at Noisebridge. Phil
will give a 30-40 minute presentation and slide show on the phone
hackers of the 1960s and 1970s and will show off some fun props, like an
old blue box and Cap'n Crunch whistle, and then will take questions and
sign books.  Phil recently donated a copy of his book to the Noisebridge
library, or you can get a copy on amazon
http://www.amazon.com/Exploding-Phone-Untold-Teenagers-Outlaws/dp/080212061X
or your local bookstore.  A longer description is below.

-----

Before smartphones and iPads, before the Internet or the personal computer, a
misfit group of technophiles, blind teenagers, hippies, and outlaws figured out
how to hack the world's largest machine: the telephone system.  Exploding The
Phone is their story.

Author Phil Lapsley traces the birth of the telephone, the rise of AT&T's
monopoly, the discovery of Ma Bell's Achilles heel, and follows the kids and
outlaws who used it for fun and profit. Along the way you'll meet an oddball
cast of characters ranging from FBI agents to whistling blind kids, from
informants to entrepreneurs.

More than five years in the making, Exploding The Phone is based on original
interviews and declassified documents and includes a Foreword by former phone
phreak and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

In the words of one reviewer, "At turns a technological love story, a counter
cultural history and a generation-spanning epic, Exploding the Phone is
obsessively researched and told with wit and clarity. It captures a moment in
time that might otherwise have been lost forever."

When not researching phreaking Phil has worked hard to look like an upstanding
member of society. He co-founded two high-technology companies in the San
Francisco Bay Area before moving to McKinsey & Company, a management consulting
company that advises Fortune 100 companies on business strategy. He holds B.S.
and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering and computer sciences from
U.C. Berkeley and an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is the
coauthor of a book on digital signal processors, 19 patents, and numerous
technical articles. He is also the co-creator of Network News Transfer
Protocol (NNTP, RFC 977), the Internet standard used to move Usenet news
articles around the net.

More at http://explodingthephone.com/



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