Exploding the Phone
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.85 (614 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0802122280 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 448 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-11-20 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Before smartphones, back even before the Internet and 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. It traces the birth of long-distance communication and the telephone, the rise of AT&T’s monopoly, the creation of the sophisticated machines that made it all work, and the discovery of Ma Bell’s Achilles’ heel. Starting with Alexander Graham Bell’s revolutionary harmonic telegraph,” by the middle of the twentieth century the phone system had grown into something extraordinary, a web of cutting-edge switching machines and human operators that linked together millions of people like never before. Phil Lapsley expertly weaves together the clandestine underground of phone phreaks” who turned the network into their electronic playground, the mobsters who exploited its flaws to avoid the feds, the explosion of telephone hacking in the counterculture, and the war between the phreaks, the phone company, and the FBI.The product of extensive original research, Exploding the Phone is a ground-breaking, captivating book.. But the network had a billion-dollar flaw, and once people discovered it, things would never be the same.Exploding the Phone tells this story in full for the first time
"An almost total success, and better than Steven Levy's "Hackers"" according to Neurasthenic. I had not expected to particularly like this book -- I was wary about the subtitle, "The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell," figuring that the story of the early phone phreaks had in fact been told many times, and that if the book cover contained such sensationalism, the content of the book was likely to be of little value.I was wrong. The material in this book is new, and interesting, and fun, it's written with passion and an understanding of what motivated these early phreaks and what. Five Stars Jay P An excellent, very well researched book on the good-old-days of phone system hacking. It would make a great movie. "Five Stars" according to David G. Thompson. Great book about the Phreaking culture, start to finish!
A fascinating book. Like Ammon Shea in The Phone Book (2010), Lapsley uses his main subject as a jumping-off point for a highly engaging history of the telephone itself and plenty of intrigue. From Booklist Sporting a foreword by Steve Wozniak (who, before he founded Apple computers, was a phone phreak himself) and the kind of detailed history that will appeal to the book’s target audience, this isn’t just a story about the early phreaks—the term that combines phone and freak and is used to describe the people who figured out how to fool the telephone system into allowing them to make free long-distance calls. Sure, these