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>Someone please correct me If I'm wrong but I thought If your systems are all E2E encrypted, then you as the service provider have no way of seeing what your us

>Someone please correct me If I'm wrong but I thought If your systems are all E2E encrypted, then you as the service provider have no way of seeing what your users are discussing on your platform. In the past the issue has been did the company intentionally develop and market the product for drug trafficking. For instance did they send sales reps to contact criminal organizations and offer their products as a way to do crimes. One company produced electronic devices for the purposes of evading wiretaps and then visited various mafia owned bars to meet criminals and sold those devices to members of those syndicates [citation needed] specifically for the purposes of evading wiretaps. You might have heard of that company, it later became Apple Computer. >"Somehow, despite the fact that many of their blue boxes had been seized by law enforcement, and there were definitely indicators that they were all made by the same outfit, the boxes were never linked back to Woz and Jobs." - [0] Edit: I can't find anything to back up my memories that Woz talks about selling blue boxes at a bar. I may have misremembered. I have added a [citation need] [0]: Concerning Steve Wozniak’s Blue Boxes https://512pixels.net/2018/03/woz-blue-box/ https://512pixels.net/2018/03/woz-blue-box/

joelkevinjones 6y ago
From my understanding, a Blue Box doesn't evade wiretaps, but allows one to make long distance calls for free.
- EthanHeilman 6y ago
  A blue box gives you administrative access to the switching equipment by tricking the switching equipment into thinking it is receiving control plane information from another switch. It's like being able to send BGP messages to routers. This means you can make long distance calls for free, but it also means you can route your call through whatever switches you want and lying about both the source and destination at each hop. Because wiretapping systems often rely on the switching infrastructure and with a blue box you control the infrastructure, you can make yourself invisible. It was God-mode for the phone network.
  - Maursault 6y ago
    Fundamentally, a blue box is, along with the essential 2600Hz tone, simply a DTMF dialer, like what is built into touch tone telephones, only it used operator dual tone frequencies, not the same dual tone frequencies used by touch tone telephones. You can't do much at all with a blue box unless you understand how the switching equipment that detected those frequencies worked, and that was only documented in unpublished Bell Telephone Company and then AT&T manuals, then subsequently by phone phreaks who either learned by trial and error or somehow came across one of those manuals. Blue boxes stopped working due to the change to digital switching equipment. A red box, which emulates the tone that tells a pay telephone or a long distance operator that a quarter has been inserted, should still function, if you can find a pay telephone that still accepts quarters.
jsjohnst 6y ago
> One company produced electronic devices for the purposes of evading wiretaps and then visited various mafia owned bars to meet criminals and sold those devices to members of those syndicates specifically for the purposes of evading wiretaps. You might have heard of that company, it later became Apple Computer. While Steve and Woz definitely made and sold Blue Boxes, this conjecture is entirely false otherwise. Blue boxes had nothing to do with evading wiretaps, but rather making free phone calls. Further, your farcical story of them visiting mafia owned bars is utterly fantasy.
- EthanHeilman 6y ago
  >While Steve and Woz definitely made and sold Blue Boxes, this conjecture is entirely false otherwise. Blue boxes had nothing to do with evading wiretaps, but rather making free phone calls. You are incorrect, blue boxes were and can be used to evade wiretaps. "in wiretapping systems: common phone-tapping equipment was designed to be backwards compatible with in-band signalling, with the result that you can evade surveillance by using a blue box to convince the police equipment that you’ve hung up. The telephone exchange ignores this signal, so you remain on the phone but with the police recording stopped" - [0] >Further, your farcical story of them visiting mafia owned bars is utterly fantasy. I can't find the exact quote where I think Woz talks about this in an interview. It is that not absurd at face value since one of the main purchaser of blue boxes was bookies. If you're selling blue boxes at that time, a bunch of the buyers are going to be bookies. Both for their ability make free calls, but also for advantages like evading wiretaps that blue boxes provide. See quote below: "Since the early 1950s [mafia] bookies had been using every trick they could think of to make free and, more important, unrecorded long-distance telephone calls. One method was as simple as bribing telephone company operators and technicians to place calls for them so that the calls never appeared on their own telephone bills. [..] Blue boxes were active devices: they allowed you to call people — anybody — without leaving a record that the call was ever made. It’s not clear exactly when the bookies learned about blue boxes, or from whom, but the best guess appears to be about 1 963 or 1 964. One source was Louis MacKenzie, the electronics engineer who offered to fix AT&T’s network, for a price, in the early 1960s. MacKenzie, who later became a witness for the government in several blue box prosecutions, sold blue boxes to bookies in 1965 or perhaps earlier." - [1] Edit: Really having trouble finding that quote from Woz. I could have misremembered this. The article that inspired Woz to build blue boxes was about people selling blue boxes to bookies, perhaps I conflated those two stories. [0]: Telecom System Security: Chapter 20, https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/SEv2-c20.pdf https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/SEv2-c20.pdf [1]: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell by Phil Lapsley, https://archive.org/stream/ExplodingThePhoneTheUntoldStoryOfTheTeenagersAndOutlawsWhoHacked/ExplodingThePhoneTheUntoldStoryOfTheTeenagersAndOutlawsWhoHackedMaBell-PhilLapsleySteveWozniak_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/ExplodingThePhoneTheUntoldStoryOf...

joelkevinjones 6y ago

From my understanding, a Blue Box doesn't evade wiretaps, but allows one to make long distance calls for free.

EthanHeilman 6y ago
A blue box gives you administrative access to the switching equipment by tricking the switching equipment into thinking it is receiving control plane information from another switch. It's like being able to send BGP messages to routers. This means you can make long distance calls for free, but it also means you can route your call through whatever switches you want and lying about both the source and destination at each hop. Because wiretapping systems often rely on the switching infrastructure and with a blue box you control the infrastructure, you can make yourself invisible. It was God-mode for the phone network.
- Maursault 6y ago
  Fundamentally, a blue box is, along with the essential 2600Hz tone, simply a DTMF dialer, like what is built into touch tone telephones, only it used operator dual tone frequencies, not the same dual tone frequencies used by touch tone telephones. You can't do much at all with a blue box unless you understand how the switching equipment that detected those frequencies worked, and that was only documented in unpublished Bell Telephone Company and then AT&T manuals, then subsequently by phone phreaks who either learned by trial and error or somehow came across one of those manuals. Blue boxes stopped working due to the change to digital switching equipment. A red box, which emulates the tone that tells a pay telephone or a long distance operator that a quarter has been inserted, should still function, if you can find a pay telephone that still accepts quarters.

jsjohnst 6y ago

> One company produced electronic devices for the purposes of evading wiretaps and then visited various mafia owned bars to meet criminals and sold those devices to members of those syndicates specifically for the purposes of evading wiretaps. You might have heard of that company, it later became Apple Computer. While Steve and Woz definitely made and sold Blue Boxes, this conjecture is entirely false otherwise. Blue boxes had nothing to do with evading wiretaps, but rather making free phone calls. Further, your farcical story of them visiting mafia owned bars is utterly fantasy.

EthanHeilman 6y ago
>While Steve and Woz definitely made and sold Blue Boxes, this conjecture is entirely false otherwise. Blue boxes had nothing to do with evading wiretaps, but rather making free phone calls. You are incorrect, blue boxes were and can be used to evade wiretaps. "in wiretapping systems: common phone-tapping equipment was designed to be backwards compatible with in-band signalling, with the result that you can evade surveillance by using a blue box to convince the police equipment that you’ve hung up. The telephone exchange ignores this signal, so you remain on the phone but with the police recording stopped" - [0] >Further, your farcical story of them visiting mafia owned bars is utterly fantasy. I can't find the exact quote where I think Woz talks about this in an interview. It is that not absurd at face value since one of the main purchaser of blue boxes was bookies. If you're selling blue boxes at that time, a bunch of the buyers are going to be bookies. Both for their ability make free calls, but also for advantages like evading wiretaps that blue boxes provide. See quote below: "Since the early 1950s [mafia] bookies had been using every trick they could think of to make free and, more important, unrecorded long-distance telephone calls. One method was as simple as bribing telephone company operators and technicians to place calls for them so that the calls never appeared on their own telephone bills. [..] Blue boxes were active devices: they allowed you to call people — anybody — without leaving a record that the call was ever made. It’s not clear exactly when the bookies learned about blue boxes, or from whom, but the best guess appears to be about 1 963 or 1 964. One source was Louis MacKenzie, the electronics engineer who offered to fix AT&T’s network, for a price, in the early 1960s. MacKenzie, who later became a witness for the government in several blue box prosecutions, sold blue boxes to bookies in 1965 or perhaps earlier." - [1] Edit: Really having trouble finding that quote from Woz. I could have misremembered this. The article that inspired Woz to build blue boxes was about people selling blue boxes to bookies, perhaps I conflated those two stories. [0]: Telecom System Security: Chapter 20, https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/SEv2-c20.pdf https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/SEv2-c20.pdf [1]: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell by Phil Lapsley, https://archive.org/stream/ExplodingThePhoneTheUntoldStoryOfTheTeenagersAndOutlawsWhoHacked/ExplodingThePhoneTheUntoldStoryOfTheTeenagersAndOutlawsWhoHackedMaBell-PhilLapsleySteveWozniak_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/ExplodingThePhoneTheUntoldStoryOf...