I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again,
I. Love. Computers. I’m a little nerd boy! And I’ve always been fascinated by the idea
of hacking. Even before I really knew what that was, it
just seemed cool. It was a mysterious world that only a select
few understood. But it doesn’t need to be mysterious, it’s
actually a pretty chill place, and I’d like to show you around, but first, a word from
our sponsor. Alright so there’s this brand called mischief,
and every two weeks they do a “drop” What’s a drop? I hear you ask. Good question. See this? It could be anything. Sometimes it’s a physical thing you can
buy, like a dog collar that curses whenever your dog barks. Here’s the thing though, that one sold out
in seconds and got on national news shows, so you’ve probably seen their drops, and
didn’t even know it was them. Sometimes the drops are digital, like the
time they made a font exactly like Times New Roman but wider, so you can cheat on your
next english paper. You’re welcome. Anyway, they just released an app so you can
be the first to find out what the next drop is. No two drops are the same, and some of them
are secrets only available in the app. See where I’m going with this? No, because I haven’t… said it yet. The app has a messaging feature, and I’m
not sure who the messages get sent to, but somebody at mischief has to read them, right? So I thought it would be funny if all 1.5
million of you downloaded the app and spammed them with… idk that part’s up to you. Poop emojis, shakespearean poetry, the entire
bee movie script. Mischief specifically told me not to say anything
about spamming the messenger because it’ll bring down their servers or something, but
I’m gonna go ahead and file that under good problems to have. So, I may never get another sponsor, but if
we can take down some servers with poop emojis, well I think that’d be pretty funny. Please go to M-S-C-H-F DOT COM and troll my
sponsors. I heard they like mischief. What is hacking? Most people probably think it’s illegal,
and to be fair, sometimes it is, but the definition that I like is “Getting technology to do
something that it wasn’t originally supposed to do.” Sure, that could be something like hacking
a bank’s computer to give you a million dollars - it certainly wasn’t supposed to
do that. But it could also be jailbreaking your phone,
and there’s nothing illegal about that - no matter what Apple wants you to believe. So when I was young and fascinated by the
idea of computer hacking, I would search the internet for “How To Hack” and read tons
of articles and blog posts about how computer systems work, and how to break into them. But one time I made the mistake of trying
to share that passion with my sister. All she saw was a big ol juicy opportunity
to get me into trouble. She was like “Mooom! TimTom’s hacking into the government, he’s
gonna go to prisonnnn” and I was like “Nuh Uh! Hacking isn’t necessarily illegal, it’s
just about getting computers to do stuff that the original designers never intennnndeeeed”
and MomTom was like “... *sigh* I’m not doing this right now.” Despite my sister’s best efforts, I learned
so many cool hacking tricks that I was basically Keanu Reeves. The only problem was, a ton of the information
I found was outdated and super worthless. For example, back in the 90’s, when you
put a quarter into a payphone, it would play certain tones down the line to tell the phone
system that you paid. But if you recorded those tones on something
like a tape recorder, and played them into the handset, the phone system would think
that you paid, and let you make calls for free! Neat! But back when I tried it, payphones had switched
to digital systems that weren’t vulnerable to that hack, and modern payphones… don’t
exist. Thinking back on it, a lot of the information
I found was about how the phone system works. Or, used to work... Which kind of makes sense, phones were the
network that connected everybody’s homes and businesses before the internet was a thing,
and phone hacking, or phreaking, as the cool kids called it, used to be a big part of being
a hacker. My favorite thing that I learned from my phreaking
days almost did get me in trouble with the police. Basically, I learned how those old rotary
phones worked, and I figured out that I could dial a phone number by just taking the phone
off the hook a bunch of times in the right pattern, kinda like morse code. I thought the idea of dialing a phone number
without pressing any buttons was neat, but I also didn’t expect it to work. So I used that trick to dial the first phone
number I could think of. 911. Once the phone started ringing my heart sank
and I hung up, but it was too late. The police had already traced the call. The cops showed up to my house like 30 minutes
later and I was just like “Oh gee willikers! Well, I sure didn’t dial 911. Yup! I didn’t press any buttons at all!” And I got away with it, like a totally 1337
hacker. Now, I don’t think movies are responsible
for my fascination with computers or hacking, but they definitely fueled that flame. My favorite movie of all time is Hackers,
a movie that came out when I was a baby. There’s a scene in the movie where one of
the characters uses that phone hook trick to call someone, and a different scene where
he uses the tape recorder trick to use a payphone for free. Most of the “Hacking” in the movie is
unrealistic and just looks cool, but there’s tons of parts where the characters use *actual
hacks* and the movie doesn’t call attention to it, they just do it like it’s no big
deal. When I first saw that I was ecstatic, like
“THAT WOULD ACTUALLY WORK!” Or at least it would have, back in the day. Nowadays, hacking doesn’t revolve around
the phone system nearly as much, and as I’ve gotten older I’m usually less interested
in breaking stuff. But I still think that mentality is a great
way to look at the world. Instead of accepting things as they are, or
as they were intended to be, approaching everything with a little bit of mischief just makes life
more interesting.
