.

DOCUMENT BlueBEEP Documentation

.TOPIC Editorial

.SUBTITLE Hello and goodbye - an adventure 2 years in the making

- Welcome to BlueBEEP 1.00 -

Today, it's been two years since I sat in my room in Hamburg

and casually decided that I am going to start the next couple days

on writing a little blueboxing tool for myself and my friends. It

should be a project that changed the world; mine, and those of others.

Five days later, the first version, 0.01 was finished and I called

my friend uptown. "I wrote a little bluebox in Pascal. You want me to

send it over to you so you can check it out?" The next day he rang me

up in the evening and told me that he liked it a lot, and if I could

add a couple of features. He also suggested that I should give it a try

and upload it to a local warez board so we could see if other people

liked it too.

A warez board. Holy shit.

About a week later, I called my local uucp email provider to see if

that girl I was writing with already sent me a reply. When I logged on,

I didn't find 1 message.

I found 57.

A total of fifty-seven people from all over the world had sent me

letters about how much they liked BlueBEEP and what kind of features

they were missing direly from other, older blueboxes that were out. Or

those cool menus they had in that Amiga bluebox. Or this. Or that. It

was out of control. As much as everyone rags on the warez scene, it's

sure as hell the best digital junkmail network you can imagine; you

throw something into it, and thousands of warez puppies make sure it
ends up in everybody's front yard. God bless WaReZ.

The overwhelming interest in the program never subsided. If

blueboxing died in one country, other people in a different country

finally figured out what they could do by shooting some signals down to

a remote CCITT long-distance switch. It was seeping down from the more

elite countries all the way to the bottom: USA, Canada, Western Europe,

then Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Brazil.. It blew me out of my chair.

While I kept on developing BlueBEEP, I received a clip from a norwegian

newspaper in the mail. A big article, with an image that pictured a

very concerned looking guy in a suit in front of a PBX system. From the

norwegian blah underneath I could only tell my handle was mentioned.

And BlueBEEP. In a huge double-page article with screen-shot. WTF! The

english translation that was neatly made on a laser printer, made me a

little bit wiser.

"SHELL NORWAY IS SUFFERING MAJOR LOSSES FROM A PROGRAM THAT IS BEING

PASSED AROUND IN THE NORWEGIAN COMPUTER UNDERGROUND FOR UP TP Nk. 20000

PER COPY. THE PROGRAM, WITH THE RIGHT SETUP, ENABLED THE USER TO USE

SHELL'S TELEPHONE SWITCHING SYSTEM TO MAKE FREE PHONE CALLS AT SHELL'S

EXPENSE. BLUEBEEP, AS THE PROGRAM IS CALLED, WAS CREATED BY A COMPUTER

HACKER FROM HAMBURG, GERMANY WHO GOES BY THE NAME OF "ONKEL DITTMEYER".

LOCAL INVESTIGATIONS IN GERMANY ARE STILL PENDING AT THIS TIME..."

The suit on the picture threw me evil looks, and I sat down. Here we

are, giving people free tools to explore the phone system, learn, and

trade K-RaD 0DaY WaReZ for free! Then some asshole turns it into

white-collar crime and we get blamed for all the shit. Luckily, in

the long run, nobody ever came to my house and asked me to "move it"

downtown. Our "local investigators" must have been too busy scooping up

the guys that got jumped by some Turks last night. Busy Police is one

of the few good things about living in a crappy neighborhood.

 However, BlueBEEP made it through. Maybe not in a steady flow, but

I always managed to come up with something new and throw it into the

big junkmail machine. In December '93, I flew to the states on some

saved-up money and attended HoHoCon. I had just completely rewritten

BlueBEEP from pieces, cluster by cluster, from my hard drive that had

just crashed. It took me about 5 days of coding - without a break. The

combination of loud music, coffeine and painkillers is a productive

one,I was just comfortably feeling numb while and about 2 weeks after

I did it. All programmers must have these moments. In Texas, a couple

of the people there had already played around with the program, and it

was up on most local h/p bbses there. I was supposed to talk about the

program, but by the time my english was bad and I was too chicken to

go up and dare to bore 350 hung-over and grouchy hackers! (sorry dFx)

DrunkFux should get some credit here, because I always harrassed him,

both '93 and 94, to give me a speaker slot and I never took him up on

it at the actual con. I better watch out now! But you can't see him

coming, each time I see him he has a different hair color. He'll

probably print my name on the TOP TEN CHICKEN LIST when he makes next

year's HoHo-shirts. Eye phear!

After that, I couldn't really program too much because my life

turned out of control, and I never had the time and the piece of mind

to focus on and do some good programming. Somehow, I managed to release

0.09 and 0.10, 0.10 with some really interesting improvements, like the

internal file structure etc. Since Summer '94 or so, nothing much was

done on the code because until recently I couldn't get the 3 necessary

components together: Inspiration, Peace of Mind and Hardware. Now that

my life is somewhat calmer now, my straightforwardness and my focus

has returned but BlueBEEP - for a long time now - is basically sucked

dry for improvements. There is no useful feature that could be added.

If it was there and it made sense and it was possible to realize it,

some user let me know about it and it has been implemented. For a

couple months already, there are no more useful suggestions coming in

on how I could be improved. Want a wardialer? Try ToneLoc. Want a

terminal? Try Telix. Want cryptostuff? Try PGP. Nothing really made

sense, and that's the state the program is in right now. With this last

version, I just added some tiny little details and fixed some bugs. One

thing is special about it though:

IT IS THE LAST RELEASE

I will make no further improvements, bug fixes or releases of this

proggy. For fairness, learning and to keep the hacker spirit of the

50's and 60's alive, I make the whole unabridges source code available

to everybody for improvements, very like the way it was done at MIT

when programming was coming to life back in the days.

If you would ask me if I think that publishing the source code is

a good idea, I would have to say no. It is unevitable that some teenage

lamers from all over the world are going to come out with bad bluebeep

hacks that don't really work, that people are gonna steal parts of this

code and use it without giving me the props, and that people are going

to flame at me on how bad my programming sucks (feel free). It is

definitely not smart, but it's Right. And, tons of people are bickering

for linux/windows/os2/insert_os_name_here versions. Well, go ahead,

port the thing (I did't tell you it was fun, remember that!) and give

me the credit. I am not good enough a programmer to port it into all

those environments, but if you think you can do it for just one, go

right ahead. Unless anyone is going to sell this code or portations of

it, it's cool with me. Just let me know if you can, OK?

Some acknowledgements to people who really helped along the way:

Prime/Spyce - for getting me into boxing in the first place

Urmel - for making some cool adlib sound routines

ECR - for stealing them from Urmel and giving them to me :)

LowCyl - who betatested it in the rough WaReZ reality, 24/7.

Tr8or - who always came up with something good.

Werdohl M.R. - for keeping all of us entertained at all times

DrunkFux - for his talent in organizing cool events

Beetle - who opened my eyes on many ideas and helped me manage

Carlos (C.A.T) - for running the BlueBEEP Fan Club in Brazil

and wife

#phreak/#hack - stuck on a higher level (gnawt) try #k0dek1dz

Pluvius - just for being a cool contact

and all those that cheered, complained, suggested, rumored, uploaded,

ftp'ed, traded, toted, spread, criticized and used BlueBEEP all along.

Happy Birthday and goodbye.

- Onkel Dittmeyer, April 1st, 1995

onkeld@earth.planet.net

.END

.TOPIC GAWD-DAMN!

.SUBTITLE Something came along and nuked the docs!

|RGAWDDAMN, |WSHITFUQ, |YMUTHAFUQIN JEZUZ KRIST! |ZBVERFLIXT 'N ZUGENAEHT!!!!

 Just when I was editing this file tonight, a straight text file about

90k in size, my editor crashed while saving the file and completely wiped

it out. However, the documentation of the source code was not affected and

you can still read it as source.doc (plaintext). I will re-write and release

the fixed documentation in the next couple of days; however because I want

to keep my promise of having the source out on April 1st, BlueBEEPs second

anniversary, I am releasing it anyway. You can grab the full documentation

in a week or so at ftp.fc.net, and I bet it will also be traded around on

#phreak/#phreak/#warez*. Stay tuned. The editorial survived the crash; chew

on that in the meantime ;-]

|COnkel Dittmeyer / onkeld@planet.net

|BApril 1st, 1995

.END

.ENDDOC