I wrote an article for 2600 when I was like 14 years old. A friend of mine who was 16, we would drive into the big city to this coffee shop and play chess, pretend like we were adults who did other cool things and were not children, and drink chai tea. They installed a public internet access vending machine one day. It ran windows, I was in the thing by rebooting it by unplugging the thing and letting the UPS die the first night I saw it but it was always there so I kept messing with it. I eventually had remote access to it and an FTP and one day we showed up and the back of it was off, my friend quickly found a locksmith up the street and I took the lock off the back and we went and made keys and brought it back. After that we would just open the back and plug into the netgear switch that was bolted inside. If anyone asked we would tell them we worked for Advants. No one cared.

I was a little baby boy, I loved 2600 magazine. I still love pay phones and own a few and am now alright at picking the Matco. Which can be tricky because the model used in most US pay phones are designed to destruct if manipulated. Really good lock cylinders. If you're securing a door and have a choice. Get a Matco. Or you know, whatever you need for your application.

I wrote up the story and sent it off and never thought they'd publish it. Like two or three quarters later me and some friends were at the mall and we met up with another dude and he was sitting reading 2600 and was like "is this you?" and I was like... "YES! Where is my tshirt and back issues?" and when I got home they were there. I've long lost the shirt. I hope someone has it that loves it.

Kevin is Free of the mortal coil. I know this whole hackery thing from that time is.... It's just not now, but it's so fundimental to what I am and it really is my secret ace in the hole. I've never been an intruder or cyber criminal but I did steal a lineman's handset from a telco truck and a 7/16 thin wall deep socket driver from my step dad's workbench and would go just sit in our neighborhood trunk and listen to everything and dial into PBXs both with garbage laptops and DTMF or voice. I spent a LOT of time on BBSs and wardialing to find weird corporate BBS terminals. I was probably at the absolute end of that being a thing. I had a couple buddies that were of a similar mind and we would dumpster dive reams of paper from big tech companies.

It was fun. I think there are aspects of that that we scrubbed off the communication networks that really are positive feedback loops. I miss yelling into the void and sometimes getting a shout back. I remember the first time I trunked to free long distance. Early VoIP. I'm not old enough to have even ever had even a red box work for me. I have built quite a few and all the other boxes as well. Lesson learned phrak. Rainbow Box. Shout out to RedBoxChiliPepper. Old enough to have tried enough times in weird ways and have an operator tell me that will not work and if I'm gonna play on the phone I should do better.

A buddy of mine was taking some Japanese classes and we called japan and an old Japanese man answered the phone and my said "mushi mushi" and the man kept being way too polite and confused. My friend overhyped how much he'd paid attention in class. Maybe not way to polite for an old Japanese man as well. Knowing what I know now, this was pretty rude and weird culturally I guess, but also no one was making Japan calls for free yet. We recorded it on a tape player and later played it for a friend that was fluent in Japanese and he told us we kept saying "bug bug" to the man.

Hack the Planet.

EDIT: If anyone has a Kevin Mitnik lockpick business card, I'd love to buy it from you. I near missed him twice at DEFCON and always just assumed I'd see him some other time and then 2020 and I don't do conferences anymore. RIP Kevin. You mean a lot to me.