Random Historically Relevant Note

[Morgan]

Apparently Telstra have now made their pay phones free for Local/National calling.

I presume that they don't make enough money to be worth sending people to empty the coinboxes any more, still it's interesting in the historical context of phone phreaking :)

[Jason Xiros]

Some nostalgia -- the original Melbourne 2600 meeting point was at the pay phones outside Melbourne Central (Swanston Street)

I feel old now.

Kind regards,

Jason

On 3 Aug 2021, at 12:00 PM, Morgan <morgan...@gmail.com> wrote:

Apparently Telstra have now made their pay phones free for Local/National calling.

I presume that they don't make enough money to be worth sending people to empty the coinboxes any more, still it's interesting in the historical context of phone phreaking :)

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The original 2600 meets frequented by phreakers were at the
Melbourne post office; (in like the 80s)  it wasn't until
the post mendax era late 90's / early 2000's where a
reformed group was created that moved it to Melbourne
central. In the pre/early/mid 90's the scene was mostly
replaced by the MLUG/MCUG groups famous as having mendax as
a member until they were disbanded (or went deep
underground) after one of our Governments early
dystopian/authoritarian attempts that led to pre-emptive
raids of all computer clubs in that era.

I never attended the GPO meetings, I would have been too
young.  I only found out about them after they stopped (from
a zine created at the time i stumbled on in one of those old
BBS dump cds you used to be able to get off ebay.)

It is possible the old guard still met there, at least back
in early 2000's (they would probably be dead of old age or
senile by now) but they would have been so discrete, and so
few in number that nobody would probably recognise it for a
meeting.  I did attend a few at Melbourne central, and one
in Sydney, but my life tied me up most of the time so I
missed most of them.      I was always curious if an
underground group that didn't promote at all still met
there, but never bothered to scout out the place - since I
would probably have stood out like an FBI agent in an Irish
Pub at happy hour - and the old guard were paranoid as hell
with good reason.

Didn't we have some discord live stream meet going for a
while there until someone locked out all the channels for lulz?

On 3/08/2021 1:10 pm, Jason Xiros wrote:
>
> Some nostalgia -- the original Melbourne 2600 meeting
> point was at the pay phones outside Melbourne Central
> (Swanston Street)
>
> I feel old now.
>
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Jason
>

--
New and improved 2600... well.. ..we drew on some flames and polished it a bit..
--
Google - making sure, life is no more, than 1984...
--
Bill Gates: 640k is more than enough for anybody
PC guy down the road: You will never fill that 10mb Hard disk mate
Abbott/Turnbull: 25Mbps is "more than enough" for the average Australian household.
Turnbull: Actually 10MBs is enough for the average household really.
Abbott/Turnbull: It is cheaper to put in FTTN, you get up to 24mbs/down and 256k up.. we can upgrade it more later...

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Here is one of several random wiki references to the era,
tho the GPO meetings are always mysteriously missing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_(computer_hacker)



In politics - Later never happens.

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Another random fun note:
The first 3 recorded cases of Phoenix being used as an
online alias were all people from Australia, and Victoria.

All three of them also had ties to the Melbourne scene, and
all three got in trouble at one time or another for getting
into things they shouldn't.

Two of them were known to frequent Austnet IRC, and one was
an Sys-Oper who admined it.

Small world.

--
New and improved 2600... well.. ..we drew on some flames and polished it a bit..
--
Google - making sure, life is no more, than 1984...
--
Bill Gates: 640k is more than enough for anybody
PC guy down the road: You will never fill that 10mb Hard disk mate
Abbott/Turnbull: 25Mbps is "more than enough" for the average Australian household.
Turnbull: Actually 10MBs is enough for the average household really.
Abbott/Turnbull: It is cheaper to put in FTTN, you get up to 24mbs/down and 256k up.. we can upgrade it more later...

--

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Final fun fact -
You can probably still find some of the 2000 era scene
working at Bundoora university, and involved in
Melbourne.wireless.  Outside of that, there is us here in
2600, or working in corporate.

Wonder how many of us became corpo's LOL.

[Jason Xiros]

People today don't realise it, but Melbourne was damn near centre of the phreaking / hacking universe back then. The great Exhibition Street exchange hack, WANK (against NASA!) and many more in the 80's and 90's

I miss the sheer innocence of Gopher via an AUSTPAC dial-up; or the text files** we all shared via BBS or Usenet.


Kind regards,

Jason


**For a real nostalgia hit, some of the historic Infosurge zines are available online. One source is at https://www.os2site.com/sw/magazine/other/InfoSurge/

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Actually I tell a lie - i've spotted the odd person working
at PAX Melbourne too - tho I suppose that could count as
Corpo :o)