Sendbajt

This is a tale of probably the most spectacular hacker group in the history of the Net and the most genius hacker among the seniors. Mr Jan S., [ because that's who this is all about ], started to get interested in computers as late as at 68 years of age, but the consequences of that have exceeded his greatest expectations.

But let's start from the beginning...

- I remember this very well. It was in 1987... I was at the post office to pick up my retirement money (at miss Halinka, from window 3) when I first saw a computer. It was standing on a desk, under a cover - Jan recalls. At that point nothing indicated that these computers were going to become the lifelong hobby of his.

- In 1989, at the voivodeship library, which I frequented, there were also computers... I remember that was the first (and last) time I sat in front of the keyboard. I had no idea what to do, so first, I read the text on the screen four times. Then somehow it went better... the same day I borrowed a book on russian digital machines, which taught me what is a bit and a byte, and who was Lenin.

That moment marks the start of an intensive period in Mr S.' life. He spent entire days in the reading room devouring books about computers, operating systems, computer networks, etc. His hobby also expanded to cover telephony and modem construction, which resulted at a later time in revolutionary methods used by the "Sendbajt" group. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. At the beginning of 1989 Mr S. met some Mieczysław R., also a pensioner, who spent most of his life installing telephone networks and working on the Strowger. Mietek (as Jan called him) was a bitter 64-year-old retiree, but he had some great practice, and for that reason Jan decided to cooperate with him to get as much information as possible (perhaps Jan S. even then was starting to come up with an evil plan, which brought fame for him and the "Sendbajt" group).

The following year Jan and Mietek spent on further intensive training in the libraries and much more. The subscription to "Bajtek" magazine introduced him to many more fields related to computers that he had no idea about. All-night talks with Mietek and a cup of hot cocoa became an integral element of that period, during which they had intense discussions about files, DOS and Unix systems, or network and modem protocols. Sometimes Miss Bożenka - Mietek's wife - visitedi Jan's house. She would make the cocoa for them and listen to their discussions. Sometimes she would also ask questions which not always made sense.

Around August 1990 Mr Jan created his first computer program. It was a generator of the random Lotto numbers written in Commodore 64 BASIC. Unfortunately it existed only on a piece of notepad paper, for the simple reason that Jan could not afford even the simplest 8-bit computer. Later he began to study assembly language. It turned out that Mr S. has an extraordinary talent for that. Just after a month he learnt all instructions of the 8086 microprocessor. The next 3 months of tedious learning let him understand all interrupts and he could write and debug assembly programs, using only a few sheets of stationery and a pencil with an eraser. When Jan learnt enough about computers and operating systems it was time for a broad course in computer networks. Within half a year of learning by heart and solving problems Jan gained so much knowledge that he could, for example, encode any text into an ASCII string, then convert that to ones and zeros, split into packets with checksums, start and stop bytes, parity and so on. After intensive training he could recall a 1kB binary file and optionally encrypt it using the XOR method in real time. Mietek did not rest either - by Jan's request he constructed a special telephone with two microphones and three earpieces.

Jan recalls:
- At the end of 1991 I had a lot of knowledge and I knew exactly what I wanted. I wanted access to the uncounted sources of knowledge accumulated on all computers of the world. - Saying this, Jan looses some tears and it's clear how imporant this experience was to him.
- January 1992 was a breakthrough. I was reading about the latest methods of signal modulation in the telephone band when Mietek walked in with the new "Bajtek". They published a list of all BBS-es in Poland. We decided to check these numbers. Because I had no telephone, I dressed up warmly and we went to a nearby payphone. According to "Bajtek" there were 3 bulletin boards in our town. With shaking hands I dialed the first number, and when I reached to insert the coin, Mietek stopped me and very roughly hit the payphone in the centre of the front panel. I looked at him bewildered but there was no time for explanations, because the connection was established and I head some loud and wild beeps in the earpiece. My first reaction was to drop the receiver but I quickly gathered myself and Mietek handed me the handpiece back. This time I was ready and tried to distiguish separate sounds. In my young years, I was, among other things, a Jazz musician, so I immediately caught the carrier tone at 1200 Hz. I could hear regular tone sequences. They repeated 6 times and the modem on the other side hung up. We didnt have much time, after this first connection I realized I was dealing with some 2400 modem and I recognized the modulation scheme. Shortly after we dialed the same number and this time I tried to establish a connection. Whishtling to the microphone was futile, so I came up with an idea: I asked Mietek to say "Aaaaaaaa" at 2400 Hz and at the same time I would express the right beeps to perform a handshake and connect with a baudrate at least 300 bps. We tried about 4 times before we did it. After receiving the message of the day and logging in as anonymous the connection dropped, because Mietek got some bad cough. I also started to feel my throat get sore, and my hand was tired from writing down the ones and zeros. The work was also made difficult by the fact that i had to transmit and decrypt at the same time. We definitely had to leave the phonebooth and go home to come up with a better plan, especially that around us a small group of young people gathered, looking bewildered. Well, my first modem connection was not very successful but I learned a lot.

What did Jan S. do in the following days? He realized that alone with Mietek they would not be able to do much. They needed the help of proffesionals. The first attempt was Mrs. Bożenka, who, as a regular participant in the sunday Holy Mass disposed of a voice which Mr S. had some great hopes about.

- Miss Bożenka, you will be the carrier tone generator in our group.
- Oh my god! What is that! In the name of the lord!
- There is nothing to worry about, it's not difficult. Please say "aaaah"
- Aaa
- But longer "aaah" and to the microphone, please.
- Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah
- Allright, do you see? Difficult? Not at all. Mr Mietek, did you get a
frequency reading on the oscilloscope?
- Unbelievable! Precisely 2400 Hz Mr. Jan!
- Fantastic! You are the oldest carrier tone generator in the world.
- How dare you!
- I was kidding, haha.
- Jan, how are we going to call our group?
- I had thought about this. I suggest "Sendbajt", is it OK?
- Er, it's allright.

In the following days Jan showed Bożenka how a carrier tone generator should behave, especially during the renegotiation phase and in case line noise appears. Mietek went through an intensive HTML couse (of course in binary version). After a week "Sendbajt" was joined by Mrs. Wanda, a good friend of Bożenka, who claimed Wanda sang the loudest and the most beautiful in the entire church.

- Very well! - Jan was happy - You will be our transmitter and modulator!
- But I don't know anything! I can't do that! - Wanda cried
- What do you mean "anything"? Please say "pi pi pi pioooupipaupioiopppipipiapappe pi pi"
- pi pi pi pioooupipaupi... how did it go?
- ...oiopppipipiapappe pi pi ...once again!
- pi pi pi pioooupipaupioiopppipipiappe pi pi ...allright?
- You left out one "pa" but the error correction on the receiving modem side should do with it. Apart from that, perfect. Mr. Mietek!
- I'm listening..
- Please modify our phone adapter so that the second microphone is connected in series with the first, through a circuit of your design, so that the signal from the second microphone modulate the first microphone signal, in phase, amplitude or frequency depending on the position of P3 switch... The second earphone should have an additional band-pass filter at 1200Hz.. anyway, here is the draft project.
- Sure thing. About these crocodile clips, do we leave them as they are?
- Yes, and please get 50 meters of black phone cable from somewhere..
- On it.

The upcoming week was entirely preparations. Jan would burn the midnight oil simulating a small six-computer ethernet network on a piece of paper. He played copying files between stations and running programs on the server. That fun costed him two packs of copier paper, but his knowledge about networking increased immeasurably.

- Our first action? Well.. this was in the basement of our block of flats. Around 11 pm, equipped with flashlights, the hackomat (that's how we called our device), a potato basket and a large compote bag we went downstairs to the basement. Mietek immediately located a box labeled "TP" and produced a key ring from his bag. After a moment our hackomat was online and we had a dial tone. According to our plan, I first dialed our neighbourly BBS number. The ladies sat down to the microphones, Mietek put the earpiece to his ear, I did mine and prepared some paper and crayons (I was out of pencils at that point). The first login attempt failed, because miss Wanda was so excited she shouted into the microphone and the remote modem disconnected. Fortunately our second attempt resulted in a connection, it was only 120bps but that was good for a start, we thought. Mietek quickly picked up and later he would receive and decrypt the messages himself. Thanks to that I could get down to processing the data. We would have great trouble if Mieted didn't borrow his son's calculator. It was a very simple calculator, but it had what we needed, that is addition and multiplication. When I logged into the system, the first thing I did was to gain the operator priviledges according to my own method I concieved half a year back. I did not expect it to be so easy. Unfortunately after 15 minutes, Bozenka could not take it anymore, said she can't shout "aaaa" anymore and she also wants to be a processor or some other nonsense. We dropped such a promising hack. But that was no problem. I managed to delete most system files anyways. When Mietek calmed his wife down and we could continue, we decided to try something else. We connected to a server of a rather large company, L**** from our town. It turned out they had an active guest account. Nothing simpler. After entering the system, I gained root access in 5 minutes, and to my inexpressible joy, I found out the server is connected to the Internet. I could not believe this, I checked the entire page of calculations to verify I have not made any mistakes, when adding negative numbers in octal - I always had problems with that. But it all turned out to be correct. I covered the microphone with my hand and shouted to Mietek - We did it! We are in the Internet! - Unfortunately the ladies were making so much noise, he most likely did not hear me. But at that point I was where I dreamt to be. The first thing I did was to connect to the Seagate Technologies Company server (I knew their operating system from one book), and I broke into the WWW site. Not wasting any more time I handed over the command to our HTML specialist, that is, Mietek, and we changed places. As we agreed beforehand, Mietek changed the files directly using the disk editor on the server. Now, the most difficult task was for miss Wanda. She had to transmit the text of our manifest for 20 minutes...

The upcoming months went fast in Sendbajt. After the intial success with WWW sites, they tried breaking in to various american military and government servers, which has always been a secret dream of Jan S. Unfortunately, despite improving the transmission parameters (thanks to the experience of Sendbajt members - they could reach 1200 bps), they still could not download larger binary files. Their largest score was a download of Internet Explorer v 2.0 source code (after breaking into Microsoft's server). It improved the groups WWW navigation because Mietek learnt the source code by heart and did the job of a browser (he would sketch JPEGs and GIFs on paper so everyone could look at the graphic design of the site). Meanwhile Jan scored new and new places in WWW, hacked, and sometimes destroyed internet servers, one by one. Long story short, the group became more and more advanced, and their popularity in the Internet rose every day. All sysadmins were pale with fear. Most of them reverted to traditional snail-mail to exchange information - this was the extent to which Sendbajt terrorized them. Of course, the group would use various phone numbers throughout their operations. First, their neighbours' lines, but later Mietek found a great spot next to a kindergarten two streets away. They would go there at nights, hook up the hackomat and sit down in the shrubs, away from people.

You probably expect that the police finally uncovered the Sendbajt group and irritated sysadmins stoned their members somewhere outside of the town. Alternatively, that Jan S. landed in prison like every hacker legend did. Surprisingly not. The operations of the group would likely continue to this day, if not for Jan's new life passion - fishing. Unfortunately without Jan, Sendbajt quickly scattered. They sometimes meet in the basement, like in the good old times, and occupy IRC, or Jan downloads some fishing websites. Apart from that, they are all happy. And so are the sysadmins, that the case got cold again... They still think their systems are well secured, and that they can sleep peacefully. Let them...