Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
I have a soft spot for Jon Prosser. I hope he comes out with his eyebrows in tact from this whole thing. I had a dream last night that he ended up in prison so I hope it wasn’t me having a vision of the future
Tomorrow the season finale of Stick drops on Apple TV+, I highly suggest y’all in the forums watch it. It’s such a good show. I’ve cried multiple times.
@Leo’s “over the transom” idiom discussing the Prosser incident is fascinating. I had heard the phrase but had no idea it meant passing unsolicited information to a newspaper.
Transoms were a big thing in the mid 20th Century:
I love those linkages for adjusting the opening; it’s a neat manual thermostat. I could easily imagine an interior door’s transom window being open a bit all the time – allowing for envelopes of nefarious text and glossies to be wafted through.
My 1970s high school had a classroom with a separate anteroom for the computer terminals. There were no actual computers; just a pair of ASR 33 terminals with dial phones and acoustical couplers that you could connect to a CAC (Call-a-Computer) BASIC timesharing service ~50 miles away. I never bothered with those HS classes, but I do remember using those terminals in off hours. The modems were 110 baud – 11 characters per second (blindingly fast to a 16-year-old).The terminals had paper tape punches and readers. You could use the paper tape punch to save your programs. If you were drafting a program using the ASR33 in an offline mode with the paper tape punch turned on, you could correct a keystroke error by backing up the punch one ratchet and hitting the DEL key. ASCII DEL codes to 127. DEL was also called the RUBOUT key. I think I was clever enough in high school to understand why that was an ingenious design.
What do transom windows have to do with that terminal room? Funny you should ask. Those ASR33 terminals had several electromagnetic motors and they ran hot. TTBOMK, the transom windows in that tiny room were always left open. No unsolicited papers were ever wafted across that threshold, but it is indeed possible that small humans could have crossed its threshold to access the locked room. Allegedly.
Did the minions managing that room ever realize that Ma Bell dial phone extensions in the 1970s were identical to the ones in their computer room? Did they realize that someone could [hypothetically] bring in another phone from home? Did they know that one of those cheap rotary dial barrel locks were completely useless? So many questions – it’s probably too late to ask any of them.
I loved this image of a rotary dial lock. I’ll have to submit that to Steve for the Security Now! podcast. Many of Steve’s images are Captain Obvious material; this one is not. OTOH, the problem is obvious to OG hackers. Maybe the sticker on the dial label has something to do the lock’s dubious deployment. 
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I only know transom as the part at the stern of a boat, where the rudder and blocks are attached…
I worked at a petrol station whilst I was in college and the phone had one of those dial locks. It didn’t stop us dialling numbers though. Also the lock in the picture is out on wrong, it should go in the 1, not zero, otherwise you can dial most local numbers…
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Yep. The dial lock in that petrol station did nothing to stop the clever. Today, many news websites will limit access by a “read articles” count in a cookie, or javascript code categorically limiting access. Often, the javascript code will limit viewing of the article a split-second after it has been displayed. Clever web users know how to flush cookies and temporarily turn off javascript. We had an Information Divide in the 1970s and today; the only thing that’s changed is what particular content is part of the current information divide. I have a friend who has trouble with a work login; we discovered that flushing the cookies will help her reliably log in. I really hate that any civilian has to know anything about browser cookies to do their job.
@big_D: I speculated above that maybe the lock was originally placed in the “right” location and some do-gooder relocated it to the zero hole – so that the lock wouldn’t keep you from accessing emergency services. I could imagine that. I don’t ROFL thinking about it, but I do LOL. I would have a hard time grinding out 999 with taps on the plunger without practice. Maybe I could pulse out the US’s 911 on the first try. It’s a hypothetical; I don’t ever see dial phones any more.
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Those old rotary phones were pulse dialed. You could simulate the rotary action by pulsing the dial hook. I used to love to dial that way as a precocious kid.
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Also, the New Zealand rotary dials are reversed as they count the number of pulses from 10. It’s also why their emergency number is 111 instead of 999.
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There’s a nice Reddit discussing why this was done in NZ (and apparently Oslo):
When new zealand was first installing automatic exchanges, they were coming from different manufacturers in different countries. One of them was Western Electric (Europe division) which did things differently to the USA because i think they were trying to avoid a patent cost.
At one point early on, a decision was made to standardize and they just had more of one type in existence than the other.
Sometimes, the patent system really screws up innovation. The Wright Brothers invented powered flight, but their patents shackled development for a long time. Apparently, they were quite litigious. It took until WWI for the government to fix things. I don’t know any good webpages on this topic; the AI summaries are pretty good.
Update: I found a YT video Were the Wright Brothers Jerks?? which gives a great combo of the aerodynamics and post-development litigation of the Wright Brothers. Tim McKay suggests that the WBs can be considered one of our first patent trolls. 