Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws who Hacked Ma Bell by Phil Lapsley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I really enjoyed this book. Having just started a new job in Kendall Square, it was really fun to be reading a book about innovation and in many ways that is what this book was about.
The title and subtitle of the book made it seem like it would be a hacker-like story, kind of like [b:The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage|18154|The Cuckoo's Egg Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage|Clifford Stoll|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1385177918s/18154.jpg|19611]. And there definitely were parts that were exciting and had the characteristics of a thriller like that. But the book was really two stories - one was about the people who figured out loopholes in the phone system to make free calls, the other was about the phone company itself and how it developed.
See, to understand the hacking, you really have to understand the entire system and Lapsley did a great job interweaving the story from Alexander Graham Bell to the breakup of the local phone companies decades later with that of the hackers. Each time the phone company changed their technology to expand or offer new services, the hackers found new loopholes, some by technology and some by social engineering.
This book is definitely one of my recent favorites - but really only suitable if you are a geek. You'll appreciate Lapsley's writing style which is somewhat informal and irreverent, as well as the early hacker pioneers who he profiles very closely.
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