I was in college back in about '95, when the World Wide Web was still relatively new. The "hacker community" was almost completely unknown to me at that time, though I already had a few years' background working with with computers. My brother and I had had a succession of first- and second-generation personal computers (or "microcomputers" as they were called back then). We'd had a Radio Shack Trash-80, a Commodore 64 and a couple Ataris. I had owned a Mac Classic and an IBM PC clone. I was mostly just into things like programming and playing games.
Anyway, my brother and I were just kids when we first got into exploring the loose network of BBS's that existed way back in the days of direct-dial modemming. Our mom worked for Illinois Bell, and then Ameritech (one of the "Baby Bells"), so we got an employee discount on our phone service. My brother and I used to call BBS's, peruse their contents, find out about other BBS's in other cities, call those, find out about more BBS's across the country, etc. until eventually we were racking up phone bills in the $100s, even despite our mom's special telco employee rate. Eventually our parents forbade us from calling long-distance, and that greatly limited our exposure to this network of info. I remember being very pissed off because I'd always gotten a kick out of reading the bizarre text files posted by people with excessively weird nicknames.
Anyway, later on when I was in college, there was this guy who had a reputation for being a "k-rad 1337-0 hax0r." There were some pretty tall stories surrounding this dude about the amazing things he could do with computers, and I wanted to find out how much of it could possibly be true.
One day I encountered him in a diner down the street from school. I asked him about his major, what classes he was currently taking, etc., (the usual college introductory bullshit). Well it turned out that he was a computer science major. I told him a little about my history with computers and asked him about hacking. He immediately opened up his backpack and pulled out a sheaf of paper with numbers printed all over it. He showed me about 3 pages covered with sets of numbers, and told me they were other peoples' calling card numbers. Then he pulled out another sheet with maybe 1000 sets of numbers on it. "Credit card numbers" he said.
I was amazed that this dude was sharing with me this direct evidence of some very illegal activity, within minutes of having met me. Puzzled, I asked him where he got all these numbers, how he learned to do this kind of thing. He said "check this out," and wrote down a bunch of URLs of various websites, names of usenet usegroups, and his email address. I remember that
www.cultdeadcow.org, L0pht.org, Phrack, and alt.hacking.2600 were all on that list. Phonelosers.org was on that list as well.
From the start, Phonelosers Of America seemed different from most other hacking groups. PLA offered no high-minded justifications for its illegal activities and no ideological bullshit (which most hacking groups had in spades). PLA was less about technical wizardry and more about practical applications. PLA was all about pranks and somewhat malicious activities, goofy stunts, over-the top revenge schemes and simple technical tricks intended to drive an intended mark completely batty. The best thing about PLA, in my opinion, was the much greater emphasis on humor. PLA was the Three Stooges of the hacking community. I remember laughing out loud in the school computer lab while reading the PLA issues for the first time.
Of all the hacking websites I've followed over the years, PLA is the only one I've gone back to on a regular basis, because it's the most fun.
