Exploding the Phone

Executive Summary: An interesting and seemingly well researched book on the history of phone phreaking. As someone whose been interested in computer/technology history, this book was right in my wheelhouse.

Audiobook: Johann North does about all you can hope for with a non-fiction book. He's speaks clearly with good inflections and generally doesn't get in the way of the book he's reading. It's certainly a decent option for reading this book, but far from a “must listen”.

Full Review
This book was on my radar for a bit. It's not quite computer crime/history but it definitely led to that later one.

The format mixes a variety of “how I came to phone phreaking” with history of the telephone and the technology that powered it over the course of about 100 years: from it's invention to the late 70's and early 80's.

Some of the story are so remarkably similar they did get a bit repetitive after awhile. However I think the combination of research and interviews was worked together into a very compelling read.

I knew a bit about phone phreaking coming into this book. Many of the books I've read about the early days of computers, computer crime and computers networks inevitably overlapped with phones and phone phreaks. However this book essentially comes up to that point in history and mostly stops.

Instead if focuses largely on phone phreaking from the 50's until the 70's when ATT had a government supported monopoly and a massive network of phone lines and switches with giant security flaws. That made it the perfect compliment to expand my knowledge beyond previous I've read.

For anyone who enjoys reading about computers, technology, or just history in general, this book was a fascinating read.