The Corner Pub

underground hated Australia’s national telephone carrier with a passion equalled only by its love of exploration. They felt that Telecom was backward and its staff had no idea how to use their own telecommunications technology. Worst of all, Telecom seemed to actively dislike BBSes.

Line noise interfered with one modem talking to another, and in the eyes of the computer underground, Telecom was respon- sible for the line noise. A hacker might be reading a message on PI, and there, in the middle of some juicy technical titbit, would be a bit of crud — random characters ‘2’28 v’1’;D>nj4’ — followed by the comment, ‘Line noise. Damn Telescum! At their best as usual, I see’. Sometimes the line noise was so bad it logged the hacker off, thus forcing him to spend another 45 minutes attack dialling the BBS. The modems didn’t have error correction, and the faster the modem speed, the worse the impact of line noise. Often it became a race to read mail and post messages before Telecom’s line noise logged the hacker off.

Rumours flew through the underground again and again that Telecom was trying to bring in timed local calls. The volume of outrage was deafening. The BBS community believed it really irked the national carrier that people could spend an hour logged into a BBS for the cost of one local phone call. Even more heinous, other rumours abounded that Telecom had forced at least one BBS to limit each incoming call to under half an hour. Hence Telecom’s other nickname in the computer underground: Teleprofit.

To the BBS community, Telecom’s Protective Services Unit was the enemy. They were the electronic police. The underground saw Protective Services as ‘the enforcers’ — an all-powerful government force which could raid your house, tap your phone line and seize your computer equipment at any time. The ultimate reason to hate Telecom.

There was such hatred of Telecom that people in the computer underground routinely discussed ways of sabotaging the carrier. Some people talked of sending 240 volts of elec- tricity down the telephone line — an act which would blow