Old nerd heroes never die! Captain Crunch — AKA John Draper, the man imprisoned for publicizing the fact that the whistle premium in boxes of Cap'n Crunch cereal could be modified to generate control tones that would trick the phone system into giving up free long-distance — has a new startup, building a pretty cool rack-mounted network-intrusion-detection system. I played with a demo of it at CodeCon, and it's pretty impressive, at least to a punter like me. You don't have to take my word for it, though: Woz says it's cool, too.
…Woz credits Draper as a true technical pioneer. "He perhaps didn't have the skills of social engineering of someone like Kevin Mitnick, but he did discover a huge amount of technical information himself, the codes and switches," all of which undoubtedly helps secure the new CrunchBox.
