> [The Secret Service agent] asked my for some picture ID. I have some fake photo ID's that a friend made for me years before, when we could make realistic photo ID's from our computers. Almost nobody else could do this because printers weren't good enough. But I had an expensive early generation dye sublimation printer and made some fake ID's for fun. I had one favorite fake ID that I'd used for almost every airplane flight, domestic and international, that I'd taken for many years. It says "Laser Safety Officer" and has a photo of me with an eyepatch. It also says "Department of Defiance" in an arc, in a font that looks like "Department of Defense" to the casual glance.
> As I opened my wallet, I considered whether I should risk using this fake ID on the Secret Service. It probably amounted to a real crime. I had my driver's license as well. But you only live once and only a few of us even get a chance like this once in our lives. So I handed him the fake ID. He noted and returned it. The Secret Service took an ID that said "Laser Safety Officer" with a photo of myself wearing an eyepatch.
I'm not a lawyer, I have no idea how criminal law in the USA works, but why would this be a crime? He didn't fake a Department of Defence ID, he created an ID for a fictional Department of Defiance, it may look similar, it may appear as a "real" ID because it's not just a piece of paper, but it's about as real an ID as a gym membership card.
How is that ID fake? It would have to imitate some ID issued by some organization to be fake.
I think “novelty ID” may be more correct. Just like those novelty dollar bills that kind of look like real currency in some ways but still have significant distinctions.
I had a replica of the Bad Mother F#cker wallet from pulp fiction. One of the TSA people asked to see my id but I think he was so busy staring at my wallet he didn’t actually look at my id when I handed it to him.
Just because he does "tame" things doesn't mean he's not abusing his privilege as an uber-rich white dude. He's a million times better person than Musk, but this is still immature behavior that not everyone could get away with because of what they look like. But hey, he's a hacker god so blank check I guess.
Basically he tells story in a way that average person assume he’s printing fake bills, when in reality he’s just cutting and binding sets of uncut bills into a notepad.
Lying to a federal investigator though is a federal crime and one that’s frequently resulted in prison sentences.
Worth noting that Jobs & Woz first product was actually a device to make illegal free calls:
Woz didn't lie according to his account. Technically, he gave a fake ID, but not a fake drivers license. I say this b/c DL's don't show occupation. My understanding is that it had his correct name. So I don't see a lie that most prosecutors would care about given the whole situation.
Not to mention that it is not a good look for a secret service agent to not know the details of the actual currency he is tasked to protect (e.g. available in perforated sheets). I suppose it is possible the agent got called in not knowing the specific details warranting arrest*, but that would be even worse.
* Am I right to think that Woz was arrested given that he was read his Miranda rights?
When I win the lottery and purchase my decommissioned lighthouse to put it on top of my decommissions missile silo, I'm going to wallpaper my new home with uncut sheets of $2-bills.
One of the greatest flaws of modern society is how we systematically beat this natural childlike enthusiasm for bending the rules out of people. I'm just old enough to remember when 'it was just a joke' was a legitimate excuse that could get you out of trouble. If the joke was funny and didn't hurt anyone you might get a slap not he wrist but people of all ages appreciated your effort to make the world a less grim place.
And I, for one, am glad that society as a whole doesn't behave this way. Imagine how obnoxious it would be if every other social interaction was somebody messing with you. Wonderful.
It's easy to "live life for liberty and the pursuit of happiness" when your actions do not have meaningful consequences for yourself or your loved ones.
The story about Wozniak tipping perforated $2 bills is about a person who breaks the pattern by behaving very suspiciously after fully satisfying the initial profiling measures. It is funny in how that puts people around him into an awkward position, but make the protagonist subtly different (e.g., say he has much darker skin, some innate attribute that reveals poor upbringing, or whatever else is used for discrimination in your place and time) and the story may not have had a happy ending. How many stories would we never read about for that reason?
When the element of comedy hinges on hero being privileged it doesn’t mean it’s not funny, but it does prompt a thought experiment as to whether a world where there’s no such profiling and everyone is treated equal base trust is possible, and if so whether such a story could be funny in that world. Taking high-trust societies I can think of as examples, I suspect either total surveillance or high value placed on following protocols sincerely with the goal of not creating awkwardness would be implied, in which case probably not.
I for one wish there were fewer people around chiding others with tired platitudes for not living their day-to-day lives like someone with $100m in their pocket.
To be fair, this is sort of a mixture of white privilege and changing times as well. I have a much less cool version of a situation where I was pulled over a few years back by state highway patrol at night. Apparently after I had stopped for gas I forgot to flick my lights on and was driving with them off. I didn’t notice because the highway section I was on had lots of lights along it and I have pretty good vision. The officer asked me if I knew I was driving with my lights off, and I told him, “my friends call me hawkeye”.
I’m 30-something white guy, I can easily imagine not feeling comfortable trying that stupid joke if I was anyone else.
I’m going to have to try this. Clemson fans travel to away games with stacks of $2 bills stamped with Tiger Paws. Been a tradition since the 70s when Georgia Tech wanted to cancel our annual series, so our fans showed up in Atlanta spending the $2 bills everywhere to make sure everyone knew the economic impact when we came to visit. It was a big deal to our fans because we weren’t going to bowl games every year back then, so our game in Atlanta was the big trip for the season.
Been a tradition ever since and our reputation as fans who “travel well” helped ensure bowl game preferences for years.
As a kid I was in the store with my parents and we were in line for the register. Some guy turned around and looked at me and said "Hey kid, ever seen a $2 bill before?" I said no, and he ripped off a $2 from a pad and handed it to me. To this day I have this $2 bill because I thought it was fake. This is the midwest, no way was this Woz but now I feel that this might not be a fake $2 bill anymore.
Was Wozniak already “the Woz” of Apple fame when this story took place? In which case I assume he could afford the best lawyers on the planet if necessary, plus the President calling to get him out of trouble.
An ordinary civilian might fall down that hole never to come out again. Just showing a fake ID to a fed could be met with serious retribution.
Woz's old friend John Draper knew how to call President Richard Nixon get out of trouble when he ran out of toilet paper, and later Woz paid for Draper's attorney fees when he got busted for being involved with duplicating BART cards:
One oft-repeated story featuring Captain Crunch goes as follows: Draper picked up a public phone, then proceeded to “phreak” his call around the world. At no charge, he routed a call through different phone switches in countries such as Japan, Russia and England. Once he had set the call to go through dozens of countries, he dialed the number of the public phone next to him. A few minutes later, the phone next to him rang. Draper spoke into the first phone, and, after quite a few seconds, he heard his own voice very faintly on the other phone. He sometimes repeated this stunt at parties. Draper also claimed that he and a friend once placed a direct call to the White House during the Nixon administration, and after giving the operator President Nixon's secret code name of "Olympus", and asking to speak to the president about a national emergency, they were connected with someone who sounded like Richard Nixon; Draper’s friend told the man about a toilet paper shortage in Los Angeles, at which point the person on the other end of the line angrily asked them how they'd managed to get connected to him.[8] Draper was also a member of the Homebrew Computer Club.[2]
DonHopkins 4 months ago | parent | context | favorite | on: How MetroCard works (2005) [pdf]
Then there was the time the infamous phone phreak John "Cap'n Crunch" Draper got busted for forging BART Cards...
Steve Wozniak and his son also got mistakenly busted and thrown in a holding cell for 4 hours because he had a (real) BART card that didn't work, so he got pissed off and ended up paying for Draper's attorney fees, and Draper copped to a misdemeanor of altering MUNI tickets, and went on probation for a year, but did not lose his job at Autodesk.
>TECHNOLOGY. March 1, 1987. JUST TACKY! By CBR Staff Writer.
>Aw c’mon John, forging the electronic characteristics of BART tickets is just tacky! John Draper, who inter alia wrote the Easy Writer word processing package, has been caught with $2,500 of forged access tickets to the San Francisco Bay-Area Rapid Transit subway system, and fellah, BART, which has never fully recovered from the teething troubles in the early days when trains used to whistle through stations at 60mph with the doors wide open, can’t afford it; Draper’s real claim to fame is that he discovered in the 1960s that a toy whistle given away in packets of a glutinous and bilious-coloured sugared corn puff cereal called Cap’n Crunch was pitched just right to mimic the tones AT&T used to set up long-distance calls, so that packs of the sickly Cap’n sold out as kids rushed to claim the whistles that enabled them to call auntie in Montana or Mary in Maine; that was ingenious if wicked, but forging BART tickets – tacky, John, tacky.
>Thanks Tom Barbalet for recording this rare interview with John Draper (aka "Captain Crunch" or "Crunchman" these days) about his life at Autodesk, and the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) cards fiasco. Also included here are other life and times of "Crunch".
Partial transcript (listen to the whole thing for the full story about the BART card fiasco -- I'm just transcribing the part about Woz getting arrested here):
[...]
John Draper: So Woz game me a Mac I could use, and Woz also go me a ... Cause Woz got hassled by the BART cops too.
Here's what happened, here's what happened at that point.
Woz went to go see the Oakland A's game. And what he wanted to do, he had his son with him. So his son I think at the time was about 9 years old. And he wanted to take his son to the Oakland A's game.
And his son says "Hey, daddy, can I ride BART?" Sure, why not? So he goes to Hayward BART, er, he goes to Hay- not Hayward, yeah, he goes to Hayward BART, yeah, parks the car, and rides BART to the Oakland Coliseum. Ok.
So what happened was, his son's BART card didn't work. He put it in to the turnstile, and it got rejected coming back. And Woz goes over to the BART attendant and says "Well my card doesn't work", he says "look, it comes back, it came back and said rejected or something."
And the guy, the BART attendant says "Wait right here." He gets on the phone, calls the BART cop. BART cop takes Woz and his son down to the Lake Merit Station, ok. At which time they grilled Woz about what he'd, that he'd, and they were claiming, accusing him of tampering with the cards, and they threw Woz and his son in a holding cell for like six hours.
Tom Barbalet: So let me get this straight.
John Draper: Until they could get an expert to come in and take a look at that card, to make sure that the card had not been tampered.
Tom Barbalet: And the card was a regular card that they just bought.
John Draper: Yeah, just a regular card that they just bought.
Tom Barbalet: So they knew your connection with him?
John Draper: No they did not know my connection with him.
Tom Barbalet: So how did, why was he...
John Draper: His card didn't work. They suspected that he had tampered with the card.
Tom Barbalet: But surely that would have happened to, just in a sample size, a hundred, maybe two hundred people in the Bay Area.
John Draper: I don't know the details, all I know is they arrested him and his son, and they held them up in a, put him in a holding cell for four hours, until they can wake up a, get the BART engineer to get out and examine the card, and once they figured out it was their fault, they let him go.
Tom Barbalet: Right.
John Draper: So when Woz found about the BART fiasco that I did, thing, that I got roped into, Woz says, "I got this attorney, I'll pay for, I'll pay for your legal attorney fees. Go see this guy. So I went and say this guy, this attorney. So he was handling my case in the BART thing.
-- He was on Steve-O's podcast - few months ago - the whole episode is hilarious - - the $2 bill stuff - its at 1:25:25 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRi8r0XQFHU - Steve-O (guy from jackass) podcast is great - btw --
> I carry large sheets, folded in my pocket, and sometimes pull out scissors and cut a few off to pay for something in a store. It's just for comedy, as the $2 bills cost nearly $3 each when purchased on sheets.
> When he said that they don't make bills like this I asked "They don't?" as though I thought it was quite normal to have sheets. My answer was also so emotionless as to confuse him about me, and to make me seem even more evasive. This, again, I do for a comedic effect.
Is it just me, or does the man simply not understand what comedy is?
I enjoy a good joke as much as the next guy. That said, if you are routinely paying for items at the register by cutting bills off of a sheet with scissors and handing the police a fake ID when asked for identification, you’re basically asking for trouble. And you’re almost certainly going to waste a lot of people’s valuable time.
Generally speaking, I do really like Woz as a person. But in this particular instance, he does kind of come across as a big pain in the ass.
It ended on (a) a yet more unbelievable note than everything up until that point, and (b) noting that lots of money changed hands that day, but that all the financial details are ancillary to the story, which is what was important.
> I'd already transferred the maximum yearly tax free gift of $10,000 to each of my kids.
If I'm not mistaken, one tip I've heard is that one can transfer more than that in gifts yearly, and although that requires filing a gift tax return with the IRS, it doesn't mean necessarily mean paying any tax. There's a lifetime maximum that has to be hit, and it's extremely high. (I'm not a lawyer nor an accountant, and this is not legal or tax advice, yada yada)
The nuance is that if you gift below the yearly reporting amount, it does not count towards the lifetime maximum, since it never has to be reported.
So if Woz had given $10,001, then he would have had to file it, and then when he died, it would have added $10,001 towards his total lifetime gift tax exclusion from his estate (currently $13M). But if he gave $10k (or whatever yearly reporting maximum) per year until he dies, then all of that does not get counted towards the $13M lifetime gift tax exclusion, so in a way, it is an additional tax reduction when the estate gets passed down.
Woz and Jobs got their first big break from selling physical copies of the 'Blue Box', a device which allowed you to place long-distance phone calls through intelligently breaking AT&T's phone routing network. In today's 'wire fraud' day and age, this 100% would have been illegal -- so note that these two people made today's most valuable company!
Relatively speaking, printing a photo ID or $2 bills is nothing. It is the hacker spirit (notice we are on a site called hacker news!).
The patron saint of hackers is making the rounds again. Whether you are a fan or not, his book "iWoz" is full of these stories like trolling casino pit bosses with the pad of bills.
A few years ago I had the privilege of meeting the woz after an event at which he was a speaker.
I was surprised at how humble and patient he was with people vying for his attention, many asking for him to autograph laptops and whatever else they had at hand.
I got his attention when I asked him about tetris and we geeked out a bit over it. Thats a story for another day but I did walk away from that conversation with a prized souvenir -- an autographed $2 bill: https://imgur.com/gallery/TQo0KOi
Well, I guess Woz was being a “prankster” - and from Wikipedia: “A practical joke, or prank, is a mischievous trick played on someone, generally causing the victim to experience embarrassment, perplexity, confusion, or discomfort”.
I can see the playful side of it, but people and places where pranks are not generally well received would be federal agents and casinos - so from the ‘victims’ point of view I expect they could have done without the bother.
Haven't heard of any, but when it was first introduced, the Euro was fairly easy to copy.
There was a man in Italy nicknamed il Professore who was notorious for producing them in bulk while not being particularly conspicuous about it.
According to an anecdote from one of his family members when a cashier tried to confirm whether the 20€ banknote he gave her was legitimate he said "lady, it costs me 18€ to make one of these, so I don't even bother".
Due to this story, if I am teaching basic electronics or how to use a 3d printer to kids, I "pay them for the day's work" with a new $2 bill (which you can get at any bank if you ask and wait a few days). I like them because instead of having some guy on the back they have a pretty painting of the Constitution. I sometimes to have to explain to the parents that yes it's real money.
Sheesh the comments on the ID! All morality and legality aside, we have to take a little bit of context into account. The Great Woz is behaving in the much heralded spirit of the age, encapsulated in things like Make. He may as well actually be the Lazer and Chief (retired) of the Defiance Department. A sense of humor might help with the nuance. Imagine the back-office or radio chatter tho. "Casino security says the bills are real. They have better machines than we do. Right. Some technician at Apple. Makes sense. Alright Tom I'll call you back."
Some of the comments in here scare me to bits: If HN's userbase is that scared of poking at the edges/inconsistencies of authority, even in jest, then how would anyone gain the expertise of challenging said authority when top-down control is pushed too far?
> HN's userbase is that scared of poking at the edges/inconsistencies of authority, even in jest
It wasn't always like this, even just 5 years ago. I don't know where all the weirdos came from but they've fundamentally changed this site, and not in a good way.
Oh, the notebook full of tear-off dollar bills. That used to be a thing. I once read that it was originated by the publicity director of Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey. Although setting them up for 4-up and perforated is over complicating things.
This seems like a plausible thing to do if you run out of change to tip, banks may not easily give out bundles of $2 in cash simply because of shortage and found this another way to grab lot of $2 notes.
I asked at a bank recently for 100 $2 bills (I needed it for tipping on a cruise ship). The tellers were extremely curious about what it was for. I got 100 still-bundled bills, like in crime movies!
If this isn't something tellers see quite regularly, then what do other cruise passengers do?
I asked for a lot of £5 (smallest denomination note in UK) at the bank once because I was going to a music festival (before mobile card payment was routine). They asked me casually why I wanted them and I explained. Seems to be a Know Your Customer thing.
The end of this story (paying taxes on $7500 winnings) seems to be hinting at something. Is the message that of course nobody follows all the rules? (Pays those gift taxes)
Its unfortunate how many people can't take a joke. Wozniak certainly wasn't wasting anyone's time as the bills were legal. Wozniak didn't have to deal with the SS agent either and could've easily invoked his 5th amendment right to silence, but he was cooperative instead. Based on the story, it doesn't look as though he claimed his fake ID was a legitimate one either and just handed it over as part of a generic question.
No, don't try to tell me how the secret service agent and the casino employees were victims and how this somehow ties into white privilege or some crap like that. Try spending some time off the internet and return to real life.
I've lived my entire life here and was well into my 40s the first time I ever saw one. When I did get hold of one, I did what many people do with it, which is to tuck it away in a side pocket of my wallet as a curiosity, rather than spend it.
You will almost never come across them unless someone goes out of their way to obtain them like Woz.
Outside of one rare occurrence where I received change in golden dollars and $2 bills, the only time I've seen $2 bills was when my father would buy them to tip with.
Agreed. I found this whole story made him sound very unlikable. Like he considers everybody to be below him to the point of being playthings. Kind of gross.
Oh, look, that was so funny putting myself into a situation that most people would be scared shitless to be in and might not have ended well for them! Let's just waste everyone's time so they can humor me on a joke! I am such an edgy rich white guy! A real hacker!
Some comments were deferred for faster rendering.
yreg|3 years ago
> As I opened my wallet, I considered whether I should risk using this fake ID on the Secret Service. It probably amounted to a real crime. I had my driver's license as well. But you only live once and only a few of us even get a chance like this once in our lives. So I handed him the fake ID. He noted and returned it. The Secret Service took an ID that said "Laser Safety Officer" with a photo of myself wearing an eyepatch.
Woz plays life like an RPG.
b3orn|3 years ago
I'm not a lawyer, I have no idea how criminal law in the USA works, but why would this be a crime? He didn't fake a Department of Defence ID, he created an ID for a fictional Department of Defiance, it may look similar, it may appear as a "real" ID because it's not just a piece of paper, but it's about as real an ID as a gym membership card.
dist1ll|3 years ago
I find his nonchalant delivery quite jarring. I don't understand what's going through his head here.
mertd|3 years ago
I love the story.
AuthorizedCust|3 years ago
I think “novelty ID” may be more correct. Just like those novelty dollar bills that kind of look like real currency in some ways but still have significant distinctions.
jejeyyy77|3 years ago
zxcvbn4038|3 years ago
29athrowaway|3 years ago
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/steve-jo...
Steve Jobs met his biological father accidentally at a restaurant.
causality0|3 years ago
77pt77|3 years ago
esaym|3 years ago
Risky, but it doesn't sound like a forged government ID (driver's license, etc). It might have even had his actual name on it.
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
FatActor|3 years ago
O__________O|3 years ago
https://catalog.usmint.gov/paper-currency/uncut-currency/?&p...
Basically he tells story in a way that average person assume he’s printing fake bills, when in reality he’s just cutting and binding sets of uncut bills into a notepad.
Lying to a federal investigator though is a federal crime and one that’s frequently resulted in prison sentences.
Worth noting that Jobs & Woz first product was actually a device to make illegal free calls:
http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2012/10/steve-jobs-f...
xpe|3 years ago
Not to mention that it is not a good look for a secret service agent to not know the details of the actual currency he is tasked to protect (e.g. available in perforated sheets). I suppose it is possible the agent got called in not knowing the specific details warranting arrest*, but that would be even worse.
* Am I right to think that Woz was arrested given that he was read his Miranda rights?
iSnow|3 years ago
waltbosz|3 years ago
baron816|3 years ago
schwartzworld|3 years ago
QuantumGood|3 years ago
jsz0|3 years ago
xavdid|3 years ago
JoeAltmaier|3 years ago
I for one wish there were more real people around, living life for liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Like we were intended to live.
filchermcurr|3 years ago
Jochim|3 years ago
strogonoff|3 years ago
When the element of comedy hinges on hero being privileged it doesn’t mean it’s not funny, but it does prompt a thought experiment as to whether a world where there’s no such profiling and everyone is treated equal base trust is possible, and if so whether such a story could be funny in that world. Taking high-trust societies I can think of as examples, I suspect either total surveillance or high value placed on following protocols sincerely with the goal of not creating awkwardness would be implied, in which case probably not.
ramphastidae|3 years ago
nickpeterson|3 years ago
I’m 30-something white guy, I can easily imagine not feeling comfortable trying that stupid joke if I was anyone else.
haunter|3 years ago
https://catalog.usmint.gov/paper-currency/uncut-currency/
davidgrenier|3 years ago
``Because the individual notes on uncut currency sheets are legal tender, they may be cut apart and spent.''
Symbiote|3 years ago
If I received one, I'd also be suspicious.
brightball|3 years ago
Been a tradition ever since and our reputation as fans who “travel well” helped ensure bowl game preferences for years.
https://www.greenvilleonline.com/story/sports/college/clemso...
nly|3 years ago
bhaney|3 years ago
implements|3 years ago
Framing one as a picture would seem to invite a burglary, and as a source of individual notes it’s much cheaper to go to a bank.
Edit: Not intended as a critical question, btw - I was just wondering how you’d use them.
jabart|3 years ago
dsq|3 years ago
An ordinary civilian might fall down that hole never to come out again. Just showing a fake ID to a fed could be met with serious retribution.
alpaca128|3 years ago
DonHopkins|3 years ago
https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/139493
Legends
One oft-repeated story featuring Captain Crunch goes as follows: Draper picked up a public phone, then proceeded to “phreak” his call around the world. At no charge, he routed a call through different phone switches in countries such as Japan, Russia and England. Once he had set the call to go through dozens of countries, he dialed the number of the public phone next to him. A few minutes later, the phone next to him rang. Draper spoke into the first phone, and, after quite a few seconds, he heard his own voice very faintly on the other phone. He sometimes repeated this stunt at parties. Draper also claimed that he and a friend once placed a direct call to the White House during the Nixon administration, and after giving the operator President Nixon's secret code name of "Olympus", and asking to speak to the president about a national emergency, they were connected with someone who sounded like Richard Nixon; Draper’s friend told the man about a toilet paper shortage in Los Angeles, at which point the person on the other end of the line angrily asked them how they'd managed to get connected to him.[8] Draper was also a member of the Homebrew Computer Club.[2]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32723420
DonHopkins 4 months ago | parent | context | favorite | on: How MetroCard works (2005) [pdf]
Then there was the time the infamous phone phreak John "Cap'n Crunch" Draper got busted for forging BART Cards... Steve Wozniak and his son also got mistakenly busted and thrown in a holding cell for 4 hours because he had a (real) BART card that didn't work, so he got pissed off and ended up paying for Draper's attorney fees, and Draper copped to a misdemeanor of altering MUNI tickets, and went on probation for a year, but did not lose his job at Autodesk.
https://techmonitor.ai/technology/just_tacky
>TECHNOLOGY. March 1, 1987. JUST TACKY! By CBR Staff Writer.
>Aw c’mon John, forging the electronic characteristics of BART tickets is just tacky! John Draper, who inter alia wrote the Easy Writer word processing package, has been caught with $2,500 of forged access tickets to the San Francisco Bay-Area Rapid Transit subway system, and fellah, BART, which has never fully recovered from the teething troubles in the early days when trains used to whistle through stations at 60mph with the doors wide open, can’t afford it; Draper’s real claim to fame is that he discovered in the 1960s that a toy whistle given away in packets of a glutinous and bilious-coloured sugared corn puff cereal called Cap’n Crunch was pitched just right to mimic the tones AT&T used to set up long-distance calls, so that packs of the sickly Cap’n sold out as kids rushed to claim the whistles that enabled them to call auntie in Montana or Mary in Maine; that was ingenious if wicked, but forging BART tickets – tacky, John, tacky.
https://digibarn.com/collections/audio/digibarn-radio/06-05-...
>DigiBarn Radio: John Draper @ Autodesk (1985)
>Listen to John Draper talking about his Autodesk period, the BART card fiasco and more! (8MB MP3, recorded May 2006)
https://www.digibarn.com/collections/audio/digibarn-radio/06...
>John Draper at the Digibarn's Homebrew@30 event
>Thanks Tom Barbalet for recording this rare interview with John Draper (aka "Captain Crunch" or "Crunchman" these days) about his life at Autodesk, and the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) cards fiasco. Also included here are other life and times of "Crunch".
https://digibarn.com/collections/audio/digibarn-radio/06-05-...
Partial transcript (listen to the whole thing for the full story about the BART card fiasco -- I'm just transcribing the part about Woz getting arrested here):
[...]
John Draper: So Woz game me a Mac I could use, and Woz also go me a ... Cause Woz got hassled by the BART cops too.
Here's what happened, here's what happened at that point.
Woz went to go see the Oakland A's game. And what he wanted to do, he had his son with him. So his son I think at the time was about 9 years old. And he wanted to take his son to the Oakland A's game.
And his son says "Hey, daddy, can I ride BART?" Sure, why not? So he goes to Hayward BART, er, he goes to Hay- not Hayward, yeah, he goes to Hayward BART, yeah, parks the car, and rides BART to the Oakland Coliseum. Ok.
So what happened was, his son's BART card didn't work. He put it in to the turnstile, and it got rejected coming back. And Woz goes over to the BART attendant and says "Well my card doesn't work", he says "look, it comes back, it came back and said rejected or something."
And the guy, the BART attendant says "Wait right here." He gets on the phone, calls the BART cop. BART cop takes Woz and his son down to the Lake Merit Station, ok. At which time they grilled Woz about what he'd, that he'd, and they were claiming, accusing him of tampering with the cards, and they threw Woz and his son in a holding cell for like six hours.
Tom Barbalet: So let me get this straight.
John Draper: Until they could get an expert to come in and take a look at that card, to make sure that the card had not been tampered.
Tom Barbalet: And the card was a regular card that they just bought.
John Draper: Yeah, just a regular card that they just bought.
Tom Barbalet: So they knew your connection with him?
John Draper: No they did not know my connection with him.
Tom Barbalet: So how did, why was he...
John Draper: His card didn't work. They suspected that he had tampered with the card.
Tom Barbalet: But surely that would have happened to, just in a sample size, a hundred, maybe two hundred people in the Bay Area.
John Draper: I don't know the details, all I know is they arrested him and his son, and they held them up in a, put him in a holding cell for four hours, until they can wake up a, get the BART engineer to get out and examine the card, and once they figured out it was their fault, they let him go.
Tom Barbalet: Right.
John Draper: So when Woz found about the BART fiasco that I did, thing, that I got roped into, Woz says, "I got this attorney, I'll pay for, I'll pay for your legal attorney fees. Go see this guy. So I went and say this guy, this attorney. So he was handling my case in the BART thing.
[...]
tbarone|3 years ago
Dangerous game to play, imagine trying to convince a judge that "I was not intentionally looking for trouble".
pigtailgirl|3 years ago
bentobean|3 years ago
> When he said that they don't make bills like this I asked "They don't?" as though I thought it was quite normal to have sheets. My answer was also so emotionless as to confuse him about me, and to make me seem even more evasive. This, again, I do for a comedic effect.
Is it just me, or does the man simply not understand what comedy is?
I enjoy a good joke as much as the next guy. That said, if you are routinely paying for items at the register by cutting bills off of a sheet with scissors and handing the police a fake ID when asked for identification, you’re basically asking for trouble. And you’re almost certainly going to waste a lot of people’s valuable time.
Generally speaking, I do really like Woz as a person. But in this particular instance, he does kind of come across as a big pain in the ass.
helsontaveras18|3 years ago
And that was a very odd story… he is an edgy guy.
082349872349872|3 years ago
I don't know if I'd say "edgy", so much as a hacker — and there have been hackers in all generations, eg https://books.google.ch/books?id=V3ByEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA575&lpg=P...
csallen|3 years ago
If I'm not mistaken, one tip I've heard is that one can transfer more than that in gifts yearly, and although that requires filing a gift tax return with the IRS, it doesn't mean necessarily mean paying any tax. There's a lifetime maximum that has to be hit, and it's extremely high. (I'm not a lawyer nor an accountant, and this is not legal or tax advice, yada yada)
lotsofpulp|3 years ago
So if Woz had given $10,001, then he would have had to file it, and then when he died, it would have added $10,001 towards his total lifetime gift tax exclusion from his estate (currently $13M). But if he gave $10k (or whatever yearly reporting maximum) per year until he dies, then all of that does not get counted towards the $13M lifetime gift tax exclusion, so in a way, it is an additional tax reduction when the estate gets passed down.
lupire|3 years ago
someweirdperson|3 years ago
"Extremely high" is relative (some 11 million, probably less at that time?), considering the person telling this story.
mxtihvb|3 years ago
Woz and Jobs got their first big break from selling physical copies of the 'Blue Box', a device which allowed you to place long-distance phone calls through intelligently breaking AT&T's phone routing network. In today's 'wire fraud' day and age, this 100% would have been illegal -- so note that these two people made today's most valuable company!
Relatively speaking, printing a photo ID or $2 bills is nothing. It is the hacker spirit (notice we are on a site called hacker news!).
gelstudios|3 years ago
A few years ago I had the privilege of meeting the woz after an event at which he was a speaker.
I was surprised at how humble and patient he was with people vying for his attention, many asking for him to autograph laptops and whatever else they had at hand.
I got his attention when I asked him about tetris and we geeked out a bit over it. Thats a story for another day but I did walk away from that conversation with a prized souvenir -- an autographed $2 bill: https://imgur.com/gallery/TQo0KOi
... and a laser cut steel business card :)
chrismarlow9|3 years ago
implements|3 years ago
I can see the playful side of it, but people and places where pranks are not generally well received would be federal agents and casinos - so from the ‘victims’ point of view I expect they could have done without the bother.
jesprenj|3 years ago
Tade0|3 years ago
There was a man in Italy nicknamed il Professore who was notorious for producing them in bulk while not being particularly conspicuous about it.
According to an anecdote from one of his family members when a cashier tried to confirm whether the 20€ banknote he gave her was legitimate he said "lady, it costs me 18€ to make one of these, so I don't even bother".
rvieira|3 years ago
spiritplumber|3 years ago
bluenomatterwho|3 years ago
markus_zhang|3 years ago
mv4|3 years ago
How times have changed.
dianfishekqi|3 years ago
l0b0|3 years ago
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20120127020131/http://archive.wo...
unknown|3 years ago
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x-complexity|3 years ago
larvaetron|3 years ago
It wasn't always like this, even just 5 years ago. I don't know where all the weirdos came from but they've fundamentally changed this site, and not in a good way.
madmax108|3 years ago
kwikiel|3 years ago
Animats|3 years ago
risfriend|3 years ago
papito|3 years ago
incone123|3 years ago
I asked for a lot of £5 (smallest denomination note in UK) at the bank once because I was going to a music festival (before mobile card payment was routine). They asked me casually why I wanted them and I explained. Seems to be a Know Your Customer thing.
Eleison23|3 years ago
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kidme5|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
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indigodaddy|3 years ago
https://archive.ph/n8vwp
kristianp|3 years ago
Invictus0|3 years ago
Slighted|3 years ago
No, don't try to tell me how the secret service agent and the casino employees were victims and how this somehow ties into white privilege or some crap like that. Try spending some time off the internet and return to real life.
astrostl|3 years ago
dorfsmay|3 years ago
thrdbndndn|3 years ago
Probably not hugged to death, since their server is unstable for quite awhile.
brailsafe|3 years ago
TAKEMYMONEY|3 years ago
ElfinTrousers|3 years ago
Aardwolf|3 years ago
xboxnolifes|3 years ago
Outside of one rare occurrence where I received change in golden dollars and $2 bills, the only time I've seen $2 bills was when my father would buy them to tip with.
decker|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
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atorodius|3 years ago
erikerikson|3 years ago
mgaunard|3 years ago
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enriquto|3 years ago
curiousgal|3 years ago
I hate this attitude so much.
squillion|3 years ago
BTW the basic facts might be true but the details reek of bullshit.
filchermcurr|3 years ago
cardanome|3 years ago
Oh, look, that was so funny putting myself into a situation that most people would be scared shitless to be in and might not have ended well for them! Let's just waste everyone's time so they can humor me on a joke! I am such an edgy rich white guy! A real hacker!
What an absolute tool.
corobo|3 years ago
Same attitude paid off in his little Apple computer hobby.
lupire|3 years ago