Today, the blue box still works on some foreign phone lines and a few toll calls, but Draper says phone companies have become increasingly adept at spotting illegal usage. The 2,600-hertz tone - now almost meaningless in an age of fiber optics - is a kind of phone phreaking mascot. It even inspired the name of the well-known hacker rag, 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. Meanwhile, Draper has become a god to the hacking
masses. To an extent, the concepts of beating the telephone conglomerates, scanning for security flaws, and exploiting a hack as far as possible all originate with Draper. He's promoted the mystique with a hacker portal (www.webcrunchers.com - link not working?) that documents his early days. But now he's working as a security software developer and running a security site (www.crunchtv.net) that seems to disavow hacker mantras.