obligatory obscure reference

Today I got an interesting screen on twitter:

Now stop for a second and think about this. Twitter won’t reveal my phone number, but they will let people search for me by my phone number.

So if I just search for all permutations of phone numbers for a given NPA (area code) and NXX (the first three digits of a phone number in the USA), I can make a list of twitter users in a given geographic area or at a specific business. NPA is often a geographically large area, but a given NPA/NXX pair can be very small — as small as a single company or small town.

Obviously you’d get caught trying to search for a bajillion contacts at once, but if I opened ~50 twitter accounts and added 10-20 numbers to each account per day, I could do 500-1000 lookups and cover a given NPA/NXX pair within a week or so.

Hey kids, remember what life was like before the web? Remember when VR was the future of computing?

Experience life before the InterWeb bubble! See geeks reverse engineer $200 toys because they can’t afford $20,000 peripherals! Thrill to 68HC11 assembly, state-of-the-art 386 coding, and Amiga parallel port interfaces!

In other words, I found my PowerGlove list backups.

Technorati Tags: Virtual Reality, Nintendo, PowerGlove, hacking