Bob Levey's Washington: 'HACKING' Monique Out Of Commission
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             The Washington Post 16.02.88
                    By BOB LEVEY


Thoughts while shaving . . . . Not to get too specific about this,
but I've always thought the fun of making love was to go ahead and
make it, not to listen to some stranger simulate it. But that was
before Monique. As anyone with a car well knows, Monique is 
Washington's Voice of Recorded Sex. She has left pink business cards
under every windshield wiper in town, inviting the finder to give
her a ring on her 976 number. It will cost you $6 to hear Monique
huff and puff and pretend to be going bananas from sexual excitement.
That's a lot of dough to hear a lot of phony caterwauling, if you
ask me.
 Still, Monique (or whoever she might really be) is raking it in.
I'm told that her number is busy half the time. And I'd hate to tell
you how many parents have called me to ask what they can do about 
the dollars 500 phone bills that their 15-year-old sons have run up,
usually in the late afternoons on weekdays, before Mum or Dad are 
home from work.
 The answer, alas, is that there isn't an answer. Once the calls
have been made, the money is owed.
 The phone company has been under a lot of pressure about 976 sex,
and it thought it had found a compromise. For the last few months,
the phone people have required 976 sex purveyors to run a warning
just before Monique's act begins.
   The warning says that if you hang up right now, before the first
'Oooooh baby,' you won't be charged. But very often, the voice 
issuing the warning is muted. And if you aren't expecting the warning,
it can whiz past you before you realize what the voice has said. That'll
be dollars 6, pal.
 Isn't there a computer hacker somewhere who can reprogram phones to
make them immune to the 976 exchange?
 Yes, it's legal (don't forget that, since deregulation, you own the
 phone).

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Extract from: Corrupt Computing