Source: was personally involved
Also, on the note of 'porn online in the late 80's' is probably impossible, as there were no digital cameras, no scanners to speak of, and the only 'porn' you'd have found would have been rare, and very, very data intensive for the days. I know. :-)
And /most/ countries police forces had absolutely no clue whatsoever about 'online', 'computers', 'modems', 'internet' and 'keyboards'. I know the french didn't!
Those were the days, etc etc :-)
Look for "Region,49" and you'll see a small number of them, but they were in Port Elizabeth, Cape Town, and Johannesburg.
Whether they could actually dial out to the rest of the world is open to question, but they would have needed to at least be accessible from the outside world for them to even be on FidoNet in the first place.
I don't find this claim so remarkable, though it's certainly possible that the details are fuzzily remembered nearly 30 years later.
In Krugersdorp in the late 1980s? And the police were on the case - both in terms of being tech-savy enough, and not having more pressing concerns? (1)
Let's say that it's an extra-ordinary claim and we'd like a little more weight behind it.
1) http://www.saha.org.za/ecc25/ecc_under_a_state_of_emergency....
Yep, this is exactly what we did with our 8-bit machines and modems at the time.
We were global even then.
EDIT- LOL. I guess the HN downvoters have proof this isn't what we were doing back then???
"In the Esquire article, Captain Crunch narrates excitedly to his interviewer Ron Rosenbaum the process by which he connected a single long-distance call via switching stations across Asia, Europe, South Africa, South America and the East coast until he reached a specific telephone in California."
Depends how much chance you have to lose yourself in an internal SA call to one or more SxS COs before the overseas hop, you could be pretty hard to catch. But, if there wasn't a lot of international traffic they could just snoop on the overseas hop and figure out who you were.
Really ? Honestly, that's even more interesting than the truecrypt/arms dealer story ...
Pictures ?
> This seems a bit odd to me
Understatement of the week. As you say, it wouldn't have been on the Internet. I know nothing about the South African BBS scene of the time but it would have been very small. And selling pornography online? How would you even have gone about that? That would have been cash transactions down in the corner. For downloading porn at 1200 bits per second.
http://bbs.hmvh.net/lists/the_list.htm
There were a few that were around during the late 80s, so it's plausible that there may have been BBS catering to porn. But to sell it via BBS during the late 80s? From Krugersdorp? No ways.
The people who were really in the know about stuff like this were guys like tKC from The Phrozen Crew, and in his own words, he only started catching onto BBS in 1991.
http://defacto2.net/wayback/the-life-and-legend-of-tkc-2000-...
Phrozen Crew were a very well-known cracking group during the 90s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_warez_groups#Phrozen_C...
Bluebeep dude! Where were you? https://twitter.com/kaihendry/status/714901743830700032
"PILATE: What's so... funny about 'Biggus Dickus'?
CENTURION: Well, it's a joke name, sir.
PILATE: I have a vewy gweat fwiend in Wome called..."
(And he really did have this friend! Heh. Comedy, one way or another)
This seems a bit odd to me, having lived in South Africa at that time. There's almost no way a guy at home would have had that kind of access in Apartheid South Africa to the internet back then. There was access, but it was through big companies or academia and on a very controlled level.
Here's a quick rundown of internet access in South Africa during that time period from Wikipedia. From experience, it is accurate.
> The first South African IP address was granted to Rhodes University in 1988.[1] On 12 November 1991, the first IP connection was made between Rhodes' computing centre and the home of Randy Bush in Portland, Oregon.[2] By November 1991, South African universities were connected through UNINET to the Internet. Commercial Internet access for businesses and private use began in June 1992[3] with the registration of the first .co.za subdomain.
You might bring up stuff like BBS, but that was not around in South Africa until after 1990 also. You could technically have imported hardware and connected to a BBS in USA, but the costs involved and control of the only Telecoms operator allowed in Apartheid South Africa (Telkom) would have been unaffordable. Especially for Krugersdorp. I doubt you'd get some kind of USA led local police raid for pornography in Apartheid South Africa either. The whole thing would need some serious evidence.