Captain Crunch is the name of a cereal, and the mascot for that cereal. But it's also the name of a famous phreaker — famous in the phreaking circles anyway... Anyway, he's doing video podcasts now.

Hacking is to computers as phreaking is to phones. Phones work by having tones of specific frequencies played through them. In the old days, if you played the correct pitch tone into a pay-phone, you could trick the system into thinking you deposited some money, for example.

Captain Crunch got his name because he used a modified whistle that was given as a toy in boxes of Cap'n Crunch cereal to generate a tone of 2600hz. This tone allowed Captain Crunch to enter "operator mode" which allowed him to, among other things, make phone calls for free, and personally control the routing of his calls (so that if you tried to trace the number, it would seem to originate from Russia or Japan, for example).

Right, so Captain Crunch has started some video podcasts. What are they going to be about? Well, hacker type stuff (and NOT phreaker type stuff it seems). In the only episode that's up so far, he talks about tracing the origin of e-mails by examining their headers. The podcasts seem to be oriented towards novices, as he actually bothers to explain how to recognize an IP address, for example (look for 4 numbers).

Before the computer-savy get too disapointed though, he promises to have interviews with interesting people like Bruce Schneider and officials from Homeland Security.

Oh, and before you get too excited, remember that he's a "computer-person"... i.e. delivering enthusiastic-yet-natural-sounding speeches isn't his strong point.

I'll be checking out his podcasts to see how it goes.