I was asleep roughly one and a half hours ago. It is unusual for me to be asleep at such an early hour, but seeing as I do have kids… it is somewhat understandable.

Which is why I am fairly annoyed that someone decided to prank call my phone and awake me from a deep sleep. I am even more annoyed that it was on behest of someone I knew, and that they were all laughing and joking about it in the background.

Two reasons why it is a bad idea to prank me:

1. Stopping me from getting a decent sleep and calling at such an hour in the first place is a way to get on my bad side. Come on.
2. I have now spent the last hour and a half looking up ways to war dial on a modern computer.

What is war dialling? Have you ever heard of the movie 'Wargames' starring Mathew Broderick where he hacks into an advanced computer in charge of the United States nuclear arsenal?

To get into that computer, his character sets his computer to randomly dial a massive amount of phone numbers, in the hope that it will eventually connect to something. When he connects, he believes it is a personal computer and that someone wants to play him at chess and a game called Global ThermoNuclear War.

The act that he used to get into that computer is war dialling, and the name is specifically derived from the movie… hence war dialling.

This is what I am going to do to the people that pranked me. They aren't all that clever, considering that they pranked me with a number that showed up on the caller ID.

0755767153, by the way… and for those from places other than Australia, it would be +61755767153.

Usually, you set whatever program you are using so that it would dial a specific number, increasing the number by one each time. So say you set it to dial a number like 555-0000, it would go up to whatever number you specifically set it to go to like 555-9999.

But seeing as I already know the number I want to interact with, i'll just set the thing to constantly call for a few hundred times between the number I have for them… and the number I have for them.

This will result in them receiving a phone call almost constantly for however long I set it for, hopefully resulting in this:

The only problem is that I have broadband, which means I might not be able to actually do this without the need to go and pull out an old dial-up modem, and setting it up. I kind of don't want to go scrummaging for an old dial-up modem, so I hope I can find a modern alternative to do this.

I'll let you know what the result is when I can get it going.