Talk:War dialing

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I thought that war dialing was essentially the same thing as what's described in the article on demon dialing — that is, dialing every number in an area to try to find listening computers. This article only mentions calling a single number repeatedly. Comments? —Arteitle 10:40, Mar 3, 2004 (UTC)
(I should add that "war dialing", as it's now described in the article, wasn't depicted in the film WarGames, but "demon dialing" as described there was. In the film, David dials every number in Sunnyvale in sequence looking for a particular software company.) —Arteitle 10:45, Mar 3, 2004 (UTC)

I object to the recent changes to war dialing and demon dialing. I can find numerous sites that define "war dialing" as dialing a range of numbers, and "demon dialing" as dialing the same number repeatedly (though sometimes it's given as a synonym for the former). [1] [2] [3] [4] Unless someone can justify the recent flip-flopping of their definitions, I'm going to change them back. --Arteitle 07:51, Mar 15, 2004 (UTC)

I've gotten what seemed like wardialing calls in the last year, in the u.s. I'm puzzled why the article refers to this in the past tense. The term seems appropriate for current practices, e.g. junk faxers and automated telemarketing calls. See [5]. -- Todd, Aug 15, 2005

Is there a reliable citation for war dialing predating the movie War Games ? What's the earliest verified description/incident? SJS 01:48, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] BBS usage, early '90s

War dialing or wardialing is a method of automatically scanning telephone numbers using a modem, usually dialing every telephone number in a local area to find where computers or fax machines are available, then attempting to access them by guessing passwords.

The usage around the BBS scene I recall was that wardialing meant hunting for modems, without any implication of password guessing. Rather the intent was to find things like Corporate or little known BBSs that had free accounts, mail, forums, online games, or file areas; the free accounts might be useful in an area where there were too many callers and not enough BBS's -- if the main local BBSs were busy, users would settle for "any port in a storm"; having extra BBSs was also useful for diagnostics -- "I can't log in to FooBBS, anybody else have this problem?", etc.

There are ample usages of this sort on record. Therefore I'll modify the lead paragraph. --AC 19:32, 4 December 2007 (UTC)