What he did was akin to hacking into Sony and releasing their movies. Those "blue boxes" recreated proprietary phone signalling and equipment control signals to give the hacker operator/technician tools which they misused to steal long distance service from the phone company. It was deliberate "hacking."
For a company that jealously guards it's proprietary technology and intellectual property rights, don't you think it is hypocritical to be deliberately undermining those rights for other companies?
I think Steve Jobs would have shrieked a lung out at anyone who did to him what he did to others. There is no nice way to spin this. Steve Jobs was at heart a "thief." At least at this point in his life.
I personally wouldn’t worry about what Wozniak and Jobs did back before they formed Apple, because I know a whole lot of people from my early years that did things in college years that they would have nothing to do with now, and are now upstanding people. That would be a lot of conservatives, too!
As far as what Jobs did with Apple ... that’s just way beyond the ordinary and norm for companies.
Another example ... I drive a Ford now, but I would have nothing to do with anyone today that distributed the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” ... BUT that doesn’t affect me having a Ford right now, even though Ford did that very thing!
In another example ... I understand that Martin Luther contributed greatly to the Protestant Reformation, and I respect that, even though I would have nothing to do with anyone today who is a rabid ANTI-SEMITE ... which Martin Luther was - perhaps even contributing to Hitler’s Holocaust of the Jews!
You’ll find that EVERY SINGLE PERSON you come in contact with or know about in history is quite a MIXED BAG on different issues!
That’s the way I look at it.
It wasn't quite the same thing as the Sony hack.
What they did was build on technical "secrets" that were openly published in the Bell System Technical Journal, copies of which were available in the library of just about every major engineering school in the country, at least until Bell security agents (Dr. Johnny Fever's "phone cops") went in and physically cut out the offending pages.
Most of the "phone phreaks" were relatively harmless geeks who were fascinated by the phone system, and sought to understand how it operated primarily as an intellectual pursuit.
Some, however, saw it as a way to make a pile of money, and through them, the technology spread into the realm of organized crime, mainly bookies, who for a time were the biggest blue box users.