Phreaking is a slang Slang is the use of informal words and expressions that are not considered standard in the speaker's dialect or language. Slang is often to be found in areas of the lexicon that refer to things considered taboo . It is also used to identify with one's peers term coined to describe the activity of a subculture In sociology, anthropology and cultural studies, a subculture is a group of people with a culture which differentiates them from the larger culture to which they belong, for example, if a particular subculture is characterized by a systematic opposition to the dominant culture, it may be described as a counterculture of people who study, experiment with, or explore telecommunication systems, such as equipment and systems connected to public telephone networks. As telephone networks have become computerized, phreaking has become closely linked with computer hacking In common usage, a hacker is a person who breaks into computers, but does no harm, usually for fun or just the challenge. The subculture that has evolved around hackers is often referred to as the computer underground but is now an open community. Hackers are people who are motivated by curiosity and adventurer's spirit.^[1] This is sometimes called the H/P culture (with H standing for hacking and P standing for phreaking).

The term phreak is a portmanteau A portmanteau (pronounced /pɔrtmænˈtoʊ/ , plural: portmanteaus or portmanteaux) or portmanteau word is used to mean a blend of two (or more) words or morphemes and their meanings into one new word. In linguistics, a portmanteau is defined as a single morph which represents two or more morphemes of the words phone The telephone , commonly referred to as a phone, is a telecommunications device that transmits and receives sound, most commonly the human voice. Telephones are a point-to-point communication system whose most basic function is to allow two people separated by large distances to talk to one another. It is one of the most common household and freak, and may also refer to the use of various audio frequencies Frequency is the number of occurrences of a repeating event per unit time. It is also referred to as temporal frequency. The period is the duration of one cycle in a repeating event, so the period is the reciprocal of the frequency. Loosely speaking, 1 year is the period of the Earth's orbit around the Sun, and the Earth's rotation on its axis has to manipulate a phone system. Phreak, phreaker, or phone phreak are names used for and by individuals who participate in phreaking. A large percentage of the phone Phreaks were blind.^[2][3] Because identities were usually masked, an exact percentage cannot be calculated.

History

2600 hertz

The precise origins of phone phreaking are unknown, although it is believed^[who?] that phreak-like experimentation began with widespread deployment of automatic switches In the field of telecommunications, a telephone exchange or telephone switch is a system of electronic components that connects telephone calls. A central office is the physical building used to house inside plant equipment including telephone switches, which make telephone calls "work" in the sense of making connections and relaying the on the telephone networks. In the United States, AT&T AT&T Inc. is the largest provider of fixed telephony in the United States, and also provides broadband and subscription television services. AT&T is the second largest provider of mobile telephony service in the United States, with over 85.1 million wireless customers, and more than 210 million total customers began introducing automatic switches for long distance and certain forms of trunking In modern communications, trunking is a concept by which a communications system can provide network access to many clients by sharing a set of lines or frequencies instead of providing them individually. This is analogous to the structure of a tree with one trunk and many branches. Examples of this include telephone systems and the VHF radios carriers in the mid-to-late 1950s. With the introduction of these switches, the general population began, for the first time, to interact with computing power on a large scale. Phreaking can be viewed as an extension of this, where individuals interested in computers and technology, yet unable to further that interest for a variety of reasons, turned to the only available option: the computer controlled telephone network.^{[original research?]}

AT&T's fully automatic switches use tone dialing, a form of in-band signaling, and include some tones which are for internal telephone company use. One internal use tone is a tone of 2600 Hz which causes a telephone switch to think the call was over, and could be exploited to provide free long-distance and international calls.^[4]

The tone was discovered in approximately 1957,^[4] by Joe Engressia Joybubbles – August 8, 2007), born Josef Carl Engressia, Jr. in Richmond, Virginia, USA, was an early phone phreak. Born blind, he became interested in telephones at age four. Gifted with perfect pitch, he was able to whistle 2600 hertz into a telephone (see Blue box). Joybubbles said that he had an IQ of “172 or something.” Joybubbles died, a blind seven-year old boy. Engressia was skilled with perfect pitch Absolute pitch , widely referred to as perfect pitch, is the ability of a person to identify or recreate a musical note without the benefit of an external reference, and discovered that whistling the fourth E above middle C This is a virtual keyboard showing the absolute frequencies in hertz , of the notes on a modern piano (typically containing 88 keys) in twelve-tone equal temperament, with the 49th key, the fifth A (called A4), tuned to 440 Hz (referred to as A440). Each successive pitch is derived by multiplying (ascending) or dividing (descending) the previous (a frequency of 2600 Hz) would stop a dialed phone recording. Unaware of what he had done, Engressia called the phone company and asked why the recordings had stopped. This was the beginning of his love of exploring the telephone system.^[4]

Other early phreaks, such as "Bill from New York", began to develop a rudimentary understanding of how phone networks worked. Bill discovered that a recorder The English Flute or recorder is a woodwind musical instrument of the family known as fipple flutes or internal duct flutes — whistle-like instruments which include the tin whistle and ocarina. The recorder is end-blown and the mouth of the instrument is constricted by a wooden plug, known as a block or fipple. It is distinguished from other he owned could also play the tone at 2600 Hz with the same effect. John Draper discovered through his friendship with Engressia that the free whistles given out in Cap'n Crunch cereal boxes also produced a 2600 Hz tone when blown (providing his nickname, "Captain Crunch"). This allowed control of phone systems that worked on single frequency (SF) controls. One could sound a long whistle to reset the line, followed by groups of whistles (a short tone for a "1", two for a "2", etc.) to dial numbers.

Multi frequency

While Single Frequency worked on certain phone routes, the most common signaling on the then long distance network was Multi-Frequency In telephony, multi-frequency signaling is an outdated, in-band signaling technique. Numbers were represented in a two-out-of-five code for transmission from a multi-frequency sender, to be received by a multi-frequency receiver in a distant telephone exchange. MF was used for signaling in trunking applications, and is a precursor of modern DTMF Controls. The slang term for these tones and their use was "Marty Freeman." The specific frequencies required were unknown until 1964, when Bell Systems The Bell System was the American Bell Telephone Company and AT&T led organization that provided telephone service in the United States from 1877 to 1984, at various times as a monopoly. In 1984, a Federal mandate broke the company up into separate companies published the information in the Bell System Technical Journal Bell Labs Technical Journal is the in-house journal for scientists of Bell Labs/Alcatel-Lucent. It is published quarterly by John Wiley & Sons in an article describing the methods and frequencies used for inter-office signalling. The journal was intended for the company's engineers; however, it found its way to various college campuses across the United States. With this one article, the Bell System accidentally gave away the 'keys to the kingdom', and the intricacies of the phone system were at the disposal of anyone with a cursory knowledge of electronics.^{[citation needed]}

The second generation of phreaks arose at this time, including the New Yorkers New York City, which is geographically the largest city in the state and most populous in the United States, is known for its history as a gateway for immigration to the United States and its status as a financial, cultural, transportation, and manufacturing center. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, it is also a destination of choice "Evan Doorbell", "Ben Decibel" and Neil R. Bell and Californians Mark Bernay, Chris Bernay, and "Alan from Canada". Each conducted their own independent exploration and experimentation of the telephone network, initially on an individual basis, and later within groups as they discovered each other in their travels. "Evan Doorbell", "Ben" and "Neil" formed a group of phreaks known as Group Bell. Mark Bernay initiated a similar group named the Mark Bernay Society. Both Mark and Evan received fame amongst today's phone phreakers for Internet publication of their collection of telephone exploration recordings. These recordings, conducted in the 60s, 70s, and early 80s are available at Mark's website Phone Trips.^[5]

Blue boxes

In October 1971, phreaking was introduced to the masses when Esquire Magazine Esquire is a men's magazine, published in the U.S. by the Hearst Corporation. Founded in 1932, it flourished during the Great Depression under the guidance of founder and editor Arnold Gingrich published a story called "Secrets of the Little Blue Box"^[6] by Ron Rosenbaum Ron Rosenbaum is an American journalist and author. This article featured Engressia and John Draper prominently, synonymising their names with phreaking. The article also attracted the interest of other soon-to-be phreaks, such as Steve Wozniak Wozniak has several nicknames, including "The Woz", "Wonderful Wizard of Woz" and "iWoz" . "WoZ" (short for "Wheels of Zeus") is also the name of a company Wozniak founded. He is sometimes known as the "Other Steve" of Apple Computer, the better known Steve being co-founder Steve Jobs and Steve Jobs Steven Paul Jobs is an American business magnate and inventor. He is well-known for being the co-founder and chief executive officer of Apple. Jobs also previously served as chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios; he became a member of the board of The Walt Disney Company in 2006, following the acquisition of Pixar by Disney, who went on to found Apple Computer Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. Apple software includes the Mac OS X operating system; the iTunes media browser; the iLife suite^[7].

1971 also saw the beginnings of YIPL (Youth International Party Line), a publication started by Abbie Hoffman Abbot Howard "Abbie" Hoffman was an American social and political activist who co-founded the Youth International Party ("Yippies") and Al Bell to provide information to Yippies on how to "beat the man," mostly involving telephones. In 1973, Al Bell would move YIPL over and start TAP (Technology Assistance Program). TAP would develop into a major source for subversive technical information among phreaks and hackers all over the world. TAP ran from 1973 to 1984, with Al Bell handing over the magazine to "Tom Edison" in the late 70's. TAP ended publication in 1984 due mostly to a break-in and arson at Tom Edison's residence in 1983^[8]. Cheshire Catalyst then took over running the magazine for its final (1984) year.

A controversially suppressed article "How to Build a 'Phone Phreaks' box" in Ramparts Magazine (June, 1972) touched off a firestorm of interest in phreaking. This article published simple schematic plans of a "black box" used to receive free long distance phone calls, and included a very short parts list that could be used to construct one. Bell sued Ramparts which forced the magazine to pull all copies from shelves, but not before numerous copies were sold and many regular subscribers received them.

Computer hacking

In the 1980s, the revolution of the personal computer A personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end user, with no intervening computer operator. This is in contrast to the batch processing or time-sharing models which allowed large expensive mainframe and the popularity of computer bulletin board systems A Bulletin Board System, or BBS, is a computer system running software that allows users to connect and log in to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, a user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging messages with other users, either through electronic mail (accessed via modem A modem is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal to encode digital information, and also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information. The goal is to produce a signal that can be transmitted easily and decoded to reproduce the original digital data. Modems can be used over any means of transmitting analog) created an influx of tech-savvy users. These BBSes A Bulletin Board System, or BBS, is a computer system running software that allows users to connect and log in to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, a user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging messages with other users, either through electronic mail became popular for computer hackers In common usage, a hacker is a person who breaks into computers, but does no harm, usually for fun or just the challenge. The subculture that has evolved around hackers is often referred to as the computer underground but is now an open community. Hackers are people who are motivated by curiosity and adventurer's spirit and others interested in the technology, and served as a medium for previously scattered independent phone phreaks to share their discoveries and experiments. This not only led to unprecedented collaboration between phone phreaks, but also spread the notion of phreaking to others who took it upon themselves to study, experiment with, or exploit the telephone system. This was also at a time when the telephone company was a popular subject of discussion in the US, as the monopoly In economics, a monopoly (from Greek monos / μονος + polein / πωλειν (to sell)) exists when a specific individual or an enterprise has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it. (This is in contrast to a monopsony which relates to a AT&T AT&T Inc. is the largest provider of fixed telephony in the United States, and also provides broadband and subscription television services. AT&T is the second largest provider of mobile telephony service in the United States, with over 85.1 million wireless customers, and more than 210 million total customers was forced into divestiture. During this time, phreaking lost its label for being the exploration of the telephone network, and began to focus more on toll fraud. Computer hackers began to use phreaking methods to find the telephone numbers for modems belonging to businesses, which they could later exploit. Groups then formed around the BBS hacker/phreaking (H/P) community such as the famous Masters of Deception (Phiber Optik) and Legion of Doom (Erik Bloodaxe) groups. In 1985 an underground e-zine called Phrack Phrack is an ezine written by and for hackers first published November 17, 1985. Described by Fyodor as "the best, and by far the longest running hacker zine," the magazine is open for contributions by anyone who desires to publish remarkable works or express original ideas on the topics of interest. It has a wide circulation which (a combination of the words Phreak and Hack) began circulation among BBSes, and focused on hacking, phreaking, and other related technological subjects.

In the early 1990s H/P groups like Masters of Deception and Legion of Doom were shut down by the US Secret Service's Operation Sundevil. Phreaking as a subculture saw a brief dispersion in fear of criminal prosecution in the 1990s, before the popularity of the internet The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet Protocol Suite to serve billions of users worldwide. It is a network of networks that consists of millions of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope that are linked by a broad array of electronic and initiated a reemergence of phreaking as a subculture in the US and spread phreaking to international levels.

Into the turn of the 21st century, phreaks began to focus on the exploration and playing with the network, and the concept of toll fraud became widely frowned on among serious phreakers, primarily under the influence of the website Phone Trips, put up by second generation phreaks Mark Bernay and Evan Doorbell.

Toll fraud

The 1984 AT&T breakup The Bell System divestiture, or the Breakup of AT&T, was initiated by the filing in 1974 by the U.S. Department of Justice of an antitrust lawsuit against AT&T. The case, United States v. AT&T, led to a settlement finalized on January 8, 1982, under which "Ma Bell" agreed to divest its local exchange service operating gave rise to many small companies intent upon competing in the long distance market. These included the then-fledgling Sprint Sprint Nextel Corporation is a telecommunications company based in Overland Park, Kansas. The company owns and operates the third largest wireless telecommunications network in United States, with 48.1 million customers, behind Verizon Wireless and AT&T Mobility and MCI MCI, Inc. is an American telecommunications subsidiary of Verizon Communications that is headquartered in Ashburn, unincorporated Loudoun County, Virginia. The corporation was originally formed as a result of the merger of WorldCom and MCI Communications, and used the name MCI WorldCom followed by WorldCom before taking its final name on April 12,, both of whom had only recently entered the marketplace. At the time, there was no way to switch a phone line to have calls automatically carried by non-AT&T companies. Customers of these small long distance operations would be required to dial a local access number, enter their calling card number, and finally enter the area code and phone number they wish to call. Because of the relatively lengthy process for customers to complete a call, the companies kept the calling card numbers short – usually 6 or 7 digits. This opened up a huge vulnerability to phone phreaks with a computer.

6-digit calling card numbers only offer 1 million combinations. 7-digit numbers offer just 10 million. If a company had 10,000 customers, a person attempting to "guess" a card number would have a good chance of doing so correctly once every 100 tries for a 6-digit card and once every 1000 tries for a 7-digit card. While this is almost easy enough for people to do manually, computers made the task far easier. "Code hack" programs were developed for computers with modems. The modems would dial the long distance access number, enter a random calling card number (of the proper number of digits), and attempt to complete a call to a computer bulletin board system (BBS). If the computer connected successfully to the BBS, it proved that it had found a working card number, and it saved that number to disk. If it did not connect to the BBS in a specified amount of time (usually 30 or 60 seconds), it would hang up and try a different code. Utilizing this methodology, code hacking programs would turn up hundreds (or in some cases thousands) of working calling card numbers per day. These would subsequently be shared amongst fellow phreakers.

There was no way for these small phone companies to identify the culprits of these brute-force hacks. They had no access to local phone company records of calls into their access numbers, and even if they had access, obtaining such records would be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. While there was some advancement in tracking down these code hackers in the early 1990s, the problem did not completely disappear until most long distance companies were able to offer standard 1+ dialing without the use of an access number.

Diverters

Another method of obtaining free phone calls involved the use of so-called "diverters". Call forwarding was not an available feature for many business phone lines in the 1980s and early 1990s, so they were forced to buy equipment that could do the job manually between two phone lines. When the business would close, they would program the call diverting equipment to answer all calls, pick up another phone line, call their answering service, and bridge the two lines together. This gave the appearance to the caller that they were directly forwarded to the company's answering service. The switching equipment would typically reset the line after the call had hung up and timed out back to dial tone, so the caller could simply wait after the answering service had disconnected, and would eventually get a usable dial tone from the second line. Phreakers recognized the opportunity this provided, and they would spend hours manually dialing businesses after hours, attempting to identify faulty diverters. Once a phreaker had access to one of these lines, he could use it for one of many purposes. In addition to completing phone calls anywhere in the world at the business' expense, they could also dial 1-900 phone sex/entertainment numbers, as well as use the phone line to harass their enemies without fear of being traced. Victimized small businesses were usually required to foot the bill for the long distance calls, as it was their own private equipment (not phone company security flaws) that allowed such fraud to occur. By 1993, call forwarding was offered to nearly every business line subscriber, making these diverters obsolete. As a result, hackers stopped searching for the few remaining ones, and this method of phreaking died.

Voice mail boxes and bridges

Prior to the BBS era of the 1980s phone phreaking was more of a solitary venture as it was difficult for phreaks to connect with one another. In addition to communicating over BBSs phone phreaks discovered voice mail Voicemail is a centralized system of managing telephone messages for a large group of people. The term is also used more broadly, to denote any system of conveying voice message, including the answering machine boxes and party lines In twentieth century telephone systems, a party line is an arrangement in which two or more customers are connected directly to the same local loop. Prior to World War II in the United States, party lines were the primary way residential subscribers acquired local phone service. British users similarly benefited from the party line discount as ways to network and keep in touch over the telephone. It was rare for a phone phreak to legally purchase access to voice mail. Instead, they usually would appropriate unused boxes that were part of business or cellular phone systems. Once a vulnerable mailbox system was discovered, word would spread around the phreak community, and scores of them would take residence on the system. They would use the system as a "home base" The system involves using signals and locations which have been agreed in advance. These signals and locations must be common everyday things to which most people would not give a second glance. The signal may or may not be located close to the dead drop itself for communication with one another until the rightful owners would discover the intrusion and wipe them off. Voice mailboxes also provided a safe phone number for phreaks to give out to one another as home phone numbers would allow the phreak's identity (and home address) to be discovered. This was especially important given that phone phreaks were breaking the law.

Phreakers also used "bridges" to communicate live with one another. The term "bridge" originally referred to a group of telephone company test lines that were bridged together giving the effect of a party-line. Eventually, all party-lines, whether bridges or not, came to be known as bridges if primarily populated by hackers and/or phreakers.

The popularity of the Internet in the mid-1990s, along with the better awareness of voice mail by business and cell phone owners, made the practice of stealing voice mailboxes less popular. To this day bridges are still very popular with phreakers yet, with the advent of VoIP, the use of telephone company owned bridges has decreased slightly in favor of phreaker-owned conferences.

Cell phones

By the late 1990s, the fraudulent aspect of phreaking all but vanished. Most cellular phones A mobile phone or mobile is an electronic device used for mobile telecommunications (mobile telephone, text messaging or data transmission) over a cellular network of specialized base stations known as cell sites. Mobile phones differ from cordless telephones, which only offer telephone service within limited range, e.g. within a home or an office, offered unlimited domestic long distance calling for the price of standard airtime (often totally unlimited on weekends), and flat-rate long-distance plans appeared offering unlimited home phone long distance for as little as $25 per month. International calling could be made very cheaply, as well. Between the much higher risk of being caught (due to advances in technology) and the much lower gain of making free phone calls, toll fraud started to become a concept associated very little with phreaking.

End of multi-frequency

The end of multi-frequency In telephony, multi-frequency signaling is an outdated, in-band signaling technique. Numbers were represented in a two-out-of-five code for transmission from a multi-frequency sender, to be received by a multi-frequency receiver in a distant telephone exchange. MF was used for signaling in trunking applications, and is a precursor of modern DTMF (MF) phreaking in the lower 48 United States occurred on June 15, 2006, when the last exchange in the continental United States ^ b. English is the de facto language of American government and the sole language spoken at home by 80% of Americans age five and older. Spanish is the second most commonly spoken language to use a "phreakable" MF-signalled trunk replaced the aging (yet still well kept) N2 carrier with a T1 carrier In telecommunications, T-carrier, sometimes abbreviated as T-CXR, is the generic designator for any of several digitally multiplexed telecommunications carrier systems originally developed by Bell Labs and used in North America, Japan, and South Korea. This exchange, located in Wawina Township, Minnesota, was run by the Northern Telephone Company of Minnesota. Many phone phreaks from across North America and the world made calls into what was the last group of MF-able inward trunks in the continental United States. A message board was set up for Paul Revere on +1 (218) 488-1307, for phone phreaks across the world to "say their goodbyes" to MF signalling and the N2 in Wawina.

During the days prior to the cutover, many famous phone phreaks such as Mark Bernay, Joybubbles Joybubbles – August 8, 2007), born Josef Carl Engressia, Jr. in Richmond, Virginia, USA, was an early phone phreak. Born blind, he became interested in telephones at age four. Gifted with perfect pitch, he was able to whistle 2600 hertz into a telephone (see Blue box). Joybubbles said that he had an IQ of “172 or something.” Joybubbles died, Bob Bernay, and Captain Crunch could be heard leaving their comments on the message board. The official date for the cutover from N2 to T-carrier In telecommunications, T-carrier, sometimes abbreviated as T-CXR, is the generic designator for any of several digitally multiplexed telecommunications carrier systems originally developed by Bell Labs and used in North America, Japan, and South Korea was Wednesday, June 14. As early as June 7, there was a noticeable static on what had previously been clear lines. By Monday, June 12, many numbers were unreachable, and the static had peaked. The recording on +1 (218) 488-1307 was generally inaccessible, and MFing through the switch was becoming increasingly difficult due to the increased static. On June 15, at around 1:40 am, Eastern Daylight Time, any new incoming calls were unreachable}. As of July 20, 2010, the message played at +1 (218) 488-1307 was simply the current time for Wawina, Minnesota.^[9]

2600 Hz

In the original analog networks, short-distance telephone calls were completed by sending relatively high-power electrical signals through the wires to the end office, which then switched the call. This technique could not be used for long-distance connections, because the signals would be filtered out due to capacitance In electromagnetism and electronics, capacitance is the ability of a body to hold an electrical charge. Capacitance is also a measure of the amount of electrical energy stored for a given electric potential. A common form of energy storage device is a parallel-plate capacitor. In a parallel plate capacitor, capacitance is directly proportional to in the wires. Long-distance switching remained a manual operation years after short-distance calls were automated, requiring operators at either end of the line to set up the connections.

Bell automated this process by sending "in-band" signals. Since the one thing the long-distance trunks were definitely able to do was send voice-frequency signals, the Bell system used a selection of tones sent over the trunks to control the system. When calling long-distance, the local end-office switch would first route the call to a special switch (this is why it is necessary to dial "1" in North America or "0" in most of Europe for long-distance calls) which would then convert further dialing into tones and send them over an appropriately selected trunk line (selected with the area code). A similar machine at the far end of the trunk would decode the tones back into electrical signals, and the call would complete as normal.

In addition to dialing instructions, the system also included a number of other tones that represented various commands or status. 2600 Hz, the key to early phreaking, was the frequency Frequency is the number of occurrences of a repeating event per unit time. It is also referred to as temporal frequency. The period is the duration of one cycle in a repeating event, so the period is the reciprocal of the frequency. Loosely speaking, 1 year is the period of the Earth's orbit around the Sun, and the Earth's rotation on its axis has of the tone sent by the long-distance switch indicating that the user has gone on-hook (hung up the phone). This normally resulted in the remote switch also going on-hook, freeing the trunk for other uses. In order to make free lines easy to find, the 2600 Hz tone was continually played into free trunks. Engressia's whistling had triggered the remote switch to go on-hook, but critically, the local switch knew he was still off-hook because that was signaled electrically. The system was now in an inconsistent state, leaving him connected to an operational long-distance trunk line. With further experimentation, the phreaks learned the rest of the signals needed to dial on the remote switch.

Normally long-distance calls are billed locally. Since the "trick" required a long distance call to be placed in order to connect to the remote switch, it would be billed like normal. However there are a class of calls that have either no billing, like calls to directory service, or reverse the billing, like WATS lines (1-800 numbers). By dialing one of these numbers the user was connected to a remote switch as normal, but no billing record was made locally. A number of people in the 1960s discovered a loophole that resulted from this combination of features that allowed free long distance calls to be made. First you would dial a toll-free number in the area code you wanted to connect to, then play the 2600 Hz tone into the line to return the remote switch to on-hook, and then use a blue box to dial the number you wanted to connect to. The local Bell office would have no record of the call.

As knowledge of phreaking spread, a minor culture emerged from the increasing number of phone phreaks. Sympathetic (or easily social-engineered) telephone company employees began to provide the various routing codes to use international satellites and trunk lines. At the time it was felt that there was nothing Bell could do to stop this. Their entire network was based on this system, so changing the system in order to stop the phreakers would require a massive infrastructure upgrade.

In fact, Bell responded fairly quickly, but in a more targeted fashion. Looking on local records for inordinately long calls to directory service or other hints that phreakers were using a particular switch, filters could then be installed to block efforts at that end office. Many phreakers were forced to use pay telephones as the telephone company technicians regularly tracked long-distance toll free calls in an elaborate cat-and-mouse game. AT&T instead turned to the law for help, and a number of phreaks were caught by the government.

Eventually, the phone companies in North America did, in fact, replace all their hardware. They didn't do it to stop the phreaks, but simply as a matter of course while moving to fully digital switching systems. Unlike the crossbar, where the switching signals and voice were carried on the same lines, the new systems used separate lines for signalling that the phreaks couldn't get to. This system is known as Common Channel Interoffice Signaling. Classic phreaking with the 2600 Hz tone continued to work in more remote locations into the 1980s, but was of little use in North America by the 1990s.

Famous phone phreaks

• John Draper (Captain Crunch)
• Mark Abene (Phiber Optik)
• Joybubbles (Joe Engressia, The Whistler)
• Patrick Kroupa (Lord Digital)
• Kevin Mitnick (Condor)
• Kevin Poulsen (Dark Dante)
• Steve Wozniak (Berkeley Blue)
• Jered Morgan (Lucky225)^[10]
• William Quinn (decoder) ^[11]
• Doug Brickner (doug)^[12]
• Kane Ryan Marlow (TRON) (Not to be confused with Boris Floricic^[13])
• Brad Carter (RBCP)
• Matt Blaze (M.F. Tones)

See also

References

Sterling, 2002

Sterling, Bruce (2002) [1993]. The Hacker Crackdown. McLean, Virginia: IndyPublish.com. ISBN 1-4043-0641-2.

1. ^ Sterling 2002: 39
2. ^ http://home.c2i.net/nirgendwo/cdne/ch4web.htm Underground Hackers Chapter 4
3. ^ http://www.webcrunchers.com/crunch/stories/first_visit.html Webcrunchers
4. ^ ^{a b c} Robson, Gary D. (April 2004). "The Origins of Phreaking". Blacklisted! 411. http://www.robson.org/gary/writing/phreaking.html. Retrieved 2008-06-21.
5. ^ "Phone Trips". http://www.wideweb.com/phonetrips. Retrieved 2008-06-21.
6. ^ "Secrets of the Little Blue Box". http://www.webcrunchers.com/crunch/stories/esq-art.html. Retrieved 2008-06-21.
7. ^ "Welcome to Woz.org". http://www.woz.org/letters/general/03.html. Retrieved 2008-06-21.
8. ^ "Cheshire's Book - TAP.HTML". http://cheshirecatalyst.com/tap.html. Retrieved 2008-06-21.
9. ^ http://www.binrev.com/forums/index.php/topic/20956-wawina/ Wawina cut off message board
10. ^ http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.12/phreakers_pr.html
11. ^ U.S. INDICTS WESTCHESTER MAN FOR ACCESSING VERIZON COMPUTERS WITHOUT AUTHORIZATION
12. ^ http://audio.textfiles.com/shows/TV/DOUGTV/
13. ^ http://audio.textfiles.com/shows/defaultradio/ Radio show hosted by Marlow and Morgan, six years after the death of Floricic

External links

• Forum russian phreakers
• Ausphreak - Australia's Main Phreaking Forum
• Secrets of the Little Blue Box - article with photos
• Telephone World - Sounds & Recordings of Wawina, Minnesota
• Textfiles.com / phreak Large collection of phreaking related text files. See also, audio conferences.
• Nettwerked Dot Net
• Digital Information Society
• Phone Losers
• The History of Phone Phreaking
• Phone Trips Large collection of historical phone recordings.
• 8bit Underground Forum dedicated to collecting 8/16-bit software, including phreaking.
• Phreaky Boys A collection of recordings made in 1990 of voice mail box systems compromised by phreakers.

Categories: Phreaking | Telephone crimes

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• Computers: Hacking: Phreaking: Directory
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