I was interested in phreaking when I was a kid. We had those coin-operated phone booths, and at some point, I figured that clicking the receiver hook with my finger was akin to dialing a number, but in this case, you didn't have to pay. Say you wanted to dial 42 - you'd quickly press the hook four times, then wait a couple of seconds, and press it two more times. Fun times.
I remember a situation when my classmate and I were returning from school and I needed to call my parents. I told him, "Now I'll show you how to make a call for free." I started tapping the hook (while he was making fun of me), my mom picked up the phone, and I began talking to her. My friend mocked me, thinking I was talking to thin air, and asked for the receiver. He said, "Hello!", my mom replied... Well, there's no need to go into what happened next :-OOO
I remember my father going away and putting a lock on the rotary dial phone - this meant you could only dial 999 I think - but my brother quickly showed him you could 'tap' out the number in the number in the way that you describe. I'm not sure who my dad was locking out - maybe we had lodgers at the time?
Later we bought a 'fancy' answerphone that you could retrieve, save and delete messages from a remote phone by playing a tone down the line. It came with a special tone generating battery operated touchpad you could hold to a receiver to play a tone down the phone, as plenty of phones were not touch tone yet.
I remember you could also use that to dial numbers some how - later a friend had a Casio watch that could also generate and 'dial' numbers for you. I tried from a payphone but it wouldn't work for me.
Those tones were DTMF. Tapping out the number on the hook was how pulse dialing (the other dialing standard) worked. Pulse dialing was superseded by DTMF at some point, but switchboards supported both for a long time. That's why you could use your tone generator (or your mobile phone!) to dial, because that's literally the exact same way that your phone dialled.
Phreaking has since become closely linked with computer hacking.
Yep. These days I think you could say that there is a discrete field of "phreaking" but as a subset of "computer hacking" in general. From what I know of it coughnot muchcough it mostly means messing around with the SS7 network[1] using SCTP[2] endpoints, or getting SS7 access from a low-budget / fly by night telco somewhere. Or maybe finding a machine that's on the standard TCP/IP based Internet that also has an SS7 connection, hack that and use it as a bridge or whatever.
There's probably still some cell-phone hacking stuff going on as well, but AIUI, that's gotten a lot more difficult over the years as well.
That said, a very small amount of old skool phreaking "stuff" still works to a point. If you find a business or a home with a POTS landline you can still use a beige-box at the demarc point and tap their line, make calls, etc. And in theory, a red box would still work on one of the 2 or 3 telco run payphones (not COCOTS) that probably exist somewhere in the world.
I would believe so since part of phreaking is solely exploiting configuration. For example, a default password for voicemail lets the phreaker access user menu then possibly - or so I was told - call capability.
This could be a first step in social engineering where an insider call gets easily trusted.
The other week, I unarchived what remains of 20-25 year old logs of our phreaking channels and started researching what became of old friends. Some were still active (using their same handles, even), but a surprising number were arrested over a short period of time, charged under CFAA or other broad laws for things no one would blink at today, and then... vanished.
For every Mitnick that spun infamy to providence, I wonder if we'll ever count how many buckled under the massive stigma "hacking" carried at the time.
Phreaking is dying but alive.
Nowadays it mostly is exploring Qualcomm chipsets and androids. Mediatek too, which is a much more open platform.
2600 meetings are still around and every first Friday so you should try to go!
As for operator/telcom abuse it is here and there. It’s not discussed as much but some things can happen but mostly since everything went to a “sim” card - that is not so much. Unlocking a phone if you consider it phreaking is active to an extent.
Lineage and alternative android systems are around too but I wouldn’t say this is phreaking per se.
In the 00- early 10s it was very much possible to phreak as Kevin mitnick did with CDMA operators - ran cloning was not so rampant but if you knew where to look you could find communities around it. Ironically not much was posted in 2600 magazines during this time. Gate keeping was and is still large for this.
Ss7 abuse is rampant and I would consider that phreaking it is still in use today.
The Wikipedia article is nice, but paints a more historical picture akin to what you’d read in a museum.
Back in the 80s Phreaking was the thing, because computers didn't really exist. OSUNY was one of the phreaking BBSs at the time. There was a big article in esquire about captain crunch, the blind guy, etc that I remember reading.
I think the OSUNY archives are around if you want to dig.
Ironic considering that the sole reason I ever BlueBoxed was due to computers.
I wanted to connect to BBSes at 300bps that were long distance from my home.
I started blue boxing entirely to access those BBSes.
After I got started, I got really into it. A friend and I did some dumpster dives at the local CO, we learned how to connect to inward operators directly, and using the right jargon were able to essentially control parts of the phone system. We explored and exploited diverters, voice conferencing systems, voice mail systems and more. That friend and I even created our own box, we named the PSI-box (Phone speaker interface). Hold your phone up to your speaker NO MORE!
It led to many things, but what started it was a computer. ;)
> Ironic considering that the sole reason I ever BlueBoxed was due to computers.
Same. The reason I was interested in phone technology back in the mid 1980s is because I wanted to connect to long distance BBSes using my Commodore 64 and long distance phone calls were prohibitively expensive for a teenager (or almost anyone really) back then.
This eventually lead to X.25 networks and ARPANet and early Internet usage and my career as a software developer.
Someone mentioned phrack above. There was (still is!) also 2600, and before that, YIPL/TAP, the original phone phreak newsletter: https://archive.org/details/YIPLTAP_1-91
I was gently obsessed with it while a student, a long time ago. I used to call random companies at night and, once on voicemail, fumble with *, # or 0 in the hope to get the ellusive outdial out of the PBX.
I never succeded. But what I loved was in fact the quiet of the night and the sound of it all. The carrier wave, the tones, the greetings. The various models (Meridian, Alcatel, ...) had different voices, mostly feminine, some soft, some very stern.
If you find this interesting you might also like this youtube channel run by a Seattle museum that has a large collection of running vintage telephone central office equipment https://www.youtube.com/@ConnectionsMuseum
Cool amongst peers, sure, but chicks still never paid any attention to me, even after I started carrying around a DTMF tone generator and the knowledge of how to use it... ;)
I found that upgrading mine with a full keypad -- including the ABCD column on the right -- did wonders for my rep. And of course a switch to toggle oscillators, so I could send red box tones.
I remember a situation when my classmate and I were returning from school and I needed to call my parents. I told him, "Now I'll show you how to make a call for free." I started tapping the hook (while he was making fun of me), my mom picked up the phone, and I began talking to her. My friend mocked me, thinking I was talking to thin air, and asked for the receiver. He said, "Hello!", my mom replied... Well, there's no need to go into what happened next :-OOO