How Telephone Phreaking Worked

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[PuyoPuyoMan]

So I mentioned this video to my father: "I'm watching a video on telephone phreaking", and his first question was: "did he mention a guy named Captain Crunch? I had math with him"
Small world huh

[truthsmiles]

“None of the questions were audible”
Pro-tip for anyone taking questions from an audience: Repeat the question. Not just for recordings but for the rest of the audience who couldn’t hear it.

[DarrellGrainger]

One thing he didn't mention was calling someone right back. I found out if you prank call the operator and hang up, they can ring you right back. I figured out how that worked.

One day, a female friend from high school had some creep calling her and breathing heavy. She didn't know what to do and told me at school. One day we are at her place and the creep called. I wrote to her to keep him on the line for a few seconds. I then picked up an extension and in a deep voice said, "Thank you miss. We have traced the call and know where he is."

The guy hung up. I used the tone to call right back. I told the guy we were the police, we had traced the call, knew where he was and would be sending a squad car around shortly. He was panicking and crying. We told him if he was truly sorry and never did it again, we'd let him off this time. He never called back. haha.

[mdoyle]

In the early days of phreaking there was a blind kid with perfect pitch and he could whistle his own tones perfectly without using any boxes.

[rtwice]

Interesting stuff. I could have used this when I was younger. When I met my girlfriend in 1979 she lived in Santa Ana, California and I lived in the high desert. I was 14 at the time and had a job throwing news papers which meant I always had a pocket full of quarters.
I remember walking to the gas station about a mile away to use their pay phone to call my new love. For 80 cents we could talk for 10 minutes. It never seemed long enough to me.

Today it blows my mind to see 14 year olds carrying $400 smartphones and the parents paying a monthly service for those kids. You realize what I could have done with that kind of money when I was 14?

By the way, 40 years later, the girl that cost me 80 cents a night to talk to is now my wife of 36 years.

[fitnesswithsteve]

2019: I have unlimited long distance and I don’t call anyone

[jasonknight]

I still think it's a historical irony that two phreakers created a computer company that eventually started making telephones.

[BennoWitter]

I discovered a method for certain payphones in Germany in the 90's, where you would press the hook down about halfway. The line would reset and you'd get a dial tone, but the keypad was blocked because the phone thought you'd hung up. The microphone, however, stayed open and you could dial any number using a DTMF generator like the ones that came with answering machines.

[Adamyup]

I like how david smirks after each secret knowing damn well he indulged in all of that " illegal " activity lol.

[cageybee]

black box for file transfer:
phone company: "this phone has been ringing for an extremely long

[mushroomsamba]

"How Telephone Phreaking Worked" or "How David Spent His Youth Ripping Off the Phone Company" 😅

[expensivefreeadvice]

Made a blue box from scratch in the 70's after a ridiculous amount of research when instead I should have been studying Maxwell's equations. Took many attempts to get the tones right, but then to my delight, my girlfriend in Newport RI answered her dorm phone. Felt like superman. That first batch of electronics was bigger than a shoebox. Then, made version 2, which was hand held size and ran on 2 9V batteries. No computers, just analog circuits and bunch of red push button switches. Brought it to college parties and everyone would take turns calling home for free in disbelief. "But we don't have a touchtone phone here..." Didn't matter, I could call anywhere from any phone. Then, figured out I could hack into overseas senders and do stupid things like get the time in Sydney Australia or the weather in London. Buddy and me would cram into an off the beaten path phone booth to perform these antics just in case "they" were on to me. I didn't want to implicate anyone's home phone. They caught me anyways... Cops let me go, but that ended my phone phreaking career as it was pretty dumb to risk arrest for a $4 phone call. Was indeed big phun.

[satan]

Computer 1: calls Computer 2
Computer 2: answers phone
Computer 1: “:o”
Computer 2: “:0”
Computer 1: “:)”
Computer 1: hangs up.

[markoorlando]

4:07

hearing david say pornographic anime magazine makes me laugh so hard

[awizardalso]

Back in the late 60's, I had a cassette recorder microphone on the speaker end of the handset. I had a friend call me from a pay phone and drop some coins in the phone and I recorded the bell dings. I made another recording duplicating many quarter dings. I would make long distance calls from a pay phone, and when the operator dropped in and said to drop in more money to keep the call going, I just played the recording for the quarter dings. It worked!

[choosetolivefree]

Ah, the 80's. The age when computer networks were growing, and had no security whatsoever.

[teilani_ayures]

Minor public speaking tip I learned in a class: During Q&A, try to remember to repeat the question so the rest of the audience can hear it through the mic. It solves the problem you had for the video as well as a bonus!

[praxxor]

"I was also asked to sign a pornographic anime magazine"


Madlasses brought some hentai to sign lmao

[joekenorer]

When I was a kid I learned about this because I had that Captain Crunch whistle, back then a cheap toy was still a toy, and it was pretty durable so I carried it everywhere. There was a kid in our neighborhood who could sometimes whistle the tone that would cause the dial tone to changeover and we all thought that was cool, but one day he took my Captain Crunch whistle and did just as you described, dialed a toll free number and used the whistle to make it reset. We would stay up entire weekends prank calling random numbers all over the country. I was fascinated, just calling someone a state away was unheard of because of the cost, but we were talking to anyone we wanted to anywhere in the country. It was the coolest thing I had ever seen until I saw a live chatroom.

Halcyon years.

[Krmpfpks]

To add another story: we did this in Germany too, with tons of different tricks. Funniest one was when one of us who could speak American English called MCI and yelled at them why they changed the calling card test number pretending he keeps testing lines in Germany and they don’t work. The other side replied it’s still 16 times 6 and one seven. This number worked for almost a year for us and we were abusing it heavily. Like in having 20 hour conference calls on those expensive party chat lines.