2600? How Phreaking Really Worked

Secrets of the Little Blue box!

0:00: Intro
1:40: What we need for blue boxing
2:47: Trunk Supervision demo
6:35: Carrier systems
8:25: E-Signaling units
9:05: Phreaking demo
12:57: Cap'n Crunch Whistle
13:31: Notch filters
14:15: Attempts to thwart
14:57: Closing

[westrex]

In my teenage years I did a different version of phreaking. My first job was in a gas station and I discovered where the pair of wires from the pay phone were connected inside the repair garage. I hooked up a regular desk phone to the pair, connected the earpiece of the desk phone to a cassette recorder input, and then made a toll call from the pay phone and captured the sound of the coins I deposited, then I copied the sound of quarters to an endless loop tape. To avoid getting caught I went to a different pay phone in a nearby park to test my sinister plan...but I didn't know who to call! So, I decided that I would call a McDonalds in Manhattan. The automated system told me to deposit $2.15 for three minutes...I played the tape, and after playing the sound of nine quarters, the system said "Thank you. You have 10 cents credit." I jumped around celebrating while holding the handset. When someone at McDonald's answered I excitedly asking them what time it was, and what the weather was like...it was all so silly...but I couldn't contain the nerd excitement inside of me!

[dougnbfs]

So much of technological information ends up being 'decommissioned' without being archived. It's great that your group is making an effort to collect and archive what would otherwise be considered 'trash' by those folks involved with the 'progress' of these technologies.
I still have some MF related test equipment in my storage, maybe some day if you like I could donate it to your group.
Thanks again for your efforts!

[jc-h]

I made a few different phreaking devices as I took an interest in electronics as a teen. Would build something and test it out to "see if I could" but never considered myself a true phreak. Everything I learned about phreaking came from electronics project books. Phreaking back in the day meant not only having a sense of curiosity and adventure, but also knowing other phreaks. None of the people I had access to in my youth were phreaks.Consequently most of my exploits were using social engineering to con Defense Service Network operators into dialing a dial-up service provider number, when I was stationed overseas and telephone and dial-up service were expensive. I followed this up when I was a civilian again by using the credit card machine phone line at work to connect my laptop's modem to, instead of having a home phone. Many truckstops in the American Midwest had payphones at the tables of the restaurants, with the lines exposed under the table, making for easy bypass of the payphone. A cup of coffee and some wire probes meant cheap access to endless GeoCities pages, and Yahoo Games.

[DougDingus]

I am happy you and your job exist to preserve this telephony history.

As a young kid in the 80's, I figured out how the simple pulse dial worked. Would make calls by slapping the handset hang up switch. One day, I called a friend and while talking about computers and bits, we realized 4 bits of info were needed to represent digits 0 through 9.

What do the remaining bit patterns do?

We started using them while on the line and suddenly we were in a three way call with the operator. She was very confused.

Even better, none of us could end the call!

Eventually, a tech had to reset the switching machine state and end the call. Our system was one of the big mechanical ones similar to the one you often feature. It used many round poles with layers of connection point spread out radially on disc's spread out along the length of the poles.

We ended up getting both a lecture on how important it is to not mess with the dialing system, and a great field trip to see all the telephony equipment in action where that tech answered every question we asked.

[CryptoTonight]

By the time I got into phreaking in the early 2000's blue boxing was just history and something we all wished we could do. Mainly what we did was using an ipod as a red box and payphone stewardship (i.e. keeping them clean, reporting when there a problem etc.) One of my favorite things was this website that had a long list of interesting phone numbers like elevator phones that would auto pickup, payphones that would ring in busy areas, and even some office building intercoms that could be accessed remotely. My favorite time that I can remember was an elevator on a college campus that had an auto pickup when you called it allowing you to talk to the people in the cab, I would call it every day from 3pm-5pm and host a show with music, soundbites from movies, call in segments, and live prank calls. It was about 3mo before the college shut me down. I actually had 5 or 6 people that would come hang out in the elevator regularly to listen to it. Good times.

[flyer]

Me and a bunch of my friends were into that scene. The local CO was near the High School and I would always walk by and go in the back where the switchmen would show us various parts of the #5 crossbar system and explain how it all worked together. They would also give us bits and pieces that were broken. One memorable time a couple of Bell Labs engineers were there and explained to us how red boxes worked and what the two tones were. We had lots of fun with that. I was also fascinated with their huge battery system in the basement and eventually advanced battery systems became my career path.

[jnelson]

The Captain Crunch whistle followed by far off relay noises is officially one of my favorite hacking demos ever - right on up there with Rickrolling our QA department with an XSS injection proof of concept.

[billmoran]

Sarah, excellent video! I was involved in Phreaking in the late 60’s but we didn’t have a name for it then. One of my neighbors was an engineer for AT&T long lines and I got a lot of Telco parts and info from him. One of my high school classmates knew it was possible to seize a long distance trunk line using a tone. I built the tone generator and my friend used it to get free calls. Eventually AT&T showed up at his house. They just said, please don’t do this anymore, and when you get out of school, come see us for a job!
I didn’t know about the Captain Crunch whistle though. That’s funny!

[davidblair]

Without question, the best production value I’ve ever seen on the channel. The lighting, the audio, the shot composition, the scripting, the editing… All top notch!

[jakecampbell]

This has to be THE most inviting way of presenting information I have ever seen!

"This is intense, so let's figure it out together."

Pure awesome. Amazingly well done!

[paladinmaid]

There is also a collection of sound files on the internet by Evan Doorbell, he's digitised and adds commentary to his old recorded phreaking tapes, he goes into detail about where his call is going and what kind of equipment he's hitting. It's absolutely fascinating stuff and worth a listen if you're into phreaking or wanting to get a listen to what it was like back then.

[sfred]

I've never seen this more clearly explained. Fantastic video.

[JeffFrmJoisey]

Thank you for explaining this. Fifty years ago my friends and I were playing around with the network. We barely scratched the surface!!! I miss the sounds of the old network - with the crosstalk, tones, clicks and klunks that made it seem alive and gave it a soul!

[thevidco]

Very nice break down. As a electronics engineer ‘retired’ - I appreciated the pedantic accuracy of your video. Nice work and entertaining as well..

[LenKusov]

Little fun trick, another band-aid some local stations that had big phreaking issues used was to modify things to leave that notch filter enabled, especially common on payphones, but what you could do instead was to make your 555 timer based bluebox operate at a harmonic of the 2600hz frequency, since the 555 outputs a square wave which would output a lot of harmonic noise and was often enough to make the receiving switch at the other end of the trunk think you made a 2600hz tone as they all used extremely simple circuitry - usually just a bandpass filter or a resonant LC circuit instead of a comb filter that wouldn't respond to harmonics or frequencies that weren't quite right. Pair that up with a big inductor coil that fits around the earpiece of a payphone, since the newer ones disconnect the mic until you insert a coin, and you can make long distance calls well into the 2000s at any highway rest stop.

[ilRosewood]

I don't know why YouTube didn't recommend this channel to me earlier. This video was excellent! Thank you for that demonstration. I had read about this many times but this was fantastic to actually see all the hardware that was just named.

[jnucci]

When I was a kid we were on a party line. Being a party line, there was no ANI, so every long distance call had an operator come on the line to ask what our phone number was. It was the only way Ma Bell could bill us. After the operator got our number, you could hear the call connections building thru all the switches and hear all the tones. When the called party hung up, you could hear the remote relays clicking, and the final sound before the connection dropped and dial tone came back was the 2600 Hz whistle.

[atubebuff]

My G*D this is such a great explanation! Your teaching method is fantastic. I say this as an ex-frameman/TWO/879 working the night shifts during my student years. My heart dropped in the latter years when they started pulling out the SxS and throwing down a chute into a large container. At night I went and pulled a few types (LF, Selector, Connector). Every CO had a distinct smell of warm coils, lube oil and those racks of E-1 amplifiers could definitely warm you up on a cold day. Thanks for keeping this alive!

[amyslittlehelper]

Love Sarah's videos! I love that Sarah, Astrid and others are preserving this arcane technological history. And as an old phone phreak from the 70's, I'm a bit envious, too! Very well done.

[Premier-Media-Group]

Getting on the BBS in the morning and looking at new lists of unpublished numbers scoured by somebody wardialing all night...
...a crazy kind of thrill...especially when we found something unexpected.