30s/white/tired/coyote/&
Words are my favorite stim toy
So what is phone phreaking?
"Phone phreaking" is the lost art/science/pursuit/criminal enterprise/etc of hacking the phone system. This is not talking about using computers in any kind of way (or at least they aren't required) but of using the phone system's own features and mechanisms against it. To explain how this all worked, we need to talk about a little history.
one thing that was fun was that there was still a US exchange you could blue box back as late as the 00s (possibly later, i can only say from experience) up in alaska
Holy shit! I remember Northwestel deprecated the very last of their in-band switching stuff in the 90s, I didn't think any still existed even in the far north that late.
Im having flashbacks to when I was a kid and we still had pulse dialing and party lines in on the mid 90s.
Ah. Memories.
not sure if this is an urban legend or not, but I heard Cap'n Crunch got his handle because he found a toy whistle in a box of Cap'n Crunch cereal that produced the 2600Hz frequency
That's almost true. John Draper took on the moniker Cap'n Crunch from the whistles but he didn't discover them; he was actually a pirate radio guy that got into phreaking and helped design and build some of the earliest blue boxes. Phreakers already used the whistles.
Which sort of buries the lede that, yes, the toy whistles out of the cereal box generated pure 2600Hz tones that could cause the long distance trunks to switch.
This rules, thanks for getting this all written out
Also shoutout to Pirates of Silicon Valley teaching me about Woz and his blue box way back in the day (and the captain crunch whistle!)
See, if I had written this post, there's no way I would have left out that pulse dialing was what rotary phones were designed to do, firing off pulses as the wheel span back to zero, and therefore that tone dialing aligned with touch tone phones. Or the reason why Cap'n Crunch got his name, because that's both hilarious and really drove home that this didn't start out as hacking like we're familiar with. Hitting random keys on a keyboard while green text flies up a black screen is about as far as possible from playing a kid's cereal toy into a phone.
That said I accept that likely would have made my version worse lol, you definitely have more focus than I do, and got the point across. Good post. :)
I mean there is an infinite amount of additional information I could have included but it turns out writing longposts on a phone is absolute fucking torture so I ended up keeping it short lol. A mistake I will not repeat, I just need to... not leave my laptop in our production AV gear.
yeah been there a couple times haha, there is no laptop in my life, so I'd have to do it at a desktop and sometimes that's just not when inspiration strikes
wow, this is a really good summary!
in fact, I think I might show this to people when I need something between "here's the one-minute summary" and "go read Exploding the Phone"
