Fru-Fru-Brigade

We're a Bunch of Weirdos

  • Mostly she/her

Hi! We're a fairly diverse plural system with various origins and interests! ADHD, autism, likely BPD. Uhm... Yeah, gonna work on this a bit more soon?



DecayWTF
@DecayWTF

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.


DecayWTF
@DecayWTF

So someone asked me in the comments if the DreamPi (a software and hardware device that allows you to bridge the Dreamcast into the internet via its internal modem, using a Raspberry Pi, a USB modem and some magic to create an ISP emulator) would be considered phreaking and I think this is a pretty good addition to this post because it goes in to some of what I wanted to touch on about situating phreaking as a historical era as much as a techological pursuit.


is a dreampi considered phreaking

mostly to trick the dreamcast into an ethernet bridge by being a fake isp to 'dial' into

So the really unsatisfying answer is this: Maybe? The thing to understand is that like most subcultures and hacking or hobbyist pursuits, phreaking was as much about the time, place and environment as it was about the technical nitty-gritty. At its core, as I talk about, phreaking was about hacking the phone system and the dreampi is really about building a super-minimal phone system emulation. Is this phreaking? Maybe!

Remember, there was no real bright line separation; lots of computer hackers were phreakers, and lots of old school phreakers became computer hackers. Look at Bill Acker who was an important figure in open source years after the death of phreaking as an organized pursuit. It's really more about how you want to situate what you're doing technologically and historically.

What about the dreampi and making the DC talk to the Internet interests you? Is it about retrogaming mainly, with the network hacking being something ancillary? Is it about learning about obsolete networking systems? Or is it in whole or in part about exploring telephony? Because that's what phreaking was: Exploring and hacking the telephone system. If that's something that interests you, even as a historical curiosity... Sure! If you want to situate what you're doing in that historical and social context, it could be a form of archaeological phreaking. Or it could not be.

Don't ever let anyone tell you these are purely technical questions; phreaking dissolved into more "conventional" computer and network hacking because the phone system itself dissolved into computer networking and, eventually, the internet, and the social context of phreaking disappeared into modern network and computer hacking along with it. But there are still people whose fascination runs to PBX systems, and the cell networks and so on. The reason they're not usually called phreakers is because the social context is gone, that period of history is gone. But they could be. So could you, if that's where your interest lies.


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in reply to @DecayWTF's post:

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

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.

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"