Phreaking The Phones: Before There Was Hacking
Before there were computer hackers, there were phreakers. And before there were macs, Jobs and Woz kept themselves busy building their own blue boxes (Above) which would emulate precise control tones to seize control of the phone system.
They were inspired by this Esquire article from 1971 called Secrets of the Little Blue Box, by legendary writer and typewriter fetishist Ron Rosenbaum.
Woz’s boxes were simply, by standards of circuitry, but the original creator of the Blue Box, built his with failsafes in mind in case the law got too suspicious.
He sighs. “We had this order for a thousand beeper boxes from a syndicate front man in Las Vegas. They use them to place bets coast to coast, keep lines open for hours, all of which can get expensive if you have to pay. The deal was a thousand blue boxes for $US300 apiece. Before then we retailed them for $US1,500 apiece, but $US300,000 in one lump was hard to turn down. We had a manufacturing deal worked out in the Philippines. Everything ready to go. Anyway, the model I had ready for limited mass production was small enough to fit inside a flip-top Marlboro box. It had flush touch panels for a keyboard, rather than these unsightly buttons sticking out. Looked just like a tiny portable radio. In fact, I had designed it with a tiny transistor receiver to get one AM channel, so in case the law became suspicious the owner could switch on the radio part, start snapping his fingers, and no one could tell anything illegal was going on. I thought of everything for this model – I had it lined with a band of thermite which could be ignited by radio signal from a tiny button transmitter on your belt, so it could be burned to ashes instantly in case of a bust. It was beautiful. A beautiful little machine. You should have seen the faces on these syndicate guys when they came back after trying it out. They’d hold it in their palm like they never wanted to let it go, and they’d say, ‘I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it.’ You probably won’t believe it until you try it.”
[Esquire, Photo of the Blue Box taken at the Computer History Museum]
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Comments (AU Comments | US Comments)
@Nick: My island name is Nicko: and i don't mean key as in button, or key as in music, or a physical key, but key as in something that gives access.
@marythegr8: well, no. it doesn't come from the box, but a key tone that they would try to replicate.
@pist: i guess that kinda makes his knowledge of phones useless. eh, go figure.
@madog: Wow, thanks for rekindling old memories, Mass mailings, just WOW...
Invisobel
@charman: Yup, and you could find plans for making your own tone generator, or just "find" a linesman's handset to use! Awesome!
grendyll
@Nick: My island name is Nicko: Holy crap, that brings back memories! Alt.2600.phreak was awesome! That's where I learned to get free calls by phreaking the phone with a paperclip. In some phones, you could insert a straightened paperclip into one of the bottom holes in the microphone, and touch the other end to either the metal plate or the screw holding the metal plate on the front of the phone, and it would trigger the coin receipt mechanism somehow - shorted it out, I guess. Good stuff!
(FYI, this exploit was fixed by the end of the 80's, and is, of course, no longer viable... just in case!)
grendyll
Hack the gibson!
Mr.DuckSauce
@Nick: My island name is Nicko: Met the "cap'n" several years ago, very strange fellow. Poor guy knew how to plow through the phone co's system, but couldn't hold a conversation with another human.
OMG, you just blew my friggin mind. It is like it is '95 again and AOL just released 2.6! I could still create fake accounts, use God Tools and do as I wanted...except that I'd already left the warez rooms for Hotline and the Carracho ;-)
ArdonAliquippa
@Noobs-R-Us: Would you like to play a game?
madog
i had no idea any of this existed (probably because i was born in '86). but if there is a way to get something for free with minimal- moderate effort, it will be done.
@Nick: My island name is Nicko: Yeah, gotta love that little mook. And maybe it explains my fascination with payphones in foreign countries.
Robotic Bilbo Bagins has no use for fleshy ones
A simpler hack...
Find a rack of coin phones on the wall. Make a long distance call on one. When the operator asks to deposit 75 cents, put the handset of that phone on the coin box of the one next to it. Lift the handset on that one and deposit the 3 quarters. The operator hears the 3 gongs. Hang up that second phone and the money is returned. Eventually, the phone company figured this out and silenced the phones during coin drops. But for many years, it worked.
VijayMouse
Those compact boxes for the mob sound cool. Then I read about the band of thermite. and I started to think about not only would it destroy the device, but it could be used to send a message to those who have done you wrong without potentially killing them.
In the 80s every computer nerd used the MCI 6 digit codes. MCI, a big phone company at the time with thousands of customers gave every customer their own 6 digit code that you would use when away from home to charge your long distance calls to your account. Of course with so many customers, it didn't take long, trying codes at random to find one that worked. I only knew of one kid who got busted for it. And he got busted because he was lazy and stupid and used old codes that were posted to bbs's that MCI had put a trace on. The funny thing is when you got busted for phreaking, they took your computer of course, all your phones (no phone for your entire family!), and they would also take your tv sets. So any kid who got busted would basically put their whole family back into the dark ages until they turned 18 and moved (or got kicked) out. There was usually a $100k fine involved too, which was quite a lot of money back then. And yet even with that terrible scenario looming over our heads, it was no deterrent. Setting up a trace was expensive and time consuming for the telcos back then, so if you used your own codes, the risk was about the same as winning the lottery. You would have to randomly stumble on a code that they had a trace on, a 1 in a million chance.
My brother had a Capn' Crunch Whistle and used it to make free long distance calls.
AWESOMNESS
Phreaking.
Ah.....the good ol days!
olternaut
Where's the picture of the movie War Games? That was the quintessential hacking movie. It’s what got all the damn kids started thinking that they can be a hacker too.
Noobs-R-Us
@jibbly: agreed, but we can't forget our roots. that's the whole point of Gizmodo '79
I highly recommend 2600's book if you're interested in these sort of things. I've read it, and it gives background into hacking in the '80s.
secretmanofagent
@GitEmSteveDave: zerawcam2. I never got lucky enough to get in the main room. I think that was more toward the end of my AOL years too, though, so I didn't spend much time in there as compared with mf.
Then I discovered the GIF room, and fell in love with interlaced boobies (and it's been a downward spiral ever since). I still have my AIM screen name that originates from AOL 3.0, and is some bastardization of its original from the multiple times I got TOS'ED back in 2.x (AOL4FREE!). "Mom! Uhhh, AOL changed their payment settings so I need to reenter your CC info....... it also has to be different than the one used before".
madog
I remember when I first saw the movie Hackers. The two crazy hackers that wore lots of makeup used a tape recorder with the sound of quarters going into a payphone. It phreaked out the phone, and when I was less than 10 years old I wanted to do that so bad. And now that I think about it, how many payphones are still around?
charman
@Nick: My island name is Nicko: With all due respect to Draper, this was light years ahead as a fully featured and realized hacking gadget.
@madog: You ever hang out in the Zeraw or zerawcam chat rooms?
@madog: 2600 always has some little cool thing in it
From what I understand from a book ont he Steve's I read, he also designed a Apple II w/a built in blue box, but realized that if you strung a dozen together, you could bring down the US phone system, and it freaked him out.
My god, he even thought of a self destruct option. James Bond/Mission Impossible shit right here!
don't forget about captain crunch and this little guy.
John Drpaer, the cap'n, was apparently the one that taught Jobs and Woz their phreakin' skills.
This was something I always wanted to try out when I was young. Ever since I first found the Anarchist's Cookbook in one of the "macfilez" (or "zelifcam" when AOL first caught on) back when mass mailing software was still perfectly acceptable, and cool.
At the time, I never knew what the "yellowbox", "bluebox" and whatever stood for although after reading the info did deduce that they were phones ("is it really a blue phone? Cool!").
madog
this is where the "hacker society" 2600 got it's name.
marythegr8
Wow. They really thought about this product when they made this.
Aaa Captain Crunch and your amazing cereal whistle and the other Captin Crunch how things have changed
leotris
@Thanatos: How about Global Thermal Nuclear War?
Noobs-R-Us
@charman: Razor and Blader ;)
HACK THE PLANET
PixelProphet
INTERESTING! Even though I was programming computers then, it certainly was confirmed this morning. It was on my iPhone???
VijayMouse
@VijayMouse: Dude, I just noticed that you edited your comment back in 12/31/1969
ARE YOU MARTY MCFLY?
My friend and I used that article in Esquire to build simple PLL circuits and made our own Blue Boxes, at nearly the same time the Steve's were doing it, it the early 70's. We used them for a few years, until a friend in the local Ma Bell grp told us they had found a way to track us. We never got caught, made about 20 of 'em, disguised in cigarette packages.
Clem-Clone
@pist: how ironic. all that ability to use the phone however he wanted but couldn't speak to others
Did someone say Capn Crunch whistle?
www.JetCityOrange.com/CapnCrunchWhistle/
@Die Fledermaus: And also a huge red flag called "bullshit".
Zodduska
@madog: A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?
@SexWaxin'_GitEmSteveDave:
ah man. i loved blueboxing and redboxing (making your own tone dialer, ie what the movie hackers were doing. however that went dead once they started disabling the mic on the handset but you could cut into the headset and mod it but..).
those were indeed the good ole days :)
This all brings back wonderful memories of being stupid and never getting caught. Anyone ever hammer a nail into the center of the mouthpiece on a pay phone, then touch the nail to the metal on the phone and get free calls? You get a nice shock if you touch it while its connected.
tXm
There must be a few that haven't read Bruce Sterling's "The Hacker Crackdown" which covers the transition from phreaking to hacking.
http://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html
(The book is "literary freeware")
It's a cracking read. Sorry.
lewie221
@charman: Honestly, the movie Hackers was the whole reason why I got into the computer field. I wanted to become the best hacker out there. Only thing I didnt get is why Angelina Jolie had such chapped lips in that movie.