Phone Phreaking: The Net Before The Internet

[Ermintruder]

I was going to simply place the link to this Youtube video into the latest slot on Page 10 of our forum thread about Shortwave Numbers Stations. Or to have let it languish at the top of the Good Stuff Online thread

But this is far too good a video not to justify having a proper topic started.

This is a another video in the outstanding series created by a very-skillful and knowledgeable gentleman named Curt Rowlett.

Much of Curt's content is about Numbers Stations, codes, cyphers, and the networks before the internetnetwork (which is where and when I was first awoken to Forteana, science and technology).

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, many the proto-hackers and developers of the first data networks cut their teeth as Phone Phreakers. I certainly dabbled in this extensively, and learned lots, long before there was a single thing written or openly discussed about even the possibilities of an internet (let alone a graphical WWW).

Around the earliest days of the internet, with the advent of dial-up bulletin boards and ancient technologies such as Prestel/Teletext/teleprinters (let's say the mid-1980s, for me) I read some pieces about Joybubbles. Only after watching this video do some more missing pieces fall into place for me, after 30 years...

Although I was trying my best to understand the biggest machine on earth (the telecommunications network of the world, even back then an almost-sentient mesh around the big apple) I had no idea that my futile fumblings with blueboxes / whiteboxes / tandem cascades and the like, were being bettered by a blind autistic savant named Joe Engressia who could literally phone anywhere in the world just by whistling.

But he did so much more than that....watch (well, actually, listen) and learn.

If you like technology, you'll love this.

If you hate technology, you'll love this (and; you're lying to me: if you really didn't like a bit of tech, you wouldn't be reading this).

Please invest 25mins of your time to properly-watch this amazing little video. Give it a chance (and remember, much of it is classic recordings of a man who has sadly, been dead now for over a decade...this has the feel of a podcast from beyond the grave). It has only has 170-odd views, so far, and has only been up for a couple of months.

Trust me: if you know the stuff I post, this is worth watching.

Phone Phreaking: A Call From Joybubbles

 

[escargot]

I first heard about phreaking from the Guardian in the late '70s. Tried to discuss it with people, nobody knew what I was on about.

 

[James_H]

Thanks! I think this is a BBC radio doc I once heard, that someone has gone ahead and put a slideshow over. Fascinating stuff.

Here's another site on phreaking http://www.historyofphonephreaking.org/
Here's Captain Crunch, the Weinstein of the Phreak Scene...

 

[JamesWhitehead]

I recall a tv documentary on the subject which featured kids just tapping on the phones in phone-booths to make free long-distance calls. Disinformation, perhaps? :c4u:

 

[Swifty]

I'm too young to remember original phreaking but in the late 80's British Telecom (as most of you will remember) brought out plastic credit card sized cards with varying amount's of credit that you could buy from corner shops, £1, £5, £10 etc ... the thing was, when people's cards ran out of credit, they'd just abandon them in the phone box ... we'd collect as many as we could, walk to the nearby Boots chemist and when the staff weren't watching, we'd spray the magnetic strip on the back of them with hairspray off the shelf .. we'd then stroll back to the phone box wafting the cards in the air to dry them and slot them into the phone .. almost always you'd get free credit, it wasn't an exact science so you might get nothing at all or a pound's worth of calls or a tenner doing that .. British Telecom got wise to that in the end so built deposit boxes for the cards to keep them out of our grubby little hands ... but, by that time, mobile phones were starting to become affordable, phone boxes became outdated almost overnight and they stopped manufacturing those cards. Happy times though.

 

[Swifty]

I recall a tv documentary on the subject which featured kids just tapping on the phones in phone-booths to make free long-distance calls. Disinformation, perhaps? :c4u:

I watched something similar that described a toy given away in a cereal box in the states that made a correct clicking sound to get free calls when used through the mouth piece, in fact, I think the cereal was Captain Crunch and I've always thought that's how the famous phreaker got his name.

 

[James_H]

I watched something similar that described a toy given away in a cereal box in the states that made a correct clicking sound to get free calls when used through the mouth piece, in fact, I think the cereal was Captain Crunch and I've always thought that's how the famous phreaker got his name.

That's correct, except that it was a whistle that gave tone at the right pitch. Back then, phones got their signals from tones so they were possible to hack with sounds if you knew how.

 

[Ermintruder]

I watched something similar that described a toy given away in a cereal box

Nearly- it was a toy bird-caller, as @James_H says.

Watch this 4min30sec video for a proper detailed explanation from "Exploding the Phone" (slide sequence changes at 1min56sec)

Of course, there were (and are, still) those that had perfect pitch, and could whistle with their own lips (and listen/react to) the 'trunk control tones'

Joe/Joybubbles was perhaps the best 'bareback' human-to-system interfacer, but there were documented cases of prison inmates being able to whistle-up line service access via penitentiary pay-phones and suchlike.

Being able to whistle DTMF (dual-tone multi-frequency) is another phenomenally-difficult skill (the discordant mournful tones that are made, either silently or overtly across a network to select the dialled digits....or, in the early days of phone banking and e-commerce, to enter credit-card details with).

Joybubbles (and others) could 'read' these (ie listen on a tapped line, and 'hear' the numbers being keyed (I can do this myself, to an extent). He could also click-count ie listen to, and hear the numbers being dialled on a non-tone true-dial system, in order to reproduce them...for research purposes, of course.

Again, I can do this to an extent, and some are also able to dial numbers without actually using the dial (I might be able to do this, I'm not saying.... !-/ ). This is by spiking the line (shorting the wires out, or "hitting the rest" in such a way that dial-pulses are being sent: 1=1, 2=2.....9=9, 10=0)

Most moden phone networks are now resistant to this kind of unofficial human MMI (man-machine-interface). But not all...

Note that as is said in the Joybubbles video, people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates all started off as phone phreakers. Had there been no bluebox breadboard bodgers, there almost-certainly would not have been such a thing as the Apple computer....at least in the style / timeline / manner we are familiar with today.

I want to emphasise the incredibly intimite human/machine interface that was going on at that time...so many human senses were being used, collaboratively and convergently, in an attempt to interpret/exploit/adapt what was (and is) the most massive machine in the world.

 

[Swifty]

Nearly- it was a toy bird-caller, as @James_H says.

Watch this 4min30sec video for a proper detailed explanation from "Exploding the Phone" (slide sequence changes at 1min56sec)
View attachment 8162

Of course, there were (and are, still) those that had perfect pitch, and could whistle with their own lips (and listen/react to) the 'trunk control tones'

Joe/Joybubbles was perhaps the best 'bareback' human-to-system interfacer, but there were documented cases of prison inmates being able to whistle-up line service access via penitentiary pay-phones and suchlike.

Being able to whistle DTMF (dual-tone multi-frequency) is another phenomenally-difficult skill (the discordant mournful tones that are made, either silently or overtly across a network to select the dialled digits....or, in the early days of phone banking and e-commerce, to enter credit-card details with).

Joybubbles (and others) could 'read' these (ie listen on a tapped line, and 'hear' the numbers being keyed (I can do this myself, to an extent). He could also click-count ie listen to, and hear the numbers being dialled on a non-tone true-dial system, in order to reproduce them...for research purposes, of course.

Again, I can do this to an extent, and some are also able to dial numbers without actually using the dial (I might be able to do this, I'm not saying.... !-/ ). This is by spiking the line (shorting the wires out, or "hitting the rest" in such a way that dial-pulses are being sent: 1=1, 2=2.....9=9, 10=0)

Most moden phone networks are now resistant to this kind of unofficial human MMI (man-machine-interface). But not all...

Note that as is said in the Joybubbles video, people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates all started off as phone phreakers. Had there been no bluebox breadboard bodgers, there almost-certainly would not have been such a thing as the Apple computer....at least in the style / timeline / manner we are familiar with today.

I want to emphasise the incredibly intimite human/machine interface that was going on at that time...so many human senses were being used, collaboratively and convergently, in an attempt to interpret/exploit/adapt what was (and is) the most massive machine in the world.

I could have sworn I also once watched a documentary (about 20 + years ago) about a clicking device but I'm probably getting mixed up with that bit in WAR GAMES when Mathew Broderick's character uses the ring pull from a soda can to phreak a phone call ? ..

 

[Ermintruder]

I'm probably getting mixed up with that bit in WAR GAMES when Mathew Broderick's character uses the ring pull from a soda can to phreak a phone call ? ..

That was a classic hack at one time, certainly in North America on some payphones/company combinations, also the use of coins/metal paperclips in a similar fashion to the ringpull (by electrically-connecting, temporarily, from the isolated internals of the handset to the earthed metalwork of the payphone).

I also once watched a documentary (about 20 + years ago) about a clicking device

That is possible- I believe (anecdotally) that some North American payphones relied upon simply 'hearing' that a coin had successfully been entered through the coinslot, passed through a very-basic cointester 'chute (one with much less security than a Las Vegas one-armed bandit).

This could be then exploited with a portable Walkman player/recorder (think of how creatively-cruel Kevin is to the crooks in 'Home Alone') by copying and playing-back the required mechanical noises back through the mouthpiece of the payphone. There are stories of people, who could biologically reproduce these noises (I'm sure someone such as Joybubbles could also do this, but for a time it was within the sub-culture of beat-boxers, back in the day...I feel that beat-boxing as a genre has all but vanished, replaced perhaps by rap and drum&bass, but without any retention of the human-generated soundscapes that were an 80s/90s mainstay.

North American payphones were, in the classic era, a lot-less robust against exploits than British ones, partly because of the UK national monopoly (therefore, at the time, they had consistant and higher standards of hardware design) and, partly due to the prevalence of operator-connected calls in North America (the street payphones were multi-company and, technically, ultra-dumb).

 

[Swifty]

That was a classic hack at one time, certainly in North America on some payphones/company combinations, also the use of coins/metal paperclips in a similar fashion to the ringpull (by electrically-connecting, temporarily, from the isolated internals of the handset to the earthed metalwork of the payphone).


That is possible- I believe (anecdotally) that some North American payphones relied upon simply 'hearing' that a coin had successfully been entered through the coinslot, passed through a very-basic cointester 'chute (one with much less security than a Las Vegas one-armed bandit).

This could be then exploited with a portable Walkman player/recorder (think of how creatively-cruel Kevin is to the crooks in 'Home Alone') by copying and playing-back the required mechanical noises back through the mouthpiece of the payphone. There are stories of people, who could biologically reproduce these noises (I'm sure someone such as Joybubbles could also do this, but for a time it was within the sub-culture of beat-boxers, back in the day...I feel that beat-boxing as a genre has all but vanished, replaced perhaps by rap and drum&bass, but without any retention of the human-generated soundscapes that were an 80s/90s mainstay.

North American payphones were, in the classic era, a lot-less robust against exploits than British ones, partly because of the UK national monopoly (therefore, at the time, they had consistant and higher standards of hardware design) and, partly due to the prevalence of operator-connected calls in North America (the street payphones were multi-company and, technically, ultra-dumb).

That's answered all my questions and more .. cheers Ermintruder ... and I know some kids were also chucking the late 80's phonecards in the freezer to also scramble the magnetic strips, something else I was told about at the time was that people who were trying to sell stolen car stereos were also doing that to scramble the silicon chip inside of them .. in those cases, they would wrap the car stereo in a fabric towel to try and absorb the moisture during the freezing process.

 

[CarlosTheDJ]

...I feel that beat-boxing as a genre has all but vanished, replaced perhaps by rap and drum&bass, but without any retention of the human-generated soundscapes that were an 80s/90s mainstay....

Check out Beardyman...

 

[Swifty]

Check out Beardyman...

Beardyman's ace :dbana: ... this Tom Thum Ted X set's on the same level IMO

 

[Schrodinger's Zebra]

I was going to simply place the link to this Youtube video into the latest slot on Page 10 of our forum thread about Shortwave Numbers Stations. Or to have let it languish at the top of the Good Stuff Online thread

But this is far too good a video not to justify having a proper topic started.

This is a another video in the outstanding series created by a very-skillful and knowledgeable gentleman named Curt Rowlett.

Much of Curt's content is about Numbers Stations, codes, cyphers, and the networks before the internetnetwork (which is where and when I was first awoken to Forteana, science and technology).

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, many the proto-hackers and developers of the first data networks cut their teeth as Phone Phreakers. I certainly dabbled in this extensively, and learned lots, long before there was a single thing written or openly discussed about even the possibilities of an internet (let alone a graphical WWW).

Around the earliest days of the internet, with the advent of dial-up bulletin boards and ancient technologies such as Prestel/Teletext/teleprinters (let's say the mid-1980s, for me) I read some pieces about Joybubbles. Only after watching this video do some more missing pieces fall into place for me, after 30 years...

Although I was trying my best to understand the biggest machine on earth (the telecommunications network of the world, even back then an almost-sentient mesh around the big apple) I had no idea that my futile fumblings with blueboxes / whiteboxes / tandem cascades and the like, were being bettered by a blind autistic savant named Joe Engressia who could literally phone anywhere in the world just by whistling.

But he did so much more than that....watch (well, actually, listen) and learn.

If you like technology, you'll love this.

If you hate technology, you'll love this (and; you're lying to me: if you really didn't like a bit of tech, you wouldn't be reading this).

Please invest 25mins of your time to properly-watch this amazing little video. Give it a chance (and remember, much of it is classic recordings of a man who has sadly, been dead now for over a decade...this has the feel of a podcast from beyond the grave). It has only has 170-odd views, so far, and has only been up for a couple of months.

Trust me: if you know the stuff I post, this is worth watching.

Phone Phreaking: A Call From Joybubbles

As someone who absolutely loves things like teletext and old phones (analogue is so much more interesting than digital), your thread has piqued a lot of interest in me.

Bookmarking so I remember to watch the video when I have more time to digest the concept of Phone Phreaking which I have never before heard of.

 

[escargot]

That is possible- I believe (anecdotally) that some North American payphones relied upon simply 'hearing' that a coin had successfully been entered through the coinslot, passed through a very-basic cointester 'chute (one with much less security than a Las Vegas one-armed bandit).

Reminds me of the mercurised dime in Kotzwinkler's The Fan Man, which can pass through any machine and activate it, then re-appear in the 'reject'slot. I thought it must have been somehow mercury-coated but it's apparently meant to be actually turning into mercury and sliding through the mechanism as liquid before re-forming as a coin at the end.

Impossible in so many ways.

 

[maximus otter]

Hannibal Lecter makes a phone call from his cell in Manhunter (1986):

maximus otter

 

[Schrodinger's Zebra]

I was going to simply place the link to this Youtube video into the latest slot on Page 10 of our forum thread about Shortwave Numbers Stations. Or to have let it languish at the top of the Good Stuff Online thread

But this is far too good a video not to justify having a proper topic started.

This is a another video in the outstanding series created by a very-skillful and knowledgeable gentleman named Curt Rowlett.

Much of Curt's content is about Numbers Stations, codes, cyphers, and the networks before the internetnetwork (which is where and when I was first awoken to Forteana, science and technology).

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, many the proto-hackers and developers of the first data networks cut their teeth as Phone Phreakers. I certainly dabbled in this extensively, and learned lots, long before there was a single thing written or openly discussed about even the possibilities of an internet (let alone a graphical WWW).

Around the earliest days of the internet, with the advent of dial-up bulletin boards and ancient technologies such as Prestel/Teletext/teleprinters (let's say the mid-1980s, for me) I read some pieces about Joybubbles. Only after watching this video do some more missing pieces fall into place for me, after 30 years...

Although I was trying my best to understand the biggest machine on earth (the telecommunications network of the world, even back then an almost-sentient mesh around the big apple) I had no idea that my futile fumblings with blueboxes / whiteboxes / tandem cascades and the like, were being bettered by a blind autistic savant named Joe Engressia who could literally phone anywhere in the world just by whistling.

But he did so much more than that....watch (well, actually, listen) and learn.

If you like technology, you'll love this.

If you hate technology, you'll love this (and; you're lying to me: if you really didn't like a bit of tech, you wouldn't be reading this).

Please invest 25mins of your time to properly-watch this amazing little video. Give it a chance (and remember, much of it is classic recordings of a man who has sadly, been dead now for over a decade...this has the feel of a podcast from beyond the grave). It has only has 170-odd views, so far, and has only been up for a couple of months.

Trust me: if you know the stuff I post, this is worth watching.

Phone Phreaking: A Call From Joybubbles

That was a wonderful video, thanks for posting it @Ermintruder Amazing stuff with the Phone Phreaking. I loved the bit where he'd whistled the tone to cut off the call and then he was "inside the phone system".

 

[MercuryCrest]

For anyone else who's interested, there are a ton of old-school e-zines filled to the brim with this sort of thing. I was making a small collection, as I'm not really counter-culture, but I love reading about these things.

A quick Google search for "Phone Phreaking ezine" and you'll get some lovely links.

 

[Mythopoeika]

I got phone phreaked myself at random back in the mid 90s.
I answered the phone and said "hello". The foreign-sounding woman at the other end said "hello" too. I expected her to say something, but she went silent. So I said "hello" again. After an awkward silence I said "well, you called me..." and she said "no, you called me". Seriously, no giggling in the background, etc. I figured that someone was messing about, so I said "someone's playing with the phones, so I'll hang up".
So I put the phone down.
I think that call was international, so it must have cost somebody a bit of dough.

 

[Victory]

I'm too young to remember original phreaking but in the late 80's British Telecom (as most of you will remember) brought out plastic credit card sized cards with varying amount's of credit that you could buy from corner shops, £1, £5, £10 etc

Memories.

 

[Austin Popper]

Captain Crunch made an appearance on the old Coast to Coast show when Art Bell was in his prime. It was a really interesting interview. There was quite a lot of interesting stuff about the whole topic of "phreaking" on line years ago when I checked into it. Some of the stories of those "hacker" kids are fascinating. Seems like one of the best was about a blind kid who was incredibly talented at whistling up the line.

I knew a guy back when I was a kid, one of my dad's friends, who worked for a telephone company, and he'd call Dad long distance and talk for an hour or more for free. I don't recall the details, but he and a co-worker had stumbled onto some simple procedure that got them into the system with no chance of being traced. As far as I know, he never got caught. Long distance charges were very high back then so it was not unusual for people to try to game the system.

 

[Yithian]

Memories.


View attachment 18633

Good design, too.

I always used to have one in my wallet as a young teen, for when I needed to phone Mummy & Daddy.

Oh, for the days when B.T. weren't a bunch of incompetents...

 

[Ermintruder]

I loved the bit where he'd whistled the tone to cut off the call and then he was "inside the phone system".

Although we're all now living in the post-truth virtual reality utopia of the 21st century, I still get a great vibe from having grown-up alongside much of the current technology we are so intimately-dependant upon.

When the existing analogue telephone network goes off (in the UK, the latest postponement for death of PSTN is to March 2025) it will be the end of a gloriously-old and retrotechnical miracle. I shall miss its analogue variabilities and random quirks (still solid yet charmingly-unpredictable, irrespective of the UK's 'first intelligent network' installed in the 1990s, at a cost many times that of the Channel Tunnel)

We enter a completely-different era, from that future point, onwards. Wireline traces & taps, caller ID, area/STD codes, all of which are currently moot anyway, just disappear.

The important point is that, in a sense, all of us will never connect:disconnect, electronically, as nodal individuals or families, ever again.

We will all then just be one eternally-interconnected morass of pseudo-organised semi-random instances. It will be (I exaggerate, but I must) almost like creating a massive bonfire made-up out of every front-door in the world....well, a final one, as privacy and isolation-by-choice have been slowly-smoldering for many years.

 

[James_H]

For anyone else who's interested, there are a ton of old-school e-zines filled to the brim with this sort of thing. I was making a small collection, as I'm not really counter-culture, but I love reading about these things.

A quick Google search for "Phone Phreaking ezine" and you'll get some lovely links.

www.textfiles.com has some stuff on this too from the old BBSs iirc. Along with a ton of other illegal stuff, and of course the anarchist cookbook.

Edit: here's the library on phreaking. http://www.textfiles.com/phreak/

The page is a treasure horde all round.

 

[MercuryCrest]

Just in case, I didn't want to link directly to it, but James_H, those are exactly what I was talking about.

 

[Schrodinger's Zebra]

Although we're all now living in the post-truth virtual reality utopia of the 21st century, I still get a great vibe from having grown-up alongside much of the current technology we are so intimately-dependant upon.

When the existing analogue telephone network goes off (in the UK, the latest postponement for death of PSTN is to March 2025) it will be the end of a gloriously-old and retrotechnical miracle. I shall miss its analogue variabilities and random quirks (still solid yet charmingly-unpredictable, irrespective of the UK's 'first intelligent network' installed in the 1990s, at a cost many times that of the Channel Tunnel)

We enter a completely-different era, from that future point, onwards. Wireline traces & taps, caller ID, area/STD codes, all of which are currently moot anyway, just disappear.

The important point is that, in a sense, all of us will never connect:disconnect, electronically, as nodal individuals or families, ever again.

We will all then just be one eternally-interconnected morass of pseudo-organised semi-random instances. It will be (I exaggerate, but I must) almost like creating a massive bonfire made-up out of every front-door in the world....well, a final one, as privacy and isolation-by-choice have been slowly-smoldering for many years.

You make an excellent, yet dare I say depressing... point.

I still lament the loss of analogue television (oh how I miss it) with all its quirks and excitement... I have a book about 'television broadcasting' and although I've read the analogue chapters several times (and thoroughly enjoyed them), I have never bothered to read the digital chapters... they hold zero interest for me.

I am, I suppose, an enigma... without digital I would not be conversing with you, now, and yet I find digital so dull and uninteresting, I'd much rather be immersed in 405 lines or 625 lines colour and vertical blanking intervals and sub-carrier signals...

... but I digress. And alas! now we are sliding inexorably towards losing our analogue telephones as well... such a tragedy (and makes me fear for the future of our beloved landline phone (8746 model, in two-tone green) after 2025).

The future, as you say, will never be the same again. It will be worse.

 

[Mythopoeika]

Oh, for the days when B.T. weren't a bunch of incompetents...

When was that?

 

[Yithian]

When was that?

Prior to 3/12/84.

 

[Ladyloafer]

I'm too young to remember original phreaking but in the late 80's British Telecom (as most of you will remember) brought out plastic credit card sized cards with varying amount's of credit that you could buy from corner shops, £1, £5, £10 etc ... the thing was, when people's cards ran out of credit, they'd just abandon them in the phone box ... we'd collect as many as we could, walk to the nearby Boots chemist and when the staff weren't watching, we'd spray the magnetic strip on the back of them with hairspray off the shelf .. we'd then stroll back to the phone box wafting the cards in the air to dry them and slot them into the phone .. almost always you'd get free credit, it wasn't an exact science so you might get nothing at all or a pound's worth of calls or a tenner doing that .. British Telecom got wise to that in the end so built deposit boxes for the cards to keep them out of our grubby little hands ... but, by that time, mobile phones were starting to become affordable, phone boxes became outdated almost overnight and they stopped manufacturing those cards. Happy times though.

interestin. i never knew the hairspray trick- obviously i missed out- but i do remember there was a way to use the credit on the card without it coming off the card. i can't remember what it was though. however, i do remember a method i was using in the mid 90's as a backpacker in australia. obviously calling home to UK was expensive but if you got a high value phone card, you, iirc, put the card in, punched in a code, and then whipped the card out quickly at just the right moment of some kind of connection. if you did it right, the credit remained on the phone, without running off the card, and you got the dialling tone to then make an international call. sometimes there was a communal card to be shared around the backpacker hostels for this purpose.



all this other 'phone phreaking' stuff is before my time, though it sounds quite interesting, i will watch that video (in the OP) at some point. i was aware of the whistle thing from the film 'war games', when matthew broderick does it to connect to the internet on his home phone.

 

[Schrodinger's Zebra]

Prior to 3/12/84.