![]() Phone phreaks spent a lot of time dialing around the telephone network to understand how the phone system worked, engaging in activities such as listening to the pattern of tones to figure out how calls were routed, reading obscure telephone company technical journals, learning how to impersonate operators and other telephone company personnel, digging through telephone company trash bins to find "secret" documents, sneaking into telephone company buildings at night and wiring up their own telephones, building electronic devices called blue boxes, black boxes, and red boxes to help them explore the network and make free phone calls, hanging out on early conference call circuits and "loop arounds" to communicate with one another and writing their own newsletters to spread information.īefore 1984, long-distance telephone calls were a premium item in the United States, with strict regulations. Phone phreaking got its start in the late 1950s in the United States and become prominent in the 1960s and early 1970s. 1.10 End of multi-frequency in the United States.Phreaking has since become closely linked with computer hacking. By the 1980s, most of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) in the US and Western Europe had adopted the SS7 system which uses out-of-band signaling for call control (and which is still in use to this day). Instead, dialing information was sent on a separate channel which was inaccessible to the telecom customer. The blue box era came to an end with the ever-increasing use of computerized phone systems which allowed telecommunication companies to discontinue the use of in-band signaling for call routing purposes. This community included future Apple Inc. To ease the creation of these tones, electronic tone generators known as blue boxes became a staple of the phreaker community. ![]() By re-creating these tones, phreaks could switch calls from the phone handset, allowing free calls to be made around the world. The term first referred to groups who had reverse engineered the system of tones used to route long-distance calls. Phreak, phreaker, or phone phreak are names used for and by individuals who participate in phreaking. The term phreak is a sensational spelling of the word freak with the ph- from phone, and may also refer to the use of various audio frequencies to manipulate a phone system. Phreaking is a slang term coined to describe the activity of a culture of people who study, experiment with, or explore telecommunication systems, such as equipment and systems connected to public telephone networks.
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