It is done by rapidly pressing and releasing the switch hook to open and close the subscriber circuit, simulating the pulses generated by the rotary dial. Possibly one of the first phreaking methods was switch-hooking, which allows placing calls from a phone where the rotary dial or keypad has been disabled by a key lock or other means to prevent unauthorized calls from that phone. The tone system in the United States has been almost entirely replaced, but in some countries, in addition to new systems, the tone system is still available, for example in Italy. In the UK the situation was rather different due to the difference in technology between the American and British systems, the main difference being the absence of tone dialing and signaling, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1990, the pager cloning technique arose and was used by law enforcement. This evasion is illegal the crime is called "toll fraud". Phreaking consists of techniques to evade long-distance charges. To report that a phone call was long-distance meant an elevated importance because the calling party is paying by the minute to speak to the called party. In some locations, calling across the street counted as long distance. Phreaking was especially prevalent in universities, where it began spreading much like computer hacking would in the following decades.īefore 1984, long-distance telephone calls were a premium item in the United States, with strict regulations. Phone phreaks experimented with 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 (often obtained through dumpster diving), social engineering, 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. Phreaking began in the 1960s when it was discovered that certain whistles could replicate the 2600 Hz pitch used in phone signalling on 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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