5 ms·
Back in the seventies, the simplest phone hack was probably what we called the "click-it", but is more formally known as the Black Box. Some curious person had
by cynwoody 14y ago
Back in the seventies, the simplest phone hack was probably what we called the "click-it", but is more formally known as the Black Box.
Some curious person had connected a lineman's set to a ringing phone line and noticed that, between the extremely loud ring signals, he could hear the calling party talking to himself. Also, that if he briefly shorted the ringing line, the ringing would stop but the call would stay connected. And he could now clearly hear the distant party! Moreover, if the calling party was using a pay phone, he could hang up and get his dime back, even if he had read the Declaration of Independence into the phone in the meantime. IOW, there was a functioning talk path but no billing!
So, the only problem to be solved was to get audio into the formerly ringing line without drawing enough DC from the line to look like a real phone call was in progress (and thereby trigger billing). This was easily solved by placing a capacitor in the line to keep the phone from drawing DC and placing a six-volt battery across the line, in series with an audio frequency choke. The final piece was a momentary contact switch (the clicker) placed across the line ahead of the capacitor. If you got a long distance call, you clicked the switch to stop the ringing, then picked up the phone, and talked for hours. And the calling party never saw the call on their bill.
If you wanted to initiate a call, you could "code ring" the party, signaling them to call you by prearrangement.
If memory serves, the Black Box stopped working when they rolled out ESS in the late seventies.
- mindcrime 14y agoThat was a good one, but arguably the simplest "hack" was the Beige Box. For the uninitiated, a "beige box" was just a piece of phone wire with a RJ11 jack on one end (the kind that plugs into the base of a phone) and alligator clips on the red and green wires at the other end. You used it by opening up the "demarc box" on the side of a building and clipping onto the corresponding terminals in the box, and using the line like normal. What made this moderately useful was the emergence of COCOT (Customer Owned Coin Operated Telephones) phones. With a phone company payphone, the "magic" that made it a payphone was stored in the switch at the exchange, and so beige boxing one of those didn't do you any good. But the "magic" that made a COCOT a payphone was in the phone itself, so the line it was hanging off of was usually a plain jane phone line with full long-distance and everything available. So you'd find a COCOT at a strip mall or something, then drive around back to where the demarc boxes were, find the one for the payphone (usually by trial and error) and take it over. Now you could do all the war dialing or calling long distance you wanted. And hiding out behind a strip mall late at night, hidden behind a dumpster or whatever, you were fairly safe from being found by cops. In fact, of all the times we did this stuff back in the day, we never got caught by a cop in the act of using this setup. Even better, some of the demarc boxes were rigged up internally to use an RJ11 connector, so you didn't even need the alligator clips. You could just open up the box, unplug the wire inside, and plug a regular phone in and have your way with it. :-)
- eric970 14y agoI'd like to disagree that biege boxing COCOTs wasn't useful. First off COCOTs were owned by customers, so the magic did not happen at the telephone switch. Quite the opposite. When VoIP started emerging, a handful of COCOT companies and their operators figured out how to place long distance calls for a fraction of the usual price. Instead of placing LD calls over the telephone network, any LD call would be intercepted by the COCOT firmware. Instead, a local number would be called and rerouted over the Internet. This was a type of extender, and one could beige box these pay phones to pick up DTMF tones and figure out the number of the extender and its access codes. Sometimes an access code was even optional for a call to go through the extender. Like many extenders, these became abused like hell.
- mindcrime 14y agoI'd like to disagree that biege boxing COCOTs wasn't useful. Umm, nobody said that. First off COCOTs were owned by customers, so the magic did not happen at the telephone switch. Quite the opposite. That's exactly what I said above.