Wow, now that is really a blast from the past. I'm a similar age to the guy who wrote that article and had a similar experience of trying to figure all this stu

Wow, now that is really a blast from the past. I'm a similar age to the guy who wrote that article and had a similar experience of trying to figure all this stuff out. Blue Boxes (at least where I lived) no longer worked, but black boxes and red boxes worked. I don't know when blue boxes ever worked, but I have the impression it was in the seventies, or at the latest, the early eighties. A black box was a circuit you put on your line to pick up a call without dropping the voltage on the line enough for the phone company to think you'd actually answered. So, your friend could call you long-distance (even internationally) and you could talk to them without them having to pay a long distance charge. The problem was that you could always hear the ringing every few seconds in the background and their voice was attenutated. It was fun and it kinda worked, but I didn't use it that much because it was so annoying. The red box was a device for making free phone calls from pay phones. It faked the tones you inserted for a nickel, a dime, or a quarter. You could just hold it up to the speaker of a pay phone and just hit the button. I built one off a schematic I downloaded. At most pay phones it didn't work at all, but I found two that it worked at. I'd go there and call all my friends in distant states and call them for hours. Every time the operator would come on and ask for money, I'd hold up the device to the speaker and press the "quarter" button a few times. Later I got hold of "hacking" programs for "MCI" codes and other providers. Actually, MCI was more sophisticated that most of the other providers, and quickly shut off hackers. There were a lot of other providers that weren't so smart. The way the programs worked is by dialing an 800 number, some "user ID code" and then a known modem number. If a computer answered (i.e., you got a carrier tone from a modem), you knew that the code was good. If not, you tried another code. These computer programs would just try random codes all day using a known-good modem number and then print you a list of the successful codes. As I started to learn more about this stuff, I did crazier stuff like call all over the world. In this era of Skype it's free to call all over the world, but in 1984 placing international phone calls was really expensive. But I'd call my teenage hacker friends in England and Australia and just chat with them for hours. At retail rates, I was running up a couple of thousand dollars a month in phone charges. Occasionally I'd hear of someone in my circle of friends getting busted in some way, but in my teenage naivete I figured it couldn't happen to me. When I was sixteen and got a driver's license, I met some of the hackers that were within driving distance. One of them got busted at his house: the police arrested him and took all his computer equipment. Since he was a minor he got off with a slap on the wrist, but he didn't get his computers back. I knew that my time was coming soon, since there were already some hints my phone line was being tapped by companies I was stealing from.