In the 1960s, a kid playing with a toy whistle from a Cap’n Crunch cereal made an odd discovery. The whistle produced a 2600-hertz tone, the same sound used by AT&T to control its phone network. That unlocked a loophole in the system, allowing them to hack into AT&T and get free long distance calls.
by Scott-Spangenberg
20 Comments
It didn’t cost them millions, it kept them from reaping millions.
Good times!
He was a cereal killer.
I always thought this was just a myth
Good ol’ 2600 hertz…
A generation of phreaking and hacking would follow suit. Now lost to our modern era of BS social media, mis and disinformation…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2600%3A_The_Hacker_Quarterly?wprov=sfla1
The book “Ghost in the Wires” is great for anyone interested in this.
John Draper aka Captain Crunch. One of the best of the old school phone phreaks.
There was a hacker magazine by the same name. . Funny that.
Yet they still somehow made it to the top 3 phone carriers in America. Amazing. Please tell us more about the rags to riches story of Att. Please /s
This would end with a MASSIVE lawsuit today
Ah, the chinger! I owned one. Fun times. I use to call random numbers across the planet when I had no one else to talk to. Lost in time now.
I could get free calls by playing a recording over payphones.
Didn’t Steve Jobs do the same with Wozniak in the early years of Apple? They had the blue box, which would produce the right tones to call free international calls.
Harold Finch?
Easy prediction is kids will find a way to jailbreak any AI.
Everyone knows this now because of Futurama, before the episode this year it was a novel fact tho
I used to make red and blue boxes in high school and sell them. Ahhh, memories
[Steve Wozniak was one of the best known examples](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_box) of phone phreaking hackers. One wonders if the computing industry itself would have had the same trajectory without this discovery.
You can also dial numbers by using the receiver
You could buy auto dialers in Asia that did the same thing. Sony had a flip version that had an acoustic coupler on it. It was also a recorder. So you could record the sounds when using a phone card or coins and replocated this when you dialed the number you wanted. So, an enterprising young kid who lived there as a kid figured this out and was able to call all around the world, for free.. was a great time.