First of all, I'm old school hacker. We're the good guys, taking things apart to see how they work and then reassembling them. The immature young anarchopunks have misappropriated the label (or had it slapped on them by ignorant and fearful media/parental types) and are more properly crackers. (Phone) phreakers are the equivalant with the public switched telephone network. Back when in the pre-MFJ AT&T days the technology was more rudimentary. In short, both signalling and carrier streams were run across the same carrier medium, making it relatively easy to trick the system into giving you free long distance, for instance. The tone to free up a trunk was 2600Hz, which as it turned out, could be produced by slightly modifying a free whistle given out in boxes of Cap'n Crunch. If you're really interested in the history and/or methodology of phreaking, do a search on it. I think www.2600.com has links to that sort of thing, if you can phind y0ur way thr0ugh th3 ann0ying jarg0nz.
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