How a Cereal Box Toy Hacked AT&T's Phone Lines

This guy really gets his use out of a stock footage subscription

"And this nerd, who later dropped out of college to run a fruit stand or something like that" A very expensive fruit stand may I say

Back in the 70's, I discovered out of boredom, that if you recorded the sounds the phone made when dialing a number you could then pick up the receiver (get the dial tone) and play the number into the receiver and it would connect you without charging you. If you didn't push the buttons the system didn't know what phone to charge avoiding the long distance charges.

In the eighties I had this calculator with a built in phone book. It had a speaker that emitted tones so I could use it with our rotary phone without having to use the rotor. I just chose the number on the calculator and held it up to the phone. Beep boop boop beep beep and it made the call. The real fun thing was that I could use it on many pay phones without having to pay.

People would take these to the airports and disconnect all the pay phones at once. Imagine what it would have been like lol

Re: the Rick Moranis “hasn’t worked since the 80s” joke... After his wife died of breast cancer in 1991, the actor, without any fanfare or self-aggrandizing announcements, left Hollywood behind to raise his kids. His comedy style didn’t get old and the roles didn’t dry up, he just decided being a father to his kids was more important. The Keymaster is a good dude.

As a delinquent teen in the 90s I discovered you could jump two separate phone lines, dial *69 to hear last number that called, then press 1 to dial these numbers. Then you would listen to: "NO you called me" "Umm, nooo, YOU CALLED ME!"

3:55 “This guy who dropped out of college to start a fruit stand” My company does contract work for Apple, but due to confidentiality & non-disclosure agreements, we can’t refer to said company by name in any of our company communications, either written or even verbal, so in our company, we all know it as “The Acme Fruit Company”.

“This video is made possible by Trade Coffee” Everybody: Impossible

“Switch to AT&T for faster modem speeds and no hidden fees!” - Every AT&T commercial ever

"Do you play any instruments?" "Yea, the phone"

“Personally, I drink cold brew that’s so sweet that it tastes like melted coffee ice cream” Hey that’s what I drink, sometimes with literal ice cream scoops in it.

Back when cereal had toys and not a chance to win a signed overwatch esports league player card

Fun fact, your phone calls still go through “wires”. Even cellular connections need wires for most of the distance.

More accurately, a "Phone Phreak" would dial an 800 (WATTS) line - which was free and then enter the 2600hz tone which would drop the call. At this point the call was beyond the billing stage. Then the "PP" enters DTMF (multi frequency) tones to redirect the call. While the touchtone phones of that era also emitted DTMF tones they wouldn't work at this stage. The so called "Blue Box" generated a different series of DTMF tones - the same ones an operator or the internal systems would generate. Or so I've heard...

“It was invented by this nerd and then later sold by this nerd”

in an intro programming class in university i once wrote a program that can record with microphone the beep sounds a touch tone telephone makes and then display the phone number on the screen. The program worked by performing a fast fourier transform algorithm on the digital signal, which gives the individual frequencies the beeps were composed of. Each different number's beep is called a DTMF tone, and each is defined as specific pair of frequencies. A strong enough amplitude in the right areas of the frequency domain, and the program can guess a number digit. Repeat for all the digits in the phone number, then the full number can be displayed. It even works if you press multiple buttons at once!

The Captain conceals the Jade Key, In a dwelling long neglected, But you can only blow the whistle Once the trophies are all collected

When he said "in the late 1960s, a group of hackers...", My Google Home activated and started telling me about the Green Bay Packers. I rewound and it did it again.

This video really just touched the tip of the iceberg in the phone phreaking world(I know, that's what this channel is about). They where able to pull of some serious stunts that went well beyond making free long distance calls. It really is an interesting topic and there are a couple good long form vids and article out there about it.