Talk:Blue box

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A fact from Blue box appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 22 July 2004. The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that blue boxes used for phreaking were also called Spiros, which was a reference to disgraced U.S. Vice President Spiro T. Agnew?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2004/July.

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Dial-up

Was it possible to get an internet connection with a blue box? If so, is it mentioned in the article? --67.180.161.183^(talk)WHY SO SΣRIOUS?_{23:51, 9 November 2009 (UTC)}[reply]

No. There was no internet in the early 1990s. —EncMstr (talk) 06:52, 11 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I have to question the accuracy of your answer. Yes, there was internet. What if you used a blue box to dial in to Compuserve or something? --67.180.161.183^(talk)_{05:07, 17 November 2009 (UTC)}[reply]

What if? You'd still have to have a log in for Compuserve or whatever ISP you called. Furthermore, most dial-up ISPs were free (local) phone calls. Now, hackers did use blue boxes to avoid call traces or call interesting long distance systems for free, but these were mostly point-to-point connections and the target systems usually didn't have internet anyway. Thesnabber (talk) 23:08, 20 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The Blue Box was a product of the 1970's and there was next to nothing resembling "the internet." Only a handful of people had access to any sort of computer, much less a remote connection to a computer. The Blue Box was used before the first Personal Computer was invented. Interestingly, John Draper was one of the very few who did have such a remote connection to a computer at the time, but that was technically unrelated to the Blue Box and phreaking. Trackinfo (talk) 07:39, 21 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry but much of the info above is rubbish. Blueboxing was still going strong in the late '90s and I remember reading at the time that someone was gaoled for a month or two after using blueboxing to connect to dial-up internet - solidly for several weeks at a time (supposedly for online gaming). In fact that small article was what got blueboxing to my attention, although it didn't last much longer! 82.153.111.118 (talk) 08:41, 8 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Here we go: [1] and for the original article (Daily Telegraph, Thursday 23rd July 1998) that mentions the blue boxing, it's somehow part of an English learning exercise here [2] (page 37).109.176.217.132 (talk) 12:15, 5 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Blue box Authorship

You cite Steve Wozniak as the author of the Blue Box. But, in this documentary, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u18BAZjUHhE&html5=True , John Draper is cited as the one and only author. What's going on? Please fix — Preceding unsigned comment added by Karenina12345 (talk • contribs) 02:53, 23 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Tufte says he invented it: "In 1962, my housemate and I invented the first blue box." http://danwin.com/2013/01/edward-tufte-aaron-swartz-marvelously-different/. Can someone confirm this? Who was his housemate? Stoeckit (talk) 17:25, 20 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Tufte is incorrect. The best book on the topic, Exploding the Phone," by Phil Lapsley, has Ralph Barclay inventing it in 1960. The book cites supporting AT&T, press, FBI documents.--173.228.54.225 (talk) 06:40, 17 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Birds?

Phone phreaks used exotic birds to reach 2600? Really? REALLY? GD-it wikipedia....I mean seriously wtf? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.166.158.2 (talk) 13:38, 16 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

HI OK — Preceding unsigned comment added by 103.248.86.247 (talk) 10:04, 3 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

BSTJ censoring on college campuses?

I would like to see some support for the claim that AT&T snipped pages out of the BSTJ issues in college libraries. When I first heard about blueboxing as a Cornell undergraduate in the mid 1970s, I went to the engineering library in Carpenter Hall and found the 1960 BSTJ article listing the MF tones completely intact. (Naturally I made a copy, but I wasn't stupid enough to actually do anything with the information. Or maybe I was just too busy.) So if they did go after campus libraries, they missed Cornell. Or the story is apocryphal. Karn (talk) 21:24, 8 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Jobs or wozniak?

Who actually makes this box jobs or wozniak? Despite the fact that many people believe jobs is some sort of technical genius he is not he us a businessman and an art major he studied art at university. I don't think he on his own would have the ability to pull off such building such a device so I assume wozniak made the components

Can someone prove this? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.27.131.165 (talk) 18:16, 21 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

OR is all I have to go on. Their relationship was largely the same before Apple and into the blue box days. Jobs did the talking and Woz did the work. It kind of reminded me of a manager for a professional wrestler. Trackinfo (talk) 00:00, 22 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I'm going to remove the line about Jobs and Wozniak as it's not sourced and not particularly relevant anyway. Feel free to put it back if someone can cite a reliable source (i.e. not Jobs or Wozniak themselves, as they are both notorious for rewriting/inventing their own history). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 188.221.176.93 (talk) 23:45, 11 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

External links modified

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Blue box photo

Edited caption with blue box photo to reflect that it is photo of blue box built and sold by Wozniak and Jobs, donated by me to the Computer Museum in Boston, whose collections became part of Computer History Museum (CHM) in Mountain View, California. This photograph was shot at Powerhouse Museum, which has the blue box on loan from CHM. The reason this particular box is historically significant is because of its makers.

Please see here: https://infostory.com/2011/11/20/hacking-and-blue-boxes/ and here: http://www.panix.com/~davidsol/meme2-07.html

Rickprelinger (talk) 01:20, 28 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see anything about 'Spiro T Agnew' in this.

The name was used to identify 3 different kinds of phone hacking, one of which was the blue box. I can't seem to find any refs on wiki about them. In my days at MIT, 'someone' used T's. These were specific to pay phones. If you remember those, you would pay money in coins to make calls. The money would go into a holding box and at the end of the call, a reverse voltage pulse would be sent from the CO to drop the coins into the coin box. A T was just a diode one would put in the line to block the reverse pulse. After your call, you would make another and hang up before answer. The CO would then send a 'coin return' pulse and presto, all your money came back. I don't know if that hack was ever fixed, but of course pay phones have now vanished. BTW, the common rumor was that out-of-band signaling was added to stop blue-boxing, which is as far as I know just an urban myth. The revenue loss from blue-boxing would never have justified a complete rework of the system. Rather, out-of-band was done to solve other issues like tying up a trunk line for connection negotiation. 69.131.0.72 (talk) 18:22, 15 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Phone hacking

+91 73552 75208 49.156.111.151 (talk) 14:08, 18 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]