Wow. 52 years on there are still folks identifying as phreaks! And blind ones at that! Joybubbles is looking down and smiling I'm sure. "When I was a kid, a prank was calling in a pizza to a neighbour's house," says Kevin Kolbye, an FBI assistant special agent in charge who has investigated the phreaks. "Today it's this." Kevin is way behind the times. 20 years back folks were cracking the voice mail infrastructure, faking call display, and forwarding calls on other peoples dime. Now this stuff is so common that telemarketers are doing it.

Heh, 2600, blue boxes, black boxes, red boxes...all seems so quaint now.

Pity there were no drugs involved or the Rolling Stone writer could really have sexed up the story. "Hacker groupies"? Okay then.

arse_hat: I'm with you. A lot of those stories were originally put together in the Jolly Roger's cookbook -- at least that's where I read it. One of the most famous was 'The Story of the Little Blue Box'.