iPhreak: RedBoxing

[Saint]

Hey everyone, I wrote this up for my blog thing and wanted opinions on it.  It's mostly for my friends and other people who are too lazy to make a real red box with crystal-swapping and such.  Meh.

iPhreak: RedBox

Category:  -- Posted by Griffin on 9.08.06

Before I get into this discussion on redboxing, I would first like to say that this was written primarily as a discussion piece. A lot of people think that redboxing is technically impossible with the new innovations in payphone technology, but time and again this is proving to be more of a myth (and I love debunking myths). So here we go.

    * The first thing you will need is an iPod, with the standard ugly-as-hell earbuds.

    * You will also need to download the tones for whatever system you are testing.

    * You will also need a payphone that doesn’t have a muted mouthpiece.

An easy way to test if the phone is unmuted is by blowing on the mouthpiece. If you can hear the distortion through the speaker or hear some kind of feedback, the line should be unmuted.

Add the tones to your iPod, and create a special playlist just for them. You will need to listen to the tones a couple of times to make sure there is no distortion on them when you play it. If it sounds like they are playing slowly, you may want to compare them to another set of tones online.

Now that you have a decent set of tones installed on your equipment, you are ready to test them out. Find a payphone, blow on the reciever to check that it is live, hold an earbud about an inch or two away, and play the tone(s) required to make a local call. Then just dial the call like usual. If the call goes through, your setup works on that phone (which is most phones in north america).

If it says “please deposit xx cents,” one of these things is wrong:

    * The volume is too high or too low (make sure you can hear the tones through the handset speaker and that there is no distortion)

    * You played your tones too rapidly (there should be at least a second between tones, and up to 3 seconds between tones because of how long it would take to insert real coins).

    * There is distortion, either from bad tones or from background noise or from a protection mechanism (see below)

    * The phone isn’t unmuted (make sure you can hear the tones through the handset speaker).

If you get an operator on the line, hang up and use a different payphone.  The cause was most likely that you didn’t allow enough space between the tones.  You can still box the call if you use an operator, but you'll need some variety of social engineering skill to do it.  Be prepared to have a reason for calling the operator to place your call for you, like this phone always eats your money, etc.

If the phone is muted, there are still some things you can do:

    * Try putting in a nickel before using the red box, that may unmute the handset

    * Call an 800 number and let the system hang up on you and reset itself so that you can get an unguarded dial tone

There is a mouthpiece distortion mechanism on some phones that make redboxing difficult and sometimes nigh-on impossible to do. Tones played on these phones with have some static, and generally don’t work. There is no way that I know of right now that can defeat this mechanism, so you’re on your own for that one. Using headphones with those soft fuzzy ear covers will help reduce distortion a bit, but it may not be enough to test the system.

FAQ:

Q: What if I only have a CD Player?
A: Good question!!! If you only have a CD player, just burn a cd of different tones (remember to label!) and play the correct amount with about three seconds between each track. That should work, everything else is the same.

Q: My tones make a pfft sound when I listen to them on my iPod.
A: The person you got them from edited them, and didn’t leave any space at the beginning/end of the recording. Even adding 1/10th of a second to the beginning and end should correct this problem.

Q: I’ve tried using several tones and none of them work!
A: Assuming that everything else is correct, you may just need to use different headphones. Also try adjusting the volume and distance from the mouthpiece. If that doesn’t work, try a different company’s payphone. If you’re still having problems, make sure you’re using the correct amount of your country’s currency for the call. If THAT doesn’t work, google porn and forget about redboxing entirely because something else is wrong.

Q: What about blue/green tones?
A: Those should play properly, just make sure you know what you’re doing before you start blasting bluebox tones through a payphone.  Blueboxing doesn't work in most areas, but if you're in asia or africa or south america it may still work in your country.

[linear]

why would you make a redbox in 2007?

[gangals]

why would you make a redbox in 2007?

2007?

[Saint]

For nostalgia, fun, free calls to canadian immigration....  Why not?

[frog]

Q: What about blue/green tones?
A: Those should work properly, just make sure you know what you’re doing before you start blasting bluebox tones through a payphone.

Blueboxing rarely works anymore. Saying "should work" is misleading.

[Arox!]

  @ bell security. Has anyone here ever seen a Bell security officer or van? Anyway I have been redboxin' since you were in diapers kid! Sometimes an operator is the only way to put a call through especially on muted phones. I know the last time I tried to redbox (3 or 4 years ago) I talked to an op and she told me my phone was not registering my "coins" and that i needed to find a working phone, which at that point I had to SE her into giving me the call.
Also another fun trick to do is calling a op and press the pound key at the same speed of a redbox tone, I have actally gotten some calls though that way believe it or not.

[Saint]

Q: What about blue/green tones?
A: Those should work properly, just make sure you know what you’re doing before you start blasting bluebox tones through a payphone.

Blueboxing rarely works anymore. Saying "should work" is misleading.

Okay good point, I more meant that the tones should play properly ^_^() but I will add a reminder that it only works in a select few areas.

I actually have seen telephone company vans visit the payphone I was using at the time, because I'm used to living in smaller towns where they send out a tech for pretty much anything that happens.  I wasn't redboxing but still.  I'm not sure how diapered I would have been, it depends because I would have been a baby in 1985 (could go either way  ) 

[linear]

why would you make a redbox in 2007?

2007?

I round up.

[linear]

Q: What about blue/green tones?
A: Those should work properly, just make sure you know what you’re doing before you start blasting bluebox tones through a payphone.

Blueboxing rarely works anymore. Saying "should work" is misleading.

"rarely?" i think it's safe to say none of us are in third world countries. therefore, we can say "never" works anymore more accuratey.

[linear]

For nostalgia, fun, free calls to canadian immigration....  Why not?

Canada was never on ACTS and therefore US tones would never have worked on it. They were on N-ACTS and canadian red boxing died long before US redboxing.

nostalgia, maybe. but your tutorial makes it out as if it's still applicable to modern phone systems. it's not.

[Saint]

I was joking, but I would be calling from the US to canada, not making calls inside canada.

Blueboxing is still possible in some areas, it's not possible on bell areas (which is almost everywhere) but other areas have smaller telcos where it's never been an issue and where they never upgraded their system to a newer switching system.  Possible but not exactly practical to locate these rediculously small telcos, right?  But if you felt like connecting to a switch in Rio to bluebox, an iPod would play the tones correctly (which was the only thing I was trying to emphasize in my original draft -- that it was quality non-fuzzy sound; I personally could not care less if and where people bluebox because I don't do it).

Not quite a third-world country, but I lived in a town when I was I high school that didn't even lock their stuff up with hex locks like bell does.  They just had a handle that you could turn and it would open, their setup was old and I was surprised anything worked at all (thick dust, ant hills, and weeds).  I never really saw the appeal of blueboxing (and really was kind of afraid of it at the time) and the only time I played a 2600 tone through the line the phone was shut down until the next day.  Just imagine a high schooler holding a crappy gateway laptop up to a crappier payphone to play a tone -- it was ghetto to say the least.

As far as "applicable to modern phone systems" -- if it still works for making phone calls, then it's applicable to modern phone systems.  You can't call long-distance on at&t phones, but for the many modern payphones in the ares where I've lived it still holds true for the most part.  I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying that it's a different set of experiences on different sets of payphones in different locations -- it's understandable that we'd have different opinions on stuff.

Now having said all of that -- I have been phreaking on and off for about a decade and just got back into it after a long hiatus (a pretty solid few years).  So if there is something wrong with something I write please feel free to correct me, after all that is why I posted it -- so I could have a discussion on the merits of it and double-check to make sure that there weren't any glaring errors on it that needed to be corrected.  I will revise it a pretty good bit and clarify based on the suggestions made here.

Thanks for looking over my stuff you guys!

Griffin

[linear]

Sorry, I am saying YOU are wrong. There are NO phone companies in America that still use ACTS. And COCOTs were never on ACTS to beging with. You can't redbox anymore. Nor for local calls, not for long distance calls.

[z09]

I had the tones on my ipod.  Until everything got deleted.  Since then I have just used RBCP first podcast (where he calls the pizza place and puts money in).  That has worked 3 time out of 3.

[ljc]

Last I checked, my telco still used ACTS. And I remember seeing Verizon ACTS. AT&T still accepts ACTS I believe - an operator told me they did accept coins via ACTS on pay phones.

Does the SBC part of AT&T still allow ACTS? (I know SBC did, but when it all became AT&T, I'm not sure what happened with SBC ACTS)

[Saint]

I had the tones on my ipod.  Until everything got deleted.  Since then I have just used RBCP first podcast (where he calls the pizza place and puts money in).  That has worked 3 times out of 3.

I actually had some old tones on a cd from back when I used a cd player so I edited them into a fifty-cent recording with enough space in the middle and on the ends so that it could be played a few times without having to really mess with the ipod.  Took me a while to figure out why they were going PFFFT on the ipod () but now it seems to be playing fine.  I'll have to try it out tonight, but a little over a year ago is the last time I redboxed (which was in Oklahoma) and it worked then.

I used to live in a town called Beggs that didn't have bell, it just had Beggs Telco.  The payphones cost 5 cents to make a local call (the phones only took nickels!), and the area that they supplied phone service to didn't have 711 access (deaf realay) even though I believe it's federally required.  In a lot of small town areas, bell wouldn't provide service because it cost them too much so in the 50s/60s/70s some towns developed their own phone systems.  My high school algebra teacher said that when he was a teenager (in the mid-late 80s) all his town had was a party line!  (Funny enough, there are still some areas in Oklahoma where you can't get a land line installed because bell doesn't want to foot the bill for it).

Unless we all go fiberoptic, I think that redboxing and blueboxing will always be do-able in some areas of the country because a lot of areas are frankly just too poor to change their entire switching system, and many too poor to even switch out perfectly fine payphones.  It doesn't seem cost-effective to me to do that just to slightly enhance security when the threat is so small to begin with.

I'm not sure if SBC/ATT phones allow ACTS, if I come accross something, I'll let you know but so far I haven't.