Is there any truth to the scene where David "hotwires" the pay phone by grounding the receiver to the phone itself with a pop tab? Pure Hollywood fantasy?
shareI tried to do that. I always wanted to be like him. I could never get the damn mouthpiece to unscrew in a payphone. I love the 80's
shareIt's obviously an homage to "Captain Crunch" who was one of the first hackers who got famous outsmarting the phone system. Another homage was paid in the movie Sneakers when he said he helped convicts make free phone calls while in prison.
Promise me, no matter how hopeless things get, keep on trying, OK? Keep coming chin-up, OK?
Pay attention to the type of phone. Those phones were being phased as the movie was being shot (a handful left after the movie came out). I found one about a year later and was able to get a dial tone, but only for a local call. When I tried long distance, it disconnected.
shareFun fact - the screenwriters of WarGames also wrote Sneakers.
shareWhen I watched that scene I wondered if it were truly possible to hotwire a pay phone with a soda can tab or if that was pure Hollywood fiction?
I also wondered if the scene where he uses a hand recorder to break out of the infirmary could actually be done in real life?
All of those things were possible in the 1980s, but since then phone manufacturers have improved the technology so those hacks are no longer possible. It used to be popular to have devices that mimic'd touch tone, or the coin acknowledgement sound from a pay phone in order to get free calls.
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Man this movie still brings back memories of a time when life was just beginning...the computer age I mean...I just bought my first computer the year before - can't believe it's 30 years ago!!!
Yet this movie is timeless...the only way to win is not to play...love it..
I believe the term for obtaining calling card codes by brute force was Phreaking. There were phreacking programs you'd let run over night that would brute force calling codes for you so you can dial into BBSs all over the country for "free". Hayes Hackamatic is one program that comes to mind.
shareAhh yes the good old days... When this movie came out in 83 I got my first Apple ][+. Man what good times... I don't remember the Hayes Hackamatic but sounds awesome! I actually wrote my own in BASIC. Just called a number, waited for a carrier and if it did, it knew the code was good. Good times.
shareAnother high-tech device in the 80s was an answering machine that came with a hand-held tone-generator. You would call your own phone and when the answering machine beeped, you would play the tone mad the answering machine would play your messages for you.
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That infirmary scene is bogus. That pad would have sent DIGITAL signals, not AUDIO which is ANALOG. Hooking up a recorder would have been an excerise in futility.
shareThe tones sent sounded like standard DTMF tones to me. Completely plausible for an alarm keypad system in that era.
shareI stand by what I said earlier.
CConsider this: The modem sounda they used in the movie isn't what dial up (remembe those fun days?) modems sounded like, They used the false sounds because had they used the real sonds, It would have hurt the ears of viewers in the theater.
Now about the DTMF tones: They could have used the tomes to show David pressing the buttons. I still say that the pads back then didn't enit tones. If you have informatin that says otherwise, I'd like to hear it
Except I have used keypad systems that were DTMF. Early digital-looking things often sorta were not. So, some access control systems used phone technology by sending acoustical-frequency tones over plain phone wires, at phone speeds.
Now, feeding a signal into it could be hard, as it's not listening for the tones (no mic) but there are ways around that also. There are heist movies from the 60s onward where you can see people clipping in phone test sets to alarm and door controls. That worked on some systems. In the 80s, sure, they could totally have one installed in that room.
Re: hand recorder to exit infirmary. If the system is responding to the sound of the beeps rather than the electronic signal being sent by pressing the buttons, then yes.
Destroy all that which is evil, so that which is good may flourish.
It used to work... I used to do this all of the time back in the 80s.
The only difference was that you had to ground both receiver terminals to the metal cradle on the pay phone and keep it grounded while you dialed.
Fun times until Bell Canada decided to glue everything shut.
It's ironic that this movie was filmed in Big Bear, California, and my best friend has lived there since 1993. What did he used to do? ANTI-hacking (IT security) for a bank!
Back on track: It is possible to make long distance calls from a payphone if you use what's called a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_box_%28phreaking%29 which plays back the tones of change being dropped in. You could also call your own voice mail, then after the tone drop change in then transfer them to an iPod or a taperecorder and play them back into any payphone. But this method is nothing like what David did
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_start
Thanks for that link. Ground start explains it all.
All sorts of stuff used to be possible before those in power started getting wise.
It's still possible to dial a phone by playing the tones into the mic. For example, if you recorded the sound of someone dialing a phone, or you have a program that will generate the proper tones. They used to sell little pocket phone directories that would dial for you. Just select the number, hold it up to most any phone, press the button and it dialed by playing the tones.
Yeah you can dial a phone that way, but it's pretty dumb. You can't record coin tones and play them back to fool the phone into thinking you've deposited coins like some movies show.
Yes it is possible. There are many different ways to hack a telephone system, even with today's technology. I used to subscribe to a technical magazine called 2600 (a reference to Cap'n Crunch hacks), I guess they are still around, that was VERY informative on payphones around the world. It's really interesting what some people can do with so much time on their hands. Check 'em out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2600:_The_Hacker_Quarterly
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Yes, the method portrayed in the movie does/did really work. When I was in Jr High (1990/1991) we were able to exploit this vulnerability in the school payphones using a safety pin.
The way it worked was the pin end was inserted into one of the holes on the transmitter end of the handset. Once in place we would touch the safety pin to the metal cradle the phone hung on when not in use. As I recall it, we didn't not have to hold the pin in place while dialing. If you made the connection successfully, a click would be heard through the receiver and you know you were good to go to dial. I don't recall if this method was limited to local cals, but it absolutely did work. The hard part was getting the right angle into the hole of the transmitter so that the sharp end of the pin hit the correct internal component.
I can confirm that this method really did work.
Since where I lived at the time (New York City area), all of the payphones were converted to DTF (Dial Tone First) instead of Ground Start payphones, and the mouthpiece itself was glued to the handset, you could use the paperclip method.
Simply open up the paperclip and put one end on in one of the holes on the mouthpiece so it's touching the metal surrounding the microphone inside and take the other end of the paperclip and touch the keyhole of the coinbox. While holding it in this position, simply dial the number you are trying to reach.
This worked in the mid/late 80s.
Then again, so did "redboxing" (using tones that simulate coins being dropped into the phone).
These methods are obviously quite outdated these days.
Randy
I did the same thing, old NYNEX phones (I lived on Long Island at the time)
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