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link in the description. If you grew up with the fun kind of parents
that let you stay up late, play violent video games, skip school three to four days a week,
set fire to the neighbor’s cat, and eat bowls of tiny little cookies for breakfast,
you might remember that all of the very best breakfast cereals used to include some sort
of prize inside. Ever since 1909, when Kellogg’s realized
that plain cornflakes might be almost palatable if you just bribe children with a 3-page picture
book, cereal boxes have been stuffed with all sorts of plastic knick-knacks—yoyo’s,
digital watches, lightsaber spoons, a ghost detector that doesn’t work, straight up
cash, a deed to 1 square inch of land in the Yukon that doesn’t even have mineral rights
and was repossessed by Canada in 1965, and, completely accidentally, a tiny whistle that
could hack into the back-end of AT&T’s phone lines. You see, back when phones had buttons and
handsets and didn’t waste your time with YouTube videos about cereal box prizes, every
bit of information that your phone received and produced needed to travel along a big
web of physical telephone lines—these wires carried all of your greetings, your gossip,
and your scary horror-movie heavy breathing sounds, but they also needed to carry certain
metadata about the call, like the number you were calling from and who you were. Since early telephone lines were only built
to transport a single stream of audio, this metadata needed to take the form of audio
as well. For example, if you’re one of the fifteen
viewers of this channel who have ever touched a push-button telephone, you’d know that
the phone produces certain tones when certain numbers are pressed—and no, this was not
just so that you could play the first 4 seconds of “Funky Town” by typing a long string
of numbers into the keypad. It was because the phone actually recorded
and sent the tones to a central switching station, where they could decode them into
numbers and connect the call to the right telephone line. It’s sort of like how nowadays, when the
NSA hears a dissenting tone, like you talking about how the United States Postal Service
is kinda slow, they know to connect you with the nearest friendly neighborhood surveillance
center. This system of recorded tones is called “in-band
signaling,” and, as you might imagine, it didn’t take very long for nerds to start
abusing it. In the late 1960’s, a group of hackers called
“phone phreaks” discovered that AT&T used a certain tone—2600 hertz—to indicate
that a long-distance phone line was empty. Of course that’s different to how it is
today. Now, if you call them, specifically about
why their retail employee literally stabbed you in your chest when you tried to buy a
Galaxy Note 9, you hear a cruel tone from the agent, saying that you shouldn’t have
gone to to the store if you didn’t want to get stabbed in the chest by their employee. But back in the 1960’s, if they didn’t
have the 2600 hertz tone, the unused phone lines would just be silent and they’d be
indistinguishable from a long-distance phone call between two sad mimes who are in love
and tragically separated by fate. Now, playing that exact tone back into the
phone would disconnect one line, but it would indicate to the switching station that the
other line was an operator, which would free them up to make long-distance phone calls
without any charge. The phone phreaks experimented with an organ,
a few exotic birds, whistlers with perfect pitch, but the easiest way to crack AT&T’s
phone lines was discovered by this guy: John Draper, who realized that the Captain Crunch
Bo’Sun Whistle that came in his box of cereal just so happened to emit a tone of exactly
2600 hertz. Oh, and for those of you who are wondering,
2600 hertz sounds a little like this. So, really, my point is: it’s probably better
that these whistles were in the hands of a criminal syndicate than the actual children
they were intended for. Now, while Captain Crunch eventually stopped
putting telecom hijacking tools in their boxes of breakfast cereal, phone phreaking continued
to evolve over the next decade or so. Many hackers began using tone-generating devices
called “blue boxes,” a design that was perfected by this nerd and sold at an egregious
markup by this nerd, who later dropped out of college to run a fruit stand, or something
like that. But, before you run over to your dusty old
house phone and begin blowing whistles into it, you should know that, much like beloved
actor Rick Moranis, these sorts of techniques haven’t really worked since the 80s. Landlines slowly became more sophisticated
over the years—Bell Telephone started putting filters over long-distance lines that blocked
out single-frequency tones, and eventually shifted all of their hardware over to a system
of out-of-band signaling, where telephone lines had dedicated data channels for information
like the number dialed and the identity of the person who dialed it. On top of that, many modern landline phones
don’t even actually use landlines at all, and rely on internet protocols to send and
receive data instead. So, until Kellogg’s starts accidentally
dropping black-market WiFi-cracking kits in their boxes of Honey Smacks, no cereal box
prize will ever quite live up to the humble Bo’Sun whistle. So, you know how when you go to a certain
fish-human hybrid themed coffee shop and you ask for coffee and they just give you coffee? That’s kinda weird, right? It’s like if you just ordered wine-flavored
wine at a restaurant instead of going through a list to find one that you like in particular. Everyone has their own taste in coffee—personally,
I exclusively drink cold brew that’s so sweet that it tastes like melted coffee ice
cream, because I am a child. Your dream coffee might be from some small,
local roaster far away from you, but you’ve just never found it. That’s why Trade Coffee has you take a three
minute quiz to find the perfect match for you. For me, it suggested the Flatlander Signature
Blend from PT’s Coffee Roasting Company in Topeka, Kansas, among others. Once you find your matches, you’ll choose
your delivery frequency, and then rate the coffees you get so your matches adjust and
improve through time. Best of all, if you’re one of the first
100 people to go to the link in the description, you’ll get 30% off your first bag.
This video was pretty interesting, except there was one little inaccuracy. By default, the captain crunch whistle did not emit the 2600 Hz tone. One of the holes in the whistle had to be plugged up to emit the right tone. It was common for people to glue one of the holes shut in order to get the right tone. This same topic is discussed by Jim Hebbeln, a volunteer at the Telecommunications History Group, in an episode of the podcast "Twenty Thousand Hertz" entitled "Phone Tones."