Cory Doctorow
Spoontaneous Consumption@pluralistic
And it's all the Phreakers' fault! Damn freeloaders 😡
Den of Earth@manu @pluralistic
I knew a guy in the 80s who would make collect calls from Canada to a payphone in France. When his girlfriend answered, she would say she accepted the charges, but the Canadian operator didnt know that there was no such mechanism in France so they would have long free talks at a time when international calls were expensive and neither Skype nor the Internet existed.
I knew a guy in the 80s who would make collect calls from Canada to a payphone in France. When his girlfriend answered, she would say she accepted the charges, but the Canadian operator didnt know that there was no such mechanism in France so they would have long free talks at a time when international calls were expensive and neither Skype nor the Internet existed.
@manu @pluralistic
Another early form of (legit, sorry!) free calls was the old Zenith numbers. This predated the 800 toll free lines. You had to call the operator and ask to be connected to the 5-digit number you wanted.
A company I worked for in the 80s still had a Zenith number published in the white pages even though it had long been disconnected. We tried calling it and were greeted with a very suspicious "and WHO are you trying to reach???" - we hung up.
Geoff Winkless@DenOfEarth @manu @pluralistic my dad used to tell me a story of how he and his friends got cheap calls from old UK payphones.
In those days, local calls were much cheaper than national; critically, "local" also included the geographical neighbour codes to the local area.
AIUI the paid rate was based on an (inaudible) signal from the exchange.
They worked out that you could hop from area to area by chaining area codes. As long as each exchange saw a local code, it would remain at local rate.
Billy Smith@Geoff @DenOfEarth @manu @pluralistic
There was a recording that i listened to in the early 1990's, called the Sounds Of Britain.
When rotary phones were still a thing, the exchanges used a similar mechanism. You could hear the clicks as the mechanism operated.
If you started dialling an adjacent area code before the first one had finished dialling through, so as long as you knew the numbers, you could dial all the way around the coastline of Britain, and then dial your own phone number. :D
@Geoff @DenOfEarth @manu @pluralistic
When you heard your own number start to ring, you had to hang up your phone.
Then within a few minutes you phone would ring, and when you answered it, all you would hear was the clangs and clicks of closing electro-mechanical connections. :D
Someone played me a tape of it in the early 90's, but i've never been able to find a copy since then. :D
Vaguely here 🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈@BillySmith @Geoff @DenOfEarth @manu @pluralistic I still have my dad's exchange index which was exactly the sort of thing you wanted to pull off this kind of trick... Amongst other things ;) https://flic.kr/p/eixfQt
Ursidinoj/The Bjornsdottirs