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There are a lot of text files and pictures of various boxes making the rounds today, but most of them are now really old. Some never worked at all, some are obsolete, and a dwindling few still do work - but they are abused or misused by a majority of those who try them. Most disturbing of all is the amount of discussion that still takes place on boxes that should rightfully have been forgotten many years ago.

Click here to download all the box-related textfiles mentioned in this document.

The purpose of this series is to debunk most of the boxes mentioned in newsgroups and text files, and to clear the air on the true usefulness of those that remain.

Without regurgitating any of the textfiles that describe these boxes, I will briefly describe how each one is supposed to work, how or even if it actually does, and why or why not. If I can prevent even ONE person from blowing money at Radio Shack when he doesn't have to, if I can convince even ONE person to spend a few bucks at Radio Shack instead of wasting hours out of his lifetime building a simple line gadget, if I can prevent ONE would-be phreaker from getting arrested, then this series will have served its purpose.

Note: Although there is a section for "boxes" that are nothing more than jokes or parodies, there are a good deal more boxes out there that present themselves as the real thing but are so stupidly implausible that they might as well be hoaxes. I have included these frauds in the proper sections for what they claim to do.

The Aqua/Gray box is supposed to defeat the "FBI Lock-in Trace" by canceling the voltage that the FBI device is supposed to put on the line to keep it open.

There are a few things wrong with the concept of the "lock in trace" right off the bat. For starters, if the FBI can keep the voltage up on your line, they already have your number, so why continue? And if their purpose is to trace a call made to you (and to prevent you from hanging up before they can complete the trace) then it's not you who the Aqua box would save.

Second, the files which describe the process say that if you hang up while the lock in trace is in effect, your phone will ring due to the voltage the tracing device places on the line. But, a line is held open with a DC voltage, and ringing uses AC. So this is obviously wrong.

Third, with digital switches pretty much the norm everywhere, this kind of analog "trace" is no longer necessary. If you should ever figure out that the FBI has had you traced, it's already done no matter what you do to your line. If the Aqua Box ever worked, it is now a thing of the past.

The Gray Box is an Aqua Box with a 2-line selector switch added. The Gray Box text file is considerably more technically detailed than the Aqua Box file but it plagiarizes a large piece of it verbatim.

The Silver Box (DTMF Generator) has sometimes been called a Gray Box, but it has nothing to do with the Aqua Box or the Lock In Trace.

The Black Box was once quite common. It used a line voltage manipulation trick to allow people to call you toll-free. The way it worked was that when someone called you through an old-fashioned toll switch, the connection was already set up right to your phone. The box let you pick up the phone and talk through this connection while fooling the system into believing that the phone is still ringing.

Black Boxing became obsolete when electronic switching - not even digital mind you, but ESS, EAX and hybrid switches - were introduced on a wide scale. It actually died in a lot of places well before that as telephone companies wised up to Black Boxing in the 1960s and 1970s and started checking logs and setting up exception flags (2 hours of ringing is NOT a normal occurrence...).

In a toll network, if the receiving end switch is electromechanical AND there are no countermeasures, AND the toll network passes audio before billing starts, black boxing will work. There are virtually no such switches left in North America, and the toll network doesn't pass audio until the called party picks up, so Black Boxing is long dead here. I have, however, heard tell of some rural European and third-world phone systems where all the conditions are right for black boxes even today, but because of the North American toll system, we couldn't call such a number for free from here. At least not usefully anyway.

The original Magenta Box is a British design, but easily adapted for the U.S. electronic parts market.

It basically uses a relay as a vibrator (get your mind out of the gutter) to generate pulsed DC, which can then be fed into a transformer and stepped up to approximate the AC ringing voltage, making any phones attached to it ring.

The plans are technically sound and the device WILL work if properly constructed, but the authors don't tell you what it's useful for. Most people, reading the Magenta Box file, will think, "Wow, I can prank someone with that." and then forget about the Magenta Box forever. But if you want to hack into a system and never be traced, not even to a payphone, the only way to do it is to Beige Box a direct connection to one of its dialup lines. The phone company would then have no record of a call. You would need to trigger the modem's answer circuit to connect this way though, and for that you would get the best results with a Magenta Box (ringback numbers can have unwanted tones, recordings, connections to a logging system, etc). So not only do I consider this box plausible, it's woefully underrated!

If there's one thing that should be mentioned about this box, it's that it won't physically last very long. Relays can be made to vibrate by wiring them to open their own coil line, but after a few hours of this the contact lifespan will be reached, so use it judiciously!

This box claims that line noise is the result of poorly regulated DC voltage on the line. The problem with that, of course, is that any effort you make to regulate the phone company's DC voltage is going to severely distort the audio.

But that's not the worst of it. The file claims you can eliminate the noise by connecting a 9 volt battery. All this will do, of course, is make the battery get very hot as the phone line, whose DC voltage is higher than 9 volts, tries to charge the battery. It may even catch fire or explode! And you won't notice any sound quality improvement.

But it gets even lamer still! The file then goes on to suggest that you can just raise the voltage to the same voltage as the line, and boom, you have an instant lock-in, where the person on the other end cannot hang up, just like the FBI! Even under crossbar or step by step, this is bullshit. And besides, have you ever hung up on someone who called you, and then picked up and found they were still there? That's how the system works anyway, so of course the authors of the textfile claim their box works!

The Violet Box apparently works in Australia. The file is a bit vague, but what I can decipher from it is this: In Australia, when your three minutes or whatever on a payphone are up, the phone itself cuts you off, unless you first put in more money.

The Violet Box is a 470 ohm resistor across the payphone's line - I guess payphones in Australia don't have much physical security for their lines. Anyway the resistor holds open the connection after the phone cuts off. After a few seconds, the phone comes back to life and you can talk for a few more minutes.

The [Acrylic] [Beige] [Bud] [Aquamarine] [Razz] [Beagan] [Lego] [Peell] Box are all the same thing: a home-made lineman's handset, usually a one-piece "flip fone" unit, with the modular plug removed and replaced with a pair of alligator clips. The idea is that you attach the alligator clips to any exposed outdoor or indoor phone connection terminals you can find, to make calls that will be billed to whoever owns the line, and so on.

The most amazing thing about the Beige Box is the number of times this device has been reworked in text files, written by individuals without the technical background to understand anything more complicated. Very seldom is anything original ever added to the basic idea, but more often than not, text files about the Beige Box are accompanied with flashy banners, dramatic pretext, and self-important postscripts.

The Ditto Box is a Beige box with a mute switch, intended for eavesdropping on long calls. The author claims that the switch will prevent line noise caused by the box but fails to explain how to get rid of the inevitable noise that is created when you first clip onto the line... muted or not.

The Aerobox is a Beige box used on a payphone line. It assumes that you have physical access to the payphone's line itself, which is exceedingly rare due to armor, concealment, and shielding.

The Beagan Box is a Beige box featuring a 1000' spool of wire. Just clip one end of the spool onto the line, tie the wire around a drain pipe for strain relief, and reel your victim's phone line all the way home. The downside, of course, is that if your tap is discovered, you won't know until they've followed the line all the way to your location, when it's too late to run.

Generally, the lineman's handset is one of the easiest ways to phreak, one of the few that works everywhere universally even today, and is considered quite lame because no real skill is involved. It's literally just theft of service, and not from the phone company but from their customers. The easiest targets are homes because most houses have grey terminal boxes somewhere on the exterior. The most politically correct targets are big corporations with the kind of physical security that would make Beige Boxing unacceptably risky.

If I were to Beige Box, I wouldn't hack up a perfectly good phone to do it. Instead, I would buy a short phone extension cord (5 feet or less) and cut off the plug end, replacing it with the alligator clips. Then I would plug a regular phone into that, which could later be used in the normal way. Weigh the cost of a $2.95 phone cord extension against the cost of a $35 phone. This is the idea behind the [Modu Box], aka the [Dayglo Box].

On the other hand, if for whatever reason I -were- compelled to slice & dice a phone for such use, I'd go the whole nine yards and install: a capacitive contact de-bouncer to minimize contact click; a mute switch (not button); a hook switch (again, not button) and a ringer OFF switch (not just hi/lo). Better yet, a ring light only. Beige Boxing does have to be done with some stealth and all these features are mentioned individually as "the best mod yet" but really only contribute to a better device.

A special note about the "Acrylic Box": that textfile describes the construction of a Beige Box but also claims to get you 3-Way Calling, Call Forwarding, etc. Well, it will - if your victim happens to subscribe to these services. So will your victim's own phone. This is just typical of the egregious lameness that went on in textfile writing back in the 1980s.

The fabled Infinity Transmitter used the same principle as the Black Box - that the Phone Company connected the audio from your phone to the called party's phone even before ringing began. The caller would send a tone down the line, the Infinity Transmitter would "hear" the tone and pick up the line before the phone could ring. It would turn on the handset microphone, and foom, instant room bug. You could listen to whatever was going on in the room for as long as you wanted, from as far away as you wanted, hence the name "Infinity Transmitter."

The Infinity Transmitter's coverage in text files smacks of Urban Legend, although a name - Manny Mittleman - is sometimes mentioned, giving it credibility. It was certainly possible to build such a device, as it took advantage of a well known property of the phone systems of its time. However, to construct something that did what it did and to miniaturize it so that it could fit inside a standard phone with the technology of the 1960s and early 1970s would have been a highly advanced project, and that is probably why all the text files you read which mention it never actually have any plans.

If you are determined to see a circuit diagram for an Infinity Transmitter, "The Big Brother Game" by Scott French has a couple of circuits - you should be able to get this from Loompanics, Paladin Press, etc.

Since the Infinity Transmitter depends on older phone systems where the audio is connected before ringing, it is pretty much completely obsolete today.

The Lunch Box is a small AM Broadcast-band transmitter. It can be used in any way you want. It's really only a loosely related concept to this series, since bugging predates phreaking by a long time. Numerous versions of the Lunch Box exist; the ones in text files generally assume that the "box" is to be wired into a phone and use its own microphone as the audio source.

A decade ago I proposed the "Fish Box" which was an FM version used in conjunction with a tone decoder and placed on payphones in areas where business people would be likely to use calling cards, extenders, and so on.

The usefulness of the Lunch Box to a phone phreak, aside from as a Fish Box, is limited, however private investigators, stalkers, paparazzi, and other spook types should find all kinds of neato ways to use it.

Installing a Lunch Box would require committing B&E or posing as a telco technician, coming to "inspect the phone wiring."

The NIN (Nine Inch Nails) box is a reverse Lunch Box, intended to sieze control of a school P.A. system. It involves connecting a radio receiver to the P.A. and using a Lunch Box or other transmitter to make "unscheduled" announcements or play music, like (for example) Nine Inch Nails. The NiN Box text (part of the Beneath the Remains series) fails to explain how you are to key the microphone (kind of a biggy to miss) and is technically vague, to be kind.

This isn't really a box at all, but simple instructions on how to connect your spare pair (the yellow and black wires, if you have only one phone line) to a pair that is in service somewhere else, or to bridge it to a line across town, etc. In theory you could string your spare pair down several miles of cable if you were meticulous and careful enough, but the further you do this, the greater your risk of detection. And when your illegal reroute is discovered, it comes right back to your house, where the police and a very smug telco security chief will want to have a word with you.

Although I really don't think the kids who wrote the text file ever tried it (I mean come on, teenage kids up a phone pole looks mighty suspicious) the idea of temporarily siezing someone else's pair is not without merit, and is certainly more elegant and technical than the crude Beige Box.

These "boxes" are very straightforward - their purpose is simply to provide a generic audio output from a phone line, to connect to a tape recorder, sound card, what have you. Radio Shack sells these for under 20 bucks.

The Rock Box is bidirectional. You can output music from your stereo to the line, so that you can "clear r0dent bridges." Uh-huh. Unlike most tan box types the Rock Box has a parts count numbering greater than 2, but the author knows little of electronics - he describes resistors by their colour codes (and incorrectly) rather than their value, and calls capacitors "condensators."

The Sperm Box is the same thing only it's attached like a beige box, to the terminal box on the side of your mark's house.

Of these, only the Slug Box is anything more than a direct connection to the microphone input of your sound card or tape recorder. Without a Part 68 Interface (which can be constructed from a few cheap parts) the line voltages will probably fry your recording equipment.

This device supposedly generates line noise. In fact it will decrease the sound quality on the line, and might make modems fall back to lower speeds, etc., but it does NOT generate noise.

This device is a potentiometer which reduces the off-hook line voltage to the bare minimum needed to run your phone. If someone else picks up an extension, neither it nor your phone will work. The purpose, of course, is to defend against eavesdropping by nosy family members.

I don't see anything wrong with the device itself but the file author says it will cause massive line noise due to the insufficient line voltage - in experiments, I found it only intermittently worked and when it did, the phone just cut right out.

Note that this device requires some adjustment depending on the normal line voltage in your area and on the current requirements of your phone. It's definitely not a plug & play device.

This is a British device, and I really have no idea if it works. It basically lights one light (green) if your line has a DC voltage of one polarity, and another (red) if the polarity is reversed. Apparently in the British phone system, when they begin charging for a call, they reverse the line bias polarity, allowing the box to indicate a free or charge call.

This device simply attaches a speaker to your line so that others in the room with you can listen in on the conversation. It doesn't have the ability to let those other people join in on the conversation, so it's sort of half of a speakerphone.

The plans outlined in the Demerit Box text file have no means of audio amplification, so there is a limit to how loud it can get, and that's not very loud. Since you're attaching an 8 ohm speaker to an earpiece "speaker" that might have an impedance of 3,000 ohms or more, you risk burning out the audio circuit of your phone!

A cheap speakerphone would serve you better...

This is another incredibly lame idea. All it is is a Radio Shack visual line tester with alligator clips attached, as an aid to Beige Boxing. With it you can tell which lines are active in a bridging head or demarcation can.

This box gets very high marks from this reviewer.

It is a fully-isolated interface to the line that will let you play or hear audio on the line whether it is on or off hook and makes the ring signal actuate a switch you can use to operate devices. It's unique among "phreak" boxes in that it claims to be - and apparently is - FCC Part 68 Compliant! What this means is that not only is it technically legal, but it is pretty much guaranteed not to blow up your audio devices when the phone rings.

The FCC Part 68 Interface has been documented in electronics magazines such as Radio-Electronics, and in many books and public sources. Why it isn't a staple of phreak box philes should be a mystery but it's not. Most text file authors never actually build the boxes they're describing, or write about things they did to their phone lines that were completely ill-advised. Pure intellectual laziness.

When just about any of the other boxes in this file are interfaced to the line through the Inter Box, chances are they will start to work when they didn't before!

Hats off to Sovereigns of Bell for putting out a refreshingly real file!

All an Olive Box does is add an external electronic ringer to your phone line. It's not really a phreak box because devices are commercially available which do the same thing.

Plausibility:	Real.
Obsolescence:	Will last as long as AC ringing voltages.
Skill:	A medium level construction project; any idiot can install one though.
Risks:	None; it's perfectly legal.

There are two different Pink Boxes. One is just a way of tying two lines together to give cheap three-way calling (see "Brown Box" in this chapter). The other is a hold button - nicely done, with a Hold light and everything.

Both devices can be bought commercially for very little money.

The Purple Box is a hold button for your phone. Since you can buy a separate hold button for about the cost of the parts in the Purple Box file, and since most phones these days have hold anyway, there's really no point in a do-it-yourself hold button, but if you must try it, the purple box plans should work fine. If nothing else, it's worthwhile as a beginner project for someone wanting to later build more complicated boxes.

The "Yellow Box" is just another example of the lame attempts at humor that went around the underground BBS and AE circuit in the 1980s. All the text file tells you how to do is install a wall jack, and it doesn't even do that very well.

Since its invention in the early 1960's, more has been written, and more programs have been released, on the Blue Box than any other box.

And no wonder; the Blue Box got spectacular press when it came to light in the early 1970's. There are still a LOT of new text files and tone generators being written on the Blue Box, even though it is almost completely obsolete in North America and rapidly falling into obsolescence everywhere else. In its heyday, Blue Boxing was like playing a guitar: easy to learn, difficult to master. The masters of Blue Boxing had control of the toll network that the phone company's brightest engineers and security personnel could not understand. The Joe-Average boxer (likely a college kid impressing friends and chicks or a mafioso who bought a box to avoid showing up on phone records) could make all the free calls he wanted, with no downside.

The Blue Box, of course, is that box which siezes control of a toll trunk, giving the user the same abilities as a long-distance operator. There are now two problems with the Blue Box. First, the system's technology has advanced so that most toll trunks no longer use the inband signaling (meaning: signaling is no longer done with audible tones) that Blue Boxes rely on. There are still a precious few left in North America but they will be gone soon. Second, every telco security person knows about Blue Boxes very well, and as a result, most local exchanges have tone detectors that will either cut off the call or sound an alarm or write an entry to a fraud log if you attempt to box.

If you can box from an exchange that has no such detectors, and if you can find an inband toll trunk that you can get onto for free (1-800 number, etc), and if you don't do it from a line where fraudulent calls can be traced back to you, THEN you can still blue box and do it safely. Otherwise, you'll find that its day is long gone.

The Green Box generates three tones, which are suspiciously the same as three particular Blue Box Tones. The function of these tones were to command a payphone to return the caller's money, collect the money from a holding chamber into the main coin box, or to have the switch call the phone back. The idea was that an operator would have some powers when dealing with payphone callers.

These are described by text files as part of ACTS but really they are just selected MF bluebox tones. Every blue box is also a green box.

Although the files written about the green box are credible, the whole ACTS system is on its way out and the green box tones themselves were scrapped with inband signaling anyway (operators today DO NOT have blue boxes at their fingertips). So green box tones no longer work.

This was a great idea that never was developed to its full potential. It was a microprocessor-based Blue/White box with a host of other tones. It was originally invented by Jolly Roger (the cool one in Germany, not the notorious plagiar in Alberta) and then fleshed out considerably by Kingpin of The L0pht. The device has been constructed at least to the prototype stage, and Kingpin has photos on his l0pht.com website.

Basically, despite claims to the contrary, it's a souped-up Euro Blue Box. It actually does a great deal more than that, as its sequencing capability allows for the simplification of extremely complicated functions. Its German origin suggests where it would be most useful - in Europe and elsewhere in the world where inband toll signalling is (or at least was, in 1993) still used widely.

The Jolly Box project was officially abandoned in 1996 by Kingpin, but he has graciously left all the original Jolly Roger work online for the benefit of anyone who wants to pick up the torch.

The Pearl Box just generates SF (Single Frequency) tones. It features the ability to "dial up" a tone with a series of knobs, a scheme that does offer some precision once the settings for a particular frequency are known.

The usefulness of a Pearl box is very limited, at least to a phreak. It can generate 2600 and 1850 cps, as well as other SF trunk control tones (2280 comes to mind). But since Blue Boxing is dead anyway, and since a Blue Box already has the SF tones you need, a working phreak really wouldn't need a box like this.

The Smurf Box is VAS's twist on the Pearl Box. VAS correctly understands that an IBM-compatible PC can generate SF tones through its speaker, but they incorrectly assume that (a) you can connect it to a phone line directly without frying anything, (b) that the PC will generate SF tones to 32767 Hz, (c) that any phone system anywhere even uses SF tones outside the 300-3000 Hz voice band on inband signaling systems, (d) that the phone system will properly interpret your PC's square wave output when most phone tones use sine waves, and (e) that the human ear can only hear tones to 5010 Hz. All of these things are wrong. Anyway, a novice programmer can write a Pearl/Smurf Box program in GWBasic or Turbo Pascal in about 30 seconds, and you didn't need VAS to tell you that.

This is an extension of the "Hallmark Card Red Box" idea.

Basically, it proposes that you can record whatever phreak tones you need from your computer onto a digital voice notepad and then play them back later.

Ignoring for the moment that these devices usually have terrible sound quality, the most obvious problem is that almost all of them have only a few slots, or have enough slots for a complex toneset but they are accessed via up/down keys rather than a keypad. For this idea to be truly practical, you'd need at least 12 hotkeys, enough to make your notepad into a portable touch-tone dialer or blue box (0-9 plus KP/ST). With most of the notepads on the market, its true usefulness is limited to just another flavor of Red Box.

As much as the Blue Box was talked about in the 1970s and 1980s, the Red Box is the topic of discussion in the 1990s. The Red Box makes the same tones that ACTS payphones use to signal the phone company that coins have been deposited.

If you saw the movie Hackers you saw a crude approximation of how red box tones could once have been gathered straight from a payphone. This really doesn't work; you'll find the tones are muted if you try it. The best way is to make them yourself with one of zillions of computer box tone generator programs out there.

In order for red box tones to work, the payphone you are calling from has to be an ACTS payphone - it has to use Red Box tones itself. The audio quality of the tones has to be good, not because of any anti-fraud devices the telco has set up but simply because the coin tone detectors have a narrow tolerance to avoid false detection of speech and background noise as coin tones.

If an operator comes on and accuses you of boxing, it's because she was already listening. The phone mutes the mic while playing its red box tones, she knows this and knows that there shouldn't be any street noise, bumping of a tape recorder into the handset, breathing, and other sounds while the tones play. She also knows that the tones should be loud, clear and undistorted. The system doesn't make those judgments; a human does and she does so only when the boxer's other messing around with the phone has triggered an exception alarm. Or if you were calling long distance and your three minutes are up...

The red box does still work and is still widely used; those who say it doesn't either don't have access to ACTS phones or played really bad tones. It won't work at all on any phone where the party you're calling complains about really bad speech quality - those phones are likely to be marked "modified to prevent fraud" and the distortion from the mouthpiece is the means used to prevent red boxing on those phones.

There are many, many text files on red box tones; the best method involves the use of a tape recorder and an acoustically-sealed (like an acoustic coupler modem) speaker for best sound quality and elimination of suspicious noise. The worst methods involve "ingenious" means - whistles, recordable hallmark cards, modified pocket dialers, yada yada. None of those things really work well and all involve the phreak spending extra money on junk, when the whole idea behind phreaking is to not spend money.

Most of those who have written about the Red Box and different ways of generating the ACTS tones have stuck to the name "Red Box" faithfully, but the one exception that I have encountered is Napalmoliv's variation, called the Disc Box. The Disc Box is simply the tones of a Red Box recorded to a recordable audio CD and played back through a Discman CD player. As Napalmoliv claims, this will undoubtedly give the best quality red box tones possible as it's high-fidelity digital audio, but once those tones leave the Discman and travel through the air and into the phone's mouthpiece, all the problems that complicate redboxing are still there. Background noise, suspicious operators, electronic countermeasures, physical bumps, and the like will still foil red boxers no matter how crystal clear the tone source is. But at least it does remove one bottleneck, where so many other pea-brained red box schemes add them.

The White Box and Silver Box are almost the same thing - both boxes produce the DTMF tones that every pushbutton phone uses. The difference is that the White Box produces the 12 tones we are all familiar with, and the Silver Box produces an additional "column" of tones, normally placed to the right of the others, marked A, B, C, and D.

The usefulness of both these boxes is quite limited.

For starters, you can buy a proper white box at Radio Shack. It's just a portable tone dialer. Amazing, then, that people have been arrested just for possessing this commonly available, perfectly legal device. Hell, I have even seen wristwatches with white boxes built in. A white box is nothing more than a tone dialer.

Second, the extra tones on the silver box are only useful on the Autovon military network - they are used for prioritizing calls.

With that said, I find it inconceivable that no phone system anywhere out there aside from the military one has fourth-column tones in use somewhere - for internal testing, and so on. A, B, C, and D will break dial tone on most digital switches. It's just that no one has published any inside information on this yet.

If a way to take advantage of silver box tones ever surfaces, then building a hardware silver box may be worthwhile. Until then, the tones themselves are a technical curiosity best left to computer tone generators.

The Silver Box is sometimes also called a Gray Box.

The [Conference] [Party] [Switch] [Hoz] [Brown] [Fuchsia] Box (hereinafter just called the Brown Box) joins together two lines to effectively give a 3-way conversation. If you already have two phone lines (for a BBS, fax, whatever) you can save the 50 cents per use charge on three-way calling by either building this box OR buy a 2-Line phone at Office Depot or Radio Shack that has a 3-way feature. Last weekend I bought such a phone at a garage sale for $3, no shit! Since you're not really stealing the three-way custom calling service, Brown Boxing is not fraud. That's why you can buy 3-way 2-line phones on the open market.

Of these boxes, the plans and description for the Conference Box is the only one worth paying any attention to. Its ASCII diagram is easy to follow and it isolates the two lines with a 1:1 transformer, as they should be. It's also the only text file which mentions that if you have 3-way calling on both lines, you can effectively get a 5-way conversation going without anyone else in the conference having 3-way calling.

Note: Some text files have described a Brown Box as simply a homemade lineman's handset, or a Bud Box (see above).

There are two types of cheese box out there, and one seems to be getting much more coverage than the other, which is unfortunate because the first kind (more commonly seen) is bullshit. The textfile explains that the box is so named for the "kind of the box the first one was found in" but then goes on to describe something that isn't a box at all!

The gist of the first cheese box type is that it effectively turns your phone into a payphone, untraceable and unreachable by law enforcement. This is accomplished by forwarding calls to an operator.

The problem here is that no matter who or what you forward calls to, your own ANI and Caller ID data still get passed. Traces still come back to you. And incoming calls go to the operator. It seems to me that it would make more sense to find a way to forward calls dialed to a payphone to your home number, if payphones had call forwarding.

The second type of cheese box is a lot more believable. It's an electronic device which connects two lines, much like a Gold Box, and makes them an anonymous loop. Two people could call either line of this loop and not know the other's real phone number, which would have some privacy advantages. If installed between two payphones, even a reverse directory lookup of the loop numbers would reveal nothing. It is likely because payphones were used for this that the idea got perverted into the first type of box - after all, what use would it be to turn your line into a payphone? Payphones in groups of two or more are common in public places, so there was an abundant supply - especially in big cities where bookies and organized crime families operate.

The Gold Box is a great idea that unfortunately is lost in the terrible quality of text files that have been written about it.

The Gold Box joins together two phone lines. You phone one, and immediately are connected to the other one's dial tone. This, of course, has a few problems of its own. For starters, if your victim expects calls to come in, all his normal callers will get his other line's dial tone. They will then get a hold of him some other way and let him know of the problem. Second, he's sure to hear at least an abortive mini-ring before the Gold Box picks up. Some phones with electronic ringers will give a full-length ring even if it receives only a fractional pulse of ring voltage. That would be suspicious to say the least. Third, the Box's original design doesn't really have a way to terminate the call; your victim would be left with a phone line that does nothing but reorder shortly after your first call. Some of the newer designs (after 1985 or so) will respond to the drop in line voltage that occurs after the person on the other end hangs up, and can terminate & reset that way.

The Slush Box is an idea by Dispater (of Phrack fame). It joins two business lines in a multi-line business phone system. Call line 1, enter a password, get line 2.

The solution, of course, is intelligent control of the Gold/Slush box by the phreak, and that is what Dispater was getting at (although I have never seen anything on the slush box beyond his proposal).

Here's how I would design and implement something like this (although I am getting at the point of giving this box a low plausibility rating): First, I would select at least one line that is not normally answered by a human. A fax line, modem line, what have you. That would be the "hot" line which is called OUT from. Call the "Hot" line and sound a tone. The box I would use would be designed to listen for this tone with a PLL tone detector or something and when it hears it, would "activate" the box. When the box is not active, both the "hot" and "cool" lines would function normally. When the box IS active, a call to the "cool" line causes the box to immediately "pick up" the phone and yield the "hot" line's dialtone. This would be best implemented against a business, a BBS or ISP, a person with a fax or modem line, etc. The point is that the "hot" line has to be one where it is acceptable to the victim to receive calls that don't connect on a fairly regular basis, i.e. as often as you use the box.

The Gold Box plans most people have read have none of these features and would therefore present a significant risk of detection - in which case a quick *69 would compromise you.

Note that a properly designed Gold/Slush box would not allow the Telco to deliver your Caller ID data to the "cool" line, as pickup would normally occur instantly, before the signal could be transmitted. Note also that the Caller ID data for the "Hot" line would be transmitted to the final dialing destination. A devastating reality for blackmail/framing purposes.

In 1988, someone named "Street Fighter" wrote a text file with a totally different design, that does the same thing as a Gold Box, and called it a "Magenta Box." And in 1991, some plans emerged for a "Divertor Box" which specifically explain and handle the problem of call termination. I have not verified either devices' functionality.

The "Blast Box" and "Loud Box" are mouthpiece amplifiers. The Blast Box is intended to make the called party's receiver so loud that it's more like a loudspeaker. I was called by a few telemarketers using a device like this back in the early 1980's, so I know it existed once. Also, my local phone company once experimented with extremely loud "You left your phone off the hook, please hang up now" recordings.

The Loud Box is the same thing, only less obnoxious - its function is simply to make your voice more audible to the other party on analog conference calls, long distance calls, and other times when your signal might otherwise come through poorly.

These devices were invented back in the old days when a phone call created a direct analog connection between the caller and callee, giving almost unlimited dynamic range and thus happily passing extremely loud signals when desired.

With today's digital switches, the voice is digitized, which limits not only the frequencies but the volume levels that can be passed through the phone system. Below a certain level, the switch will pass no signal at all, and above, it will "clip". "Normal" speech levels fall between the extremes. On the upside, digital switching also eliminates a lot of the problems that would have made a legitimate mic amplifier desirable - today, long distance and conference calls are loud and clear.

If you short a phone line, anyone who calls it will get a busy signal. This is a basic truth and is the only thing the Busy Box text file has to offer you. It's yet another example of an adolescent effort to get recognition in the virtual underworld by writing a text file about something.

The Chartreuse Box is another exercise in lameness. It purports to give free electric power from the phone line, but the phone line's DC power can only supply a small current, above which you'll trip circuit breakers. Never mind that as soon as the phone rings, whatever you happen to be powering will be fried.

This is not a phreak box. It claims to be able to change traffic lights by emulating those flashing strobe lights you sometimes see on fire engines. A lot of cities aren't using that system anymore, and I don't think that the timing needed is as critical as the textfile claims.

There IS such a thing as a Chrome Box, however. I once rode in a taxicab that used to be a police car, and the cabbie showed off a button under the dash that flashed the headlights. INSTANTLY the lights at the intersection we were at changed. If the sensor that changes the lights can be tripped by flashing headlights, then there's probably no need to build an elaborate box.

The Clear Box takes advantage of pay phones where you are supposed to dial first and pay when your party answers. The phone mutes the mouthpiece until you put in the quarter (or whatever the call costs). However, the earpiece is still active, and while you are fishing in your pocket for that quarter, you can hear your called party going "Hello? Hello?".

The Clear Box is basically an amplifier and an induction coil that lets you speak into a microphone, amplifies your voice, and feeds it into the coil, which then transfers the voice signal directly into the phone line by electromagnetic induction, bypassing the muted microphone.

The concept is sound, but if you can even find the phone line itself, it is very well shielded with metal piping that will beautifully (and inconveniently) absorb any magnetic induction signal you try to impart through it. And if you had easy enough access to the line to successfully do this, you would likely do better just to bud box your calls in the first place.

A version of this file suggests putting the induction coil near the earpiece, and your voice would then enter the phone line that way, presumably by way of crosstalk. The problem with this is that if you used a strong enough induction signal to be heard, you would also oscillate the earpiece's cone, resulting in loud feedback and the deafening sound of your own voice. I don't think so.

I strongly suspect that clear boxes really did exist, but the text files most of us see about them are based on conjecture and second hand reports. Perhaps the original clear boxers found an electromagnetic weak spot in the phone or some point on the line where they could inject an electromagnetic signal. Perhaps the mouthpiece cutoff relay was near the outside of the phone, in which case a strong magnet would have defeated it.

Postpay phones have one more problem that the clear box files never mentioned. Not all phone calls require you to speak. On a postpay phone you can call up the local sports scores line or whatever and just listen - the phone might even let you use its keypad! If you live near a postpay phone, try it some time. Try local, long distance, even 900 numbers. Try everything till you find a weakness, that's what real phone hackers do!

This isn't a phreak box but it once may have worked. Everything about this idea reeks of urban legend, so I'm giving it a low plausibility rating.

What it is, is you call an 800 number with an extender. From that, you get dialtone and call the same 800 number again. Repeat a few dozen times until the toll network is filled up with your calls and crashes.

I really don't think this could ever have worked simply because the toll free system as a whole will not run out of lines before the 800 number you are using runs out of extenders. The 800 number may even have only one!

The "DNA Box" is not a box. A few years ago, a group called DNA released some cell hacking files and called the series "The DNA Box". Cellphone Hacking is a pretty big subject in itself, and with new technologies emerging, it's still a developing set of methods, and beyond the scope of this series.

The Grab Box is frequently found among phreak box files but it's not a box at all. All it is is a long wire antenna for an AM radio. Everyone who owned a shortwave receiver back in radio's golden age knew that for long distance reception, longer is better when it comes to wire antennas. And now, someone has come along and called the wire antenna a box.

The Neon Box text file is just instructions for how to connect an audio source, for example a sound card, directly to the phone line. You risk frying your audio source if you do it, because most tape recorders/sound cards are not designed to cope with the 90 VAC ringing voltage on the line.

Get an FCC Part 68 interface if you're serious about sending direct audio into the line from an arbitrary source. Or hack up an old phone and use the mic line as your audio input.

This box has only ever been mentioned in Consumertronics' "Beyond Color Boxes", which is suprising since that book was compiled from the same public domain sources as this file's reference materials. It's possible that the Orange Box chapter was added by the publisher (along with who knows what else?) in order to be able to say that the book wasn't 100 percent plagiarized from TAP and text files. Since I don't have the book, and can't read John Williams' mind, I won't say.

The Orange box is alleged to provide a Caller ID service, without subscribing to Caller ID, without the phone company even needing to offer it. Now this is very fishy indeed because the terminating switch generates the Bell 202 data stream that Caller ID is transmitted on, so if your local switch is too old to support Caller ID, then this box - as described - is just plain impossible.

But there are some clues given as to where the idea may have come from. First, the article mentions a "special Sony answering machine" that has an Orange Box built in. Then it mentions that many fax machines can be programmed to respond only to other fax machines that it has been programmed to respond to - without the use of Caller ID to determine which machines are "on the list" then they call.

A little digging turned up a nifty device that basically acted as a password front end for your phone line - someone calls your number, and gets a voice prompt asking them to key in their phone number. You would then see the number they keyed on a display and could choose to pick up and talk, hit a "reject" button that hangs up on them, or let them eat silence. This sounds incredibly lame on the surface but it's useful in that you could have friends and family enter fictitious numbers that act as passwords - as long as the password holders don't talk to each other, you'd be relatively sure which password holder was on the other end when they called.

Protected fax networks work much the same way - most faxes allow the originating phone number to be programmed into the header and transmitted in the initial handshake. I suspect that the "special Sony answering machine" might have simply been a password protected model, nothing more.

Caller ID data can only be transmitted when both the originating and terminating switch support it, and to the best of anyone's knowledge, can only be extracted if the receiving party already subscribes to Caller ID, or used *69 after the fact. ANI can be provided if you are a large WATS subscriber, a telco service provider, or a 911 emergency call center. ANI uses a separate line and special telco-supplied hardware, and is quite costly. It will, additionally, work where Caller ID won't, because it's an older service, and one not meant for the mass market as Caller ID is.

This isn't really a box.

Most areas have overlapping toll-free calling zones (A and C), where two areas that may be a long distance call between them have, in common, a geographical area that is not long distance to either point (B).

So, (A) must pay LD to call (C) and (C) must pay LD to call (A) but (A) and (C) can both call (B) for free, and (B) can call (A) and (C) for free. Sometimes there are one-way exceptions, check your local calling rate sheet.

Anyway, if someone in (B) forwards their calls to someone in (C) then anyone in (A) could call (B) for free and get forwarded, toll free, to the person in (C). This is the idea behind the Forwarding Phuck Box.

BBS Operators have used this trick for years to allow more people to call them toll-free without the high cost of a regional 800 number, but the textfile authors suggest having Call Forwarding turned on for an unwitting mark and then beige boxing the mark's house to set the forwarding destination. Only thing is, if you can spend the gas money to drive to (B) everytime you want to call (C) from (A), you'll probably find it cheaper just to pay Ma Bell for the call instead.

I think a Gold Box would be a better solution, especially one installed in a business where the phone is never used after hours. As long as only local (to the box) calls are made, it should last a very long time. You could do this at work, and call BBSes and ISPs downtown from the suburbs without having to pay for optional extended local service or LD! And it's only when you start charging LD calls that eyebrows would get raised in Accounting.

The "Plaid Box" is simply the reversal of the Ring and Tip lines on your tone phone. The idea here was that Touch Tone phones only worked in a certain polarity, and on rotary lines, the polarity was the reverse of that needed to run a tone phone. When you ordered tone service, all the telco did was reverse the polarity of the line. By reversing the wires, you reverse the polarity yourself.

Since there are no rotary lines anywhere near where I live, and since tone dialing no longer costs extra, I have no way of testing this "box." Overall, it's obsolete.

The Scarlet Box was written by someone who never tried it. All it does is short out the victim's phone line, when its purpose is supposed to be to create line noise. If you use a direct piece of wire the phone company will be around shortly to fix the problem as a dead short is very undesirable to them. If you use a resistor the line will just stay open all the time. Whoop-de-doo.

The Snow Box is not a phreak box, it's a TV transmitter. It belongs in the Pirate Radio file section of underground boards, and is only mentioned here because (a) it's called a Box, and (b) it appears so often among phreak boxes.

Unless you are planning on doing your own version of the Razor and Blade show, and have been turned down by your cable community access channel, the Snow Box is of very little use to you as a phreak.

The Power Box is nothing more than stealing electric power by bypassing the meter. The power company WILL notice this, if you don't kill yourself in the attempt. Remember, the voltage through the meter is 220 volts, not 110. It will kill you twice as dead.

The Tron Box is a series of capacitors which supposedly slow the meter using the reactance of the box's circuit. The claim is that the more power you use, the slower the meter will run. If constructed and plugged in, in fact a Tron Box will explode. No shit - the capacitors are rated at 50 volts, your line is 120. And they are electrolytic, meaning polarized, meaning unsuitable for use in an A.C. circuit. Ever see a big filter cap go foom? I have. It's ugly, smelly, messy, unpleasant and LOUD.

Since I wrote the first version of this report, I have received mail from two different sources claiming that something like the Tron Box does exist, and that there's a video or news expose which explicitly shows how it's used, but I have yet to see it. If anyone has this video I'd appreciate a copy for review in the next revision. With that said, however, the one in the text file will not work.

This is along the same general lines as the Spike Box, but with some adaptation might actually do something. Unlike the Spike Box, this is connected directly to your victim's phone line. The victim picks up the phone and gets electrocuted. The plans given in text files tell you to connect a battery but the problem is that phone lines actually operate on a higher voltage than the battery they prescribe. Now, if you changed this to a power source that kicked out a few dozen kilovolts, you'd have something useful.

It amazes me that even today, from time to time, someone still posts a serious question as to whether the Blotto Box works. This started out as a parody years ago, and has been worked into serious textfiles by several writers who mostly just want to "see their name in lights".

The Blotto Box purports to cause such grievous damage to the phone company that an entire area code would be taken out. This is done by sending high voltage down the line.

There are lots of things wrong with this, not the least of which is that the outside plant (i.e. all that copper overhead) is riddled with circuit breakers, fuses, gas discharge devices, etcetera. And this makes sense, because if a 220 volt Honda generator could bring an area code to its knees as the Blotto Boxers claim, then the first lightning strike would destroy the whole system.

Second, the file suggests using a Honda portable generator. Depending on the model you'll either get 110 volts or 220, which you can get from household outlets anyway. Why waste the money to rent a generator?

And it amazes me that the authors never thought of instead hooking up a Tesla coil, which typically would be over 100 kilovolts - and due to its high frequency, might actually jump a blown breaker and cause damage a little further down the line than your local loop! HellO!!! The kicker is, someone else did think of this. They called it the "Spike Box". The claim there is that you can electrocute a dialled victim, burn their house down by phone, etc. Suuuuuure.

If you want to get the phone company's attention, a parcel full of manure sent to their security department would be more effective than blowing out one subscriber loop.

Then there's the Bottle-Nosed Grey Dolphin Box, which is supposed to be more of a revenge tool against a specific line than a way to k-phuck the phone system. It claims you can generate 500 volts by attaching eight capacitors (it doesn't give the values of those capacitors) in series to a 9 volt battery. It's also claimed that this box doubles as a Taser. Gimmie a break! c

Let me start by saying that the Mauve Box is pure unfiltered bullshit. It claims to be able to tap distant phone lines by using a "magnetic field" which you generate by running your phone line through a bucket of mixed soil and iron filings. No way is given as to how to direct it to tap a particular line.

Anyone who's taken Grade 7 science knows the Mauve Box is a joke file, and I think a lot of people who would have flunked elementary school would also hold a pretty big suspicion about it. It's that obvious.

The "Paisley Box" is just a parody file. Its file description on BBSes implied that you could sieze a TSPS operator's console, but what you actually get is a file which will get you drunk and electrocuted (and it says so).

This parody is mentioned only because even to this day, the Paisley Box is still described in file lists everywhere as a serious phreak box.

This is another joke file. It's supposed to take out your enemy's phone line and everything around it by simply plugging 120 Volts AC into it. In fact, the worst that can happen is you'll set off a circuit breaker.

The text file for this box starts off seeming pretty normal, until you get to the part where it tells you what it does. That's where the file takes a sharp left turn into the Horseshit Zone.

It claims to create a "capacitive disturbance" in the victim's phone line. By remote, from your line. Turn up the "disturbance" enough and you can melt the victim's phone or make his body explode.

Probably the most glaring error with this is that even if this were possible, the same conditions would have to exist on your line too, meaning you'd be lying there dead and/or gibbed while your intended victim is still going "Hello? Hello?".

But even that isn't going to happen. The Urine Box is just another adolescent grab at notoriety and nothing else.

These "boxes" are pure joke files and don't really claim to do anything. It's kind of a waste of bytes to write anything at all about files like that but if by doing so I can prevent them from contaminating legitimate H/P archives, then it's worth it.

Click here to download all the box-related textfiles mentioned in this document.

Newly added boxes this version (98/07/19):

Jolly Box
Orange Box