Talk:Blue box

BSTJ censoring on college campuses?

I would like to see some support for the claim that AT&T snipped pages out of the BSTJ issues in college libraries. When I first heard about blueboxing as a Cornell undergraduate in the mid 1970s, I went to the engineering library in Carpenter Hall and found the 1960 BSTJ article listing the MF tones completely intact. (Naturally I made a copy, but I wasn't stupid enough to actually do anything with the information. Or maybe I was just too busy.) So if they did go after campus libraries, they missed Cornell. Or the story is apocryphal. Karn (talk) 21:24, 8 December 2014 (UTC)

I can confirm AT&T tried to have bluebox information censored. In my library's archived copies of 73 magazine, next to the blue-box article, the librarians had stapled in a copy of a thick legal letter which was evidently sent to the subscription list of the magazine, directing that the article be cut out and destroyed. The librarians archived it in context instead. ( <3 librarians :) ) ~2025-35214-87 (talk) 21:06, 20 November 2025 (UTC)

Jobs or wozniak?

Who actually makes this box jobs or wozniak? Despite the fact that many people believe jobs is some sort of technical genius he is not he us a businessman and an art major he studied art at university. I don't think he on his own would have the ability to pull off such building such a device so I assume wozniak made the components

Can someone prove this? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.27.131.165 (talk) 18:16, 21 February 2015 (UTC)

OR is all I have to go on. Their relationship was largely the same before Apple and into the blue box days. Jobs did the talking and Woz did the work. It kind of reminded me of a manager for a professional wrestler. Trackinfo (talk) 00:00, 22 February 2015 (UTC)

I'm going to remove the line about Jobs and Wozniak as it's not sourced and not particularly relevant anyway. Feel free to put it back if someone can cite a reliable source (i.e. not Jobs or Wozniak themselves, as they are both notorious for rewriting/inventing their own history). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 188.221.176.93 (talk) 23:45, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

I don't see anything about 'Spiro T Agnew' in this.

The name was used to identify 3 different kinds of phone hacking, one of which was the blue box. I can't seem to find any refs on wiki about them. In my days at MIT, 'someone' used T's. These were specific to pay phones. If you remember those, you would pay money in coins to make calls. The money would go into a holding box and at the end of the call, a reverse voltage pulse would be sent from the CO to drop the coins into the coin box. A T was just a diode one would put in the line to block the reverse pulse. After your call, you would make another and hang up before answer. The CO would then send a 'coin return' pulse and presto, all your money came back. I don't know if that hack was ever fixed, but of course pay phones have now vanished. BTW, the common rumor was that out-of-band signaling was added to stop blue-boxing, which is as far as I know just an urban myth. The revenue loss from blue-boxing would never have justified a complete rework of the system. Rather, out-of-band was done to solve other issues like tying up a trunk line for connection negotiation. 69.131.0.72 (talk) 18:22, 15 September 2022 (UTC)

Name origin of the blue box

Why is there no reference to the origin of the name "blue box"? The "blue" prefix comes from the AT&T Blue Books, the internal manuals containing the specifications for the telephone multi-frequency (MF) tones used to control long-distance lines. These manuals were often bound with blue covers, which is how they got the name “Blue Books.” The Blue Box devices, which reproduced these tones to manipulate the telephone system, were named after these manuals, not because of the color of any device casing or other urban legens. Some sources propagate myths, such as the first Blue Box being painted blue, but these are unsubstantiated; the name strictly derives from the AT&T Blue Books. 93.199.134.105 (talk) 14:26, 16 September 2025 (UTC)