💾 Archived View for spam.works › mirrors › textfiles › phreak › step.phk captured on 2023-06-16 at 19:49:53.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
File: STEP BY STEP OFFICES Read 10 times THE SIMPLE PLEASURES OF A STEP OFFICE [2600 -- May 1984] There are still more than a few step offices in the United States today. Most of them are in rural areas, but there are still a few cities (mostly in south, southwest, and west ares of the country) that have step. These antiquated telephone systems can best be described as a bunch of relays and wires--clicking and stumbling over themselves. It's easy to find out if you're in a step office--especially if you're using a rotary dial phone. (In many step areas, that's all you can have, particulary on the east coast since they don't have what's known as common control, which allows for touch-tones(R). Some offices have been converted, however, using some sort of tone to pulse converter--every time you hit a tone, you hear it being pulsed out.) With a rotary dial phone, you can hear the actual switching. If, say, you're dialing 675-9112--you'd dial a 6 and you'd hear what's known as the selector kick in (more on that later) with a kind of a clunk. Then you'd dial a 7, and hear a second thing kick in with a mild click--that's what's known as the digit absorbing relay. Depending on the office, this relay can kick in on any or none of the numbers. What it does basically is absorb an extra digit which is only needed to make the telephone number 7 digits long. So, in this case, the second digit of the number, which is 7, is the extra digit. You would probably be able to substitute any number for the 7 and still have the call go through, since that digit is ignored. Some offices absorb two of their digits, which means that they had five digit phone nmbers before uniformity struck. To continue with our Demonstration, you'd next dial a 5, and hear another click at the end of your dialing sequence. After dialing 9, you'd hear click, pop, snap--several things kicking in, then th 1, clunk-clink, and then the last two digits which wouldn't produce any sounds at the end of them. Then it will go into a ring cycle, assuming that's a valid number in the office. Step offices usually have a very mechanical sounding ring, similar to crossbar. Ring generators, though, can make step sound like ESS. Often you hear what sounds like a busy signal or static in the background as the number rings. An easy way to tell if you're dialing into a step office is to try dialing XXX-1111 and see how long it takes to get a ring or reorder or whatever. Then try calling XXX-0000. If it takes more time to get to the same point, it's a step office bacause step is the only system that actually pulses out the numbers all over again. A Phreaker's Delight It's much safer to blue box and phreak from a step office bacause they're very basic, crude offices with no safety features (safety for them, that is). And if you're lucky enough to live in a fairly large metropolitian area that's still on step, you might dial up a number that you know is ESS from you step area and flash the switchhook. You'll get what's known as a wink. That's the equivalent of whistling 2600 hertz for about a half second to reset the trunk. You'll hear click-click That's you cue to put in various multifrequency tones (KP + number + ST). 2600 hertz is not needed at all, and since that's the tone that usually sets off alarms, this is a very safe way to blue box. (Incidentally, this occurs more through a flaw with ESS and not step.) If you really know what you're doing and you know a few things about step switching, you can, on a touch tone(R) phone, dial up a number and listen in the background for the switch level. Let's say you're dialing 941-0226. You won't hear it rotary dial those numbers, but you will hear another number or series of numbers in rotary step pulses. That's the selector we mentioned earlier. Let's say that after you dialed 941-0226, you heard a 5 being pulsed out. What does that mean? The selector is the decision-making part of the phone call. Different prefixes are stored in different levels in each central office. In this particular case, 941 happens to be stored in level 5 in whatever office you're calling from. There's no rhyme or reason to it; the selector level could be anything up to three digits in length. (If it was three digits, you'd hear each individual digit get pulsed out.) The toll center is usually level 1 and the operator is usually level 0. So what can be done with this information? If, after dialing 941-0226, you enter your own rotary five, you'll once again hear the click-click which is your cue for MF tones. While step offices have no special phone phreak trapping capabilities, they a just as dangerous as any other office as far as being traced. They have what's known as trap and trace. If a certain person (or computer) is begin harrassed, they'll put a trap plug on a particular line. If you happen to call into that number, you won't be able to hang up until the other party does. Some More Tricks In some step areas, local calls are limited to certain exchanges that have th same first digits as yours. For example, the 222 exchange can dial 235 and 263 as local calls. But in order to call the 637 exchange, you must first dial a 1 which makes the call non-local. If you dial a 6, you'll get an immediate reorder. But somewhere between you and the 637 exchange, is the 231, 233, 235, and 239 exchanges. There's no 237. So you dial 2. Clunk-clunk. You dial 3. Click. And then you dial 7. Ching-clunk. It goes to the 637 exchange! Similarly, a 281 from he 287 exchange could wind up in 471. Why? Because these numbers are all coming from the same switching center. That just happens to be the way step works (and in some cases crossbar). If you could seize the 222 trunk, you'd enter KP+25500+ST to reach 222-5500. To reach 637-5500, you'd enter KP+755000+ST. Then there's "step crashing"--if the number you're calling is 675-2888, and it's busy, you can dial 675-2887, and in between the last pulse of your rotary dial and the time it would start to ring, you can flash you switchhook extremely fast. If you time it right, you'll hear an enormous loud click at your end. Then, all of the sudden, you'll cut into your party's conversation. (This works bacause of step's realy system. One relay has determined that the line you dialed is open. Then, before a second relay sends along the ring pulse, you throw in a 1, which jumps the number you dialed up by one, and fools the system into connecting you to a busy number.) There is one drawback to this, though. You, the party you've crashed in on, and the party they were talking to are all stuck together until you all hang up at the same time. If you're in a step office where 411 is used for directory assistance, chances are that there are test codes in the format of 11XXX. 1191 might be ringback, etc. In such places, dialing 1141 will also get you directory assistance, but at no charge! In some of the newer step offices, 410X is the format for tests. There, you can dial 4101 for free directory assistance. Other test numbers are (usually): 4100 -- off-the-hook recording, 4102 -- test board, 4103 -- miscellaneous, 4104 -- ringback, 4105 -- disconnects you line for about 5 minutes, 4106 -- various tests, 4107 -- pulse test, 4108 -- test board, 4109 -- your telephone number in touch tones (R). Different Varieties of Step There's more than one kind of step office. We've been talking about the most common type, used by both GTE and Western Electric (Bell). It was invented by Automatic Electric early in the century. 214-281 is a typical Bell step office (not the reorder in the background ring) while 214-256 is a typical GTE step office (the ring sounds like it's underwater). For both of these, a suffix of 1798 will always provide a busy signal, free of charge. There is also something known as XY step, which is strange, unusual, and for the most part put together very poorly. It looks similar to a crossbar in appearance. Instead of a round switch, it's tall and rectangular-shaped. To dial a number, it moves up and across a ladder of contacts, as if it was a piece of graph paper, hence the name XY. On these systems, the last digit in th phone number is usually up for grabs. You can accept collect calls on a number with a different last digit from yours. The calls will still reach your number, but it won't show up on your bill. Also, suffixes beginning with 9 and 2 are usually interchangeable. A typical XY step office is 518-789. A suffix of 3299 will get you a standard step test. Great Britian uses the Stroger system and there is also the all-relay step, which is very rare. It was developed presumably to save switches. One such system exists in Heath Canyon, Texas with only 36 subscribers at 915-376. A neighboring town that's also all-relay can be found at 915-386. [Courtesy of BIOC Agent 003 & Sherwood Forest ][ -- (914) 359-1517] -----End of File