I've taken a cursory glance at phone phreaking, and I am having a hard time finding things that apply to today's US phone system. Are all the phone phreaking boxes obsolete? Every time I see anything on 2600 tone, it's followed by: "but the phone companies have updated their system to counter this..."

The same results come up after most of the phone phreaking boxes I've seen. While I haven't taken an in depth look at the subject, I'm wondering if it's all just history or something I can test today?

Even on phreaking sites, I mainly just see crude prank calls placed at random in motels and the like. Seemingly tasteless unless there's something to learn in my opinion. Any advice is appreciated! I'll continue my long reads in the meantime, searching for something to put into practice...

'eh a lot of phreaking is dead due to the digital age. Every so often you may be able to use an orange box, but it's rare to find such outdated equipment.

Myself, I have a couple lineman's buttsets laying around that'll always work as long as people use standard "from the telco" telephony

Then, with phreaking running scarce, do you think it'll pick back up now that some companies and individuals are switching to VOIP? And I read in "Steal This Computer Book 4.0" that some hackers actually tap into a business's phone system and set themselves up a mailbox.

Since many businesses don't want to deal with it, they turn a blind eye while others don't even know they're there. Is this phreaking still in use today, or has virtually all phone phreaking evolved into computer hacking?

Well the cool thing about these businesses that are getting owned are that they're actually using older tech for their voicemail systems.

as for phreaking, theres always hope, just depends on how things progress; theres a lot more to phreaking than just being mallitious, think of it as knowing the in's and out's of the telecom sytstem.