Wiktionary
n. The cracking or exploring of a telephone system, e.g. trying to get free calls or to discover special service numbers or other internal technical information. vb. (present participle of phreak English)
Wikipedia
Phreaking is a slang term coined to describe the activity of a culture of people who study, experiment with, or explore, telecommunication systems, such as equipment and systems connected to public telephone networks. The term phreak is a sensational spelling of the word freak with the ph- from phone, and may also refer to the use of various audio frequencies to manipulate a phone system. Phreak, phreaker, or phone phreak are names used for and by individuals who participate in phreaking.
The term first referred to groups who had reverse engineered the system of tones used to route long-distance calls. By re-creating these tones, phreaks could switch calls from the phone handset, allowing free calls to be made around the world. To ease the creation of these tones, electronic tone generators known as blue boxes became a staple of the phreaker community, including future Apple Inc. cofounders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.
The blue box era came to an end with the ever increasing use of computerized phone systems, which sent dialing information on a separate, inaccessible channel. By the 1980s, much of the system in the US and Western Europe had been converted. Phreaking has since become closely linked with computer hacking. This is sometimes called the H/P culture (with H standing for hacking and P standing for phreaking).
Usage examples of "phreaking".
This gives case histories of three major hackers whose activities ranged from phone phreaking to computer viruses.
But my little hobby has given me a certain reputation in the phreaking world.
The losses from this primitive phreaking activity are far, far greater than the monetary losses caused by computer-intruding hackers.
New forms of phreaking are spreading rapidly, following new vulnerabilities in sophisticated phone services.
The above is only a small section of a much larger library of hacking and phreaking techniques and history.
I gawk at the wiretaps, laptop, printer, code busters, phone phreaking equipment, and lots of other jury-rigged contraptions and punch-pads made from parts that must have once belonged to Pacific Bell.
I ask her whether it would be any loss to society if phone phreaking and computer hacking, as hobbies, simply dried up and blew away, so that nobody ever did it again.
Secret Service agents know more about phreaking, coding and carding than most phreaks can find out in years, and when it comes to viruses, break-ins, software bombs and trojan horses, Feds have direct access to red-hot confidential information that is only vague rumor in the underground.
Phone phreaking is a type of hacking that allows you to explore the telephone network by exploiting the phone systems and phone company employees.
Bureau trick was one of the first things I learned when I was in to the hobby of phone phreaking as a teenager.