You can still do this on POTS phones, at least to dial. Just playing the right sounds into the microphone will dial the number.
Interesting. I thought it was all digital by now. I'm gonna have to patch a synth in and try it. If I can find a touch tone telephone that is.
Just make your own tones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-tone_multi-frequency_signaling#Keypad
The distinction isn't actually digital vs. analog but in-band vs. out-of-band. For dialing, it might as well be in-band, since the end user has to have control over it. They used to also do things like authorizing long-distance calls through in-band signalling, which is why phreaking worked. Phone company equipment sent audio signals to other phone company equipment over the same line that you were talking over, so if you made the same audio signals, the target equipment would respond in the normal way. That's all out-of-band now (the equipment communicates over lines that you don't have access to), so that's why you can't phreak that way anymore. If they had kept it in-band but just switched to digital, you could still phreak; it would just need something more sophisticated than a whistle from a box of Captain Crunch.
I see. I figured that there was new infastructure by now to accomodate all of the data needs the modern world has. I know very little about POTS other than it being the original backbone of the early internet and land lines.
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