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The Millennium Payphone by Phluck originally printed in 2600, volume 15, number 2 Subscribe to 2600, The Hacker Quarterly at http://www.2600.com Pretty much all Canadian phreaks have become fascinated with the Millennium payphones, and with good reason. These payphones have only been around several years and are a large technical advancement over the previous phones. They are extremely secure against red boxing and pretty much anything else. In eastern Canada, the advancement was greatly needed. Our previous payphones were very dated (not to mention ugly). In the west, they had newer phones and most of them have not yet been replaced with the new Millenniums. At this point, most of the phones in Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritime Provinces have been upgraded to the new Millenniums. The first thing you will notice about the Millennium phone is the display on it. This displays the time and date and some advertising usually can be found scrolling underneath that. Below the display there are buttons for volume control, language and new call. The volume control is self-explanatory. The language button toggles the language in the display between French and English. I'm sure that is another country were to use the phones this wouldn't be there; it's only there because of Canadian language laws. The new call button hangs up and starts a new call, and is pretty useless. Looking more closely at the phone you will notice there are two keyholes. There is one on the upper left side of the phone. This one opens up the top part of the phone, allowing the lineman to change settings on it, such as the display message. I have never actually seen a phone with this part open, but it would be really interesting. The other keyhole is on the front of the phone, near the bottom. This one opens up the phone for collecting money. When you pick up the receiver you hear a dial tone, but don't be fooled, it's actually a recording. There is an annoying voice that speaks over the dial tone telling you how to place your call. Once you drop your quarter in you get a real dial tone, and the mouthpiece and keypad are activated. One really interesting thing about the Millennium phone is that they don't receive incoming calls. If you try to call the phones, you get a recorded message saying "This phone cannot receive incoming calls." I have heard one interesting story about the operator calling a phreak back who had been harassing her, but I'm not sure if it's true. If it is, it would be really interesting to find out how the phone determines which calls to accept. According to the official information from Northern Telecom (the makers of the phone), there is a data jack on the phone for computers to plug into. On close inspection of the phone I couldn't find this. I assume that this is an optional feature. The program used for managing these phones is called Millennium Manager. It is built into the phone, and even diagnoses some of its own problems. It has a statistics manager and a logging system, which calls the telco notifying it when service is needed. These phones also have a really strong fraud protection with lots of fraudulent card and coin detecting devices. There is also something called the "watchdog program" which detects suspicious card use. There isn't too much information on this that I have found, but what I did find was some information on using the system at: http://www.cadroutemaster.com/watchdog.htm If you want to read more about the phone you can find info at: http://www.nortel.com. It has a list of the phone's features. I'm currently doing research on the technical side of these phones. Once I have enough info I might write another article. Until the, happy phreaking!