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        )(    950's:  The Real Story                                 )(
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      Ever heard (actually, seen) people on various hacking boards around
the country telling you how you are going to get caught for sure if you
use the in state-WATS (950) telephone numbers to make your phreaks off of?
This file is to tell you what the story is with 950's and how to SAFELY use
them.

      The 950 prefix was created by the old Bell System for all the SSC's
(Specialized Common Carrier), or Extenders as they are called, to place
their services upon.  This was done for the long distance company's benefit
so they could have the same dial up in all cities across the USA.  For some
reason, the Long Distance companies rejected the 950 prefix in favor of
local lines and 1-800 numbers.

      Disadvantages to 950's are that they are run on a special ESS of
their own that can trace your call before you can say 'Shit!'.  But tracing
only occurs on special occasions.  The companies on 950's will only trace
when the computer controlling the calls sees that there is an unusually
high number of calls to the extender on that particular day.  The computer
then will auto-trace every 100th call or so.  Which means that, if used in
moderation, 950's are fantastic!

      Advantages:  By having the same dial up in all cities, you can go on
vacation and just hack codes to use for while you are there on your
favorite 950 extender.  Being a free call (in most cases, some phones not)
from a pay phone, this is very advantageous.  Also, and anyone who has used
a 950 knows this, the connections on 950 extenders are VERY clear usually,
making for excellent error-free data transfer on AE lines, etc.

      With the breakup of the Bell System in January of 1984, the 950
prefix was supposed to be dragged down with it and the companies were sup-
posed to have switched over to either local or 1-800 numbers, but as is
very typical of the phone company, they never got around to it.

      Here is the list of the 950's that are currently in use in the U.S.:

                    950-1000..........Southern Pacific Communications
                    950-1022..........MCI Exec-U-Net
                    950-1033..........U.S. Telephone
                    950-1044..........AllNet
                    950-1066..........Lexitel
                    950-1088..........SBS Skyline

      Personally, I favor the use of 950-1088, because it has many users
and the codes (which, by the way are 6 digits, but they are switching over
to 8 digits) are easy to hack out from a pay phone.  You may want to try
the other services so you can have a few codes from each available for use.

The Wanderjahr