Editing Phreaking (section)

===Voice mail boxes and bridges===
Before the BBS era of the 1980s phone phreaking was more of a solitary venture as it was difficult for phreaks to connect with one another.{{Citation needed|date=January 2018}} In addition to communicating over BBSs phone phreaks discover [[voice mail]] boxes and [[Party line (telephony)|party lines]] as ways to network and keep in touch over the telephone. They usually appropriate unused boxes that are part of business or cellular phone systems. Once a vulnerable mailbox system is discovered, word would spread around the phreak community, and scores of them would take residence on the system. They use these systems as a [[dead drop|"home base"]] for communication with one another until the rightful owners discover the intrusion and wipe them off. Voice mailboxes also provide a safe phone number for phreaks to give out to one another as home phone numbers and personal cellular numbers would allow the phreak's identity (and home address) to be discovered. This is especially important given that phone phreaks are breaking the law.

Phreakers also use "bridges" to communicate live with one another. The term "bridge" originally referred to a group of telephone company test lines that were bridged together giving the effect of a party-line. Eventually, all party-lines, whether bridges or not, came to be known as bridges if primarily populated by hackers and/or phreakers.

The popularity of the Internet in the mid-1990s, along with the better awareness of voice mail by business and cell phone owners, made the practice of stealing voice mailboxes less popular. To this day bridges are still very popular with phreakers yet, with the advent of VoIP, the use of telephone company-owned bridges has decreased slightly in favor of phreaker-owned conferences.