I guess it's been about a decade (crazy!) but there were quite a few legit and really knowledgeable phreaks doing interesting things on the binary revolution forums (looks like binrev.com's still around!). Back when I would lurk, there were a lot of novel things going on, e.g. with VOIP. spoofing caller ID and calling yourself to extract the telco's caller ID data was one I remember. War-dialing and collecting interesting numbers was also big.

Obviously there is a nostalgia for the blue-boxing days, which most of us have only ever read about. And of course that was never really about free calls (you can place a free call with a $2 headset and pair of bed-of-nails clips on any block in america), and I think the classic esquire piece communicates that pretty well.