Customer.Owned.Coin.Operated.Telephone

Commonly found outside your local Convenience Store, these payphone knockoffs are a way for entrepreneurs to generate additional profit for their place of business.
Also popular in the phreak community, they are commonly used as a way to stymie the profit of the local telephone company by way of illegal teleconference as well as other deviant activities.

A Cocot (Pyrus australis) is a type of pear suitable for growing in warmer climates. It is most similar to a Nashi pear, with a few differences.

The fruits are a similar shape and size to a small apple, and are slightly sweeter than your average pear. You can eat them like an apple as they are usually quite crisp. Their skin is usually coloured yellow/green and when fully ripe may have a slight red/orange tinge. The fruit are bright green when unripe.

It is planted at several places throughout Australia, however, most plantings of the fruit are on the NSW north coast.

The leaves of the plant have these annoying jagged edges which make fruit picking a real pain. A friend of mine spent a few weeks fruit picking and to this day will not eat a cocot, due to pain he endured picking them. A full day's picking (or even an hour) will leave your hands quite cut, even if you use gloves, your arms and neck are often grazed as they come into contact with the leaves if you pick them all day.

If you can find one in your greengrocer, choose them in the same way you'd pick an apple or a pear (smell the fruit, discard any with bruises etc).

As they are more easily cultivated than pears in a warm climate, theoretically, they should be cheaper than pears, however, as they're still somewhat of a yuppie fruit, they tend to be expensive.

While COCOTs were once favored by evil-minded phreaks, their appeal is slowly dwindling. Newer COCOTs lack the vulnerabilities present in older ones, such as the ability to trick the phone into leaving a line open by making noise into the mouthpiece after the called party hangs up. ANI II assigns different pair codes to COCOT lines than to BOCOT or POTS lines. Thus, it is very difficult to trick operators into billing services to COCOTs in areas that support ANI II.

RBOCs in some regions are starting to replace phones that use the insecure ACTS system with sophisticated COCOTs, most notably the Nortel Millenium payphone. Some RBOCs have even started to operate COCOTs outside of their territory; an example would be Ameritech operating COCOT phones in Pacific Bell territory, and normal BOCOTs in their own. The security advantages afforded by modern COCOTs could make them a universal replacement for the ACTS-based telco phones that phreaks know and love.